I took over user accounts in Microsoft Copilot (there are caveats but still), and they asked me to provide additional information of the exploit (they wanted a video) and before I sent it they fixed the vulnerability, didn't pay me a cent. Fair? Idk.
That’s so low. That’s the level of bounty I awarded researchers when I was managing the bug bounty program at a small startup, it’s just ridiculous coming from a large company like OpenAI
Who says they don't? And if they don't, maybe its because others are using their hard-earned money to buy tokens from them to do it, so they don't really have to.
I find Sam Altman recent comments very "low" as well, neither matters. So in that case I think bounty hunters should just cold shoulder idiocracy and sell these to the underground. Let their customers be abused and complain about how OAI isn't protecting them. Each one of these types of events could cost them thousands of dollars in lost revenue and/or internal support.
I don't think so, businesses like Zerodium bought zero days in plain sight and I don't think they faced legal consequences. They don't operate anymore though. So basically I'd say it depends who you sell it to and how.
On the contrary, many (including myself) would argue that "the victim's amount of money/power" has absolutely no ethical relevance: "You shall do no injustice in judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great, but you are to judge your neighbor fairly" (Leviticus 19:15).
This isn't like stealing from a business. These are individuals most private conversations, potentially including their bank accounts etc. Poverty is no defence - and yes, I've spent a great deal of my life barely scraping by. You'll find poor people are significantly less tolerant of theft, especially from individuals, than rich. Whether that evidences the theft inherent in most forms of wealth generation I'll leave up to the reader.
Yeah, and some people just want the multi-billion dollar company that is currently destroying the planet while also permanently crippling social connections to just stop.
Yeah... idk, sounds like when I was starting out almost 30 years ago my clients constantly lowballed me saying "but think of the exposition! this project will give you" lol
Were they not right? Just like money giving you some runway but will run out, the exposure is still only a leveler, it's still up to you to take advantage of it.
Not worth the effort for a company supposedly worth a trillion dollars. The problem is oai can't afford all of its mistakes at the usual rate and they make bad press. A 100k bug could make a headline, but 5k for the same bug requires the average person to be educated enough to understand how bad these issues are.
The "take over any instagram/meta account through their AI password reset chatbot" was going around and sold on shady forums for ~1 month before being patched.
Very few people would even have the knowledge of who, how, or where to "sell" such vulnerabilities. Going through a public bounty program is pretty much always preferable.
Don't worry, as more and more people get put of of work by AI the number of people willing to be felons will increase. Hell, they might even become president.
$5000 is a joke. They pay millions to their top devs and still have more holes than a colander so a nice guy shows you a huge opening in your platform and all you can give him is a pat on the shoulder? Did you fire your top devs and hire that guy for a million bucks plus options? Did you sue the security firm you paid millions to audit the issues?
I really hope they get hacked and crash down burning in flames like the Hindenburg
I think you know that the mentality of a company like this is “security is a risk but not a reward and whoever captures the reward kills everyone else”
actually, your comment is naive. clearly you don't understand game theory and economic incentives. if a company doesn't reward good behavior, you'll see bad behavior.
but then again since you're not naive, you already know these AI companies like openai already act evil and like bad entities.
I conclude therefore, per your words "you are the last one anyone should consult with, basically about anything"
Now what about those millions of lines of code? Wasn’t the agent swarm supposed to take care of it?
All jokes aside this is exactly what happens as you build larger monoliths, system complexity and bug surface increases logarithmically… so in all seriousness you want to reduce LOC as much as possible. Maybe this can teach OpenAI a lesson to produce software that’s correct and adhere to established engineering standards over sensationalised “we built so much code” promotional material.
I’m sure exponential is what parent meant, but geometric (edit: polynomial) is what actually happens, not exponential. Code complexity increases linearly when it doesn’t interact with other features, and geometrically when it does. In the worst case, complexity increases as the square of lines of code. That is still very, very bad, but it’s not exponential.
Much easier to reason and make decisions if the bar is "yeah it exists, but is it effective relative to its intended purpose?" This weeds out buggy code as well as under performant code. If it's not effective (broken, too slow, etc), it either needs a refactor or thrown on the scrap pile.
> Now what about those millions of lines of code? Wasn’t the agent swarm supposed to take care of it?
What's the joke? They're literally saying, every day, that this is true to a civilization endangering extent. They're making demands based on this, and politicians are taking up those demands.
And now they're paying bullshit $5K bug bounties for account-stealing exploits on their own platform. They should have paid more just the make the bug seem more grandiose; I don't know who let them get away with this - this is what happens when CEOs run their own PR I guess. It's basically an public announcement that they're total fakes.
i don't think LoC is the metric. sometimes fewer lines of code results in a larger attack surface through type coercion / widening, poor abstractions, hiding or stuffing behavior (modules that do everything), etc. to me, making code easy to understand, test, fuzz, and verify is more important. sometimes that requires more lines of code.
LoC *IS* the metric. It is obviously not perfect tho but still the best one to compare software surface. Including to compare the same solution in different languages and platforms. The less code you need to manage, the less code you need to change and the less code you need to hold in your head to understand it (or in the LLM context nowadays).
If they or their company use email "security" software that "scans" all links it's not necessarily the users fault / they don't in fact click. The mail is auto-confirmed the second it hits the inbox.
We've had to change our registration confirmation mails too recently to not confirm on GET only, but with another form - in hindsight it was stupid before but many services do that.
> We've had to change our registration confirmation mails too recently to not confirm on GET only, but with another form - in hindsight it was stupid before but many services do that.
Security software fetching links will not trigger this behavior. It needs to be done in the context of the actual ChatGPT user so that a JavaScript payload can run.
If merely GET on the link was sufficient to trigger the behaviors, the adversary generating the link would just GET it themselves.
Yes, if it requires the user session (xss related), like the article, there is no problem.
I was replying more generally about the "don't click links" advice and cases of server generated confirmation-token links (not saying this was the case at OpenAI)
I've worked at a company that did link mangling on everything except simulated phishing emails. The effect was that people were trained to trust the mangled links.
Oof. Together with the fact that it's possible to remotely access the file system (!) of computers ever having started a "Work" chat in the ChatGPT desktop app [1], this seems pretty bad.
Claude Code terminal has "remote control" option activated via /rc command. -- somewhat similar in that it still runs the session on the PC/Mac but allows the Claude authenticated user to access the session via internet / app
I am guessing this ChatGPT functionality is a similar Codex feature?
But this session is disconnected when the conversation is /exit ed
For my personal blog [0], I am still writing without LLM assistance. The goal is to test how well I understand the topic I am writing about, as well as to improve my own writing.
I think there was another HN discussion about it re bounty value and as far as I remember the issue is not that big companies are greedy in that case, but rather that over time it’s strategically better to have lower bounties so less people are interested in it.
5 or 50k doesnt matter to them. And this bug in terms of severity is very high imho.
> I'm trying not to have any important data to even lose
This is the way. Respect user privacy and keep as little data as possible, and not only do you become a less attractive target, if you are targeted the outcome won’t be so bad.
only $5000 for this, lmao. It should be $50k out of pure shame. If they don't make these things hurt just a little they're never going to take following best practices seriously enough. There will be 9 more anyways.
Meanwhile the actual user of the account probably has to sign in using a yubikey because they get "CyBeRsEcRuItY aLeRtS" when they try to update node in their project to fix a crash and have to switch to daybreak blue to continue (or attempt to trick the normal models into doing it and risk getting autobanned)
Another classic OAuth implementation failure. Mismanaging the state parameter or leaking tokens via referer headers in redirects is Security 101. Wild to see this in a production environment of this scale.
The post seems to be talking about a html injection via a postMessage call where the receiver didn’t check who sent the message, which is a well known vulnerability entry point. Did I miss where OAuth had anything to do with this??
why didnt the black box of bullshit company detect this? for a group that touts every inane 'discovery' with hyperbolic bullshit, they really fall short on delivering anything of actual value, just rehashed bullshit.
It requires the user to click a link. But I still find this bounty very low. Others may not report them if such a small bounty is given.
I speculate that the AI didn't find this and that human effort and intuition for where to look were needed to find this vulnerability.
but hey you do you
Ethics and legal requirements shouldn’t be conflated.
There are times when ethics are a higher standard than what the law requires, and in that case the ethics are no less important.
Also, they were not OpenAI.
What? Why would anyone work at a company paying them that much less than they pay the contractors?
> server-side vulnerabilities are worth very little, because they quickly get patched.
Most people don't want to be felons.
I really hope they get hacked and crash down burning in flames like the Hindenburg
but then again since you're not naive, you already know these AI companies like openai already act evil and like bad entities.
I conclude therefore, per your words "you are the last one anyone should consult with, basically about anything"
Sounds exponential
99.9% of shops need a monolith with same monolith having entry points for background workers and crons.
Much easier to reason and make decisions if the bar is "yeah it exists, but is it effective relative to its intended purpose?" This weeds out buggy code as well as under performant code. If it's not effective (broken, too slow, etc), it either needs a refactor or thrown on the scrap pile.
What's the joke? They're literally saying, every day, that this is true to a civilization endangering extent. They're making demands based on this, and politicians are taking up those demands.
And now they're paying bullshit $5K bug bounties for account-stealing exploits on their own platform. They should have paid more just the make the bug seem more grandiose; I don't know who let them get away with this - this is what happens when CEOs run their own PR I guess. It's basically an public announcement that they're total fakes.
Seasoned developers are unimpressed, or even disgusted, by the same massive piles of code.
dont click links people
that'll be $500k for the security training pls
We've had to change our registration confirmation mails too recently to not confirm on GET only, but with another form - in hindsight it was stupid before but many services do that.
This has been a thing since forever lol
If merely GET on the link was sufficient to trigger the behaviors, the adversary generating the link would just GET it themselves.
I was replying more generally about the "don't click links" advice and cases of server generated confirmation-token links (not saying this was the case at OpenAI)
[0]: https://che01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A...
- "sign in via one-time code."
- "Click here to see our latest update".
250k refresher fee
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078284
I am guessing this ChatGPT functionality is a similar Codex feature?
But this session is disconnected when the conversation is /exit ed
[0] https://trung.to
Pure html by hand, using vim. No frameworks, no nothing, single stylesheet. I think there are a few others around here that still do this.
[1] https://armincat.com/
5 or 50k doesnt matter to them. And this bug in terms of severity is very high imho.
I like the chain of regular old school things used to achieve it like post message, JSONP, iframe, Img tags.
I'm trying not to have any important data to even lose, when I eventually get hacked.
We can all turn up our noses, like the other commenters in this thread, but every one of them is exposed. Negligence is a matter of degrees.
This is the way. Respect user privacy and keep as little data as possible, and not only do you become a less attractive target, if you are targeted the outcome won’t be so bad.
Please don't drain my $6.5 billion in Dogecoin.
Meanwhile the actual user of the account probably has to sign in using a yubikey because they get "CyBeRsEcRuItY aLeRtS" when they try to update node in their project to fix a crash and have to switch to daybreak blue to continue (or attempt to trick the normal models into doing it and risk getting autobanned)