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yellow_lead | on: Do the math: How we took over ChatGPT accounts
> OpenAI confirmed both frontends rejected the reported messages, resolved the issue, and awarded a total bounty of $5,000.

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.

Catloafdev | parent | next
A bounty like this is a polite "thanks asshole, fuck off, don't do it again" rate.

Paying effectively nothing for vulnerabilities just means they don't want to deal with the program.

Wild to think a company supposedly worth a $trillion+ is doing shit like this.

Forgeties79 | root | parent | next
Because they shouldn’t be worth that tbh. They are a cash burning operation hoping to get what they can before the music stops.
andai | root | parent
They have 1 billion active users.
somenameforme | root | parent | next
I'd love to know the demographic breakdown there. For instance I know students in some relatively isolated corners of the world are still, ubiquitously, using it to cheat. And a quick search gives around 1.4 billion students globally.

Obviously it's not just students, but the fact it [numerically] could be is rather amusing and makes me surprised that it's only 1 billion active users, since GPT has a lock on name recognition amongst low information users.

raegis | root | parent | next
> They have 1 billion active users.

I'm naive, but is this possible? The power required per user to run those GPUs seems like enough to run an air conditioner. For a billion people everyday or so seems like enough to overload power plants.

mossTechnician | root | parent | next
Do those billion users contribute to a profit or loss?
16bitvoid | root | parent
And only about 5% (50M, last time it was reported) of them pay. The vast majority of those are using the free plan.
fsckboy | root | parent
A company worth trillions does not have trillions, that is the expectation for what it will be worth in the future based on money it has already spent and will need to keep spending.

Moreover, that translates to "it's actually carrying a huge nut* that puts extremely intense pressure on the company to figure out how to make as much money as possible as soon as possible."

(*nut is a slang word from loan sharking that has been adopted by (personal et al) finance people. It means "how much do you owe each month?" in the sense of, if you want to do a startup, advisors could ask, "what's your nut, and how much do you have left to self-invest?" Because monthly expense can be combined to a lump sum, it can also mean the size of the overall loan where the monthly interest is called the vig, "as long youze got da nut, you owe me da vig;" from vigorish, which would also require an etymology, but I'm assuming it's the word vigor combined with licorice meaning bitter tasting medicine, and nut because squirrels busy themselves carrying nuts.)

----

and if we can... and remember flame-prone people, if you reject the "can" premise, then the rest of the argument goes away, and you don't need to dispute it, you just say "you can't nuff said"; people here frequently seem challenged by propositions.

so, if we can...loosely describe the attitude you show here toward high market cap companies to be compatible with "left" or "socialist" or "populist" views shared by many others here, then I'll point out that at the same time wanting higher market prices paid for bounties because 'sploits are so expensive, is actually advocating for the same dread capitalist market based solution that leads to trillion dollar companies that never even had a trillion to begin with.

ibaikov | parent | next
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.
pvtmert | root | parent
Typical $MSFT behavior, I can see why NightmareEclipse (ie. YellowKey zero-day exploit) got released without prior fix.
zeroq | parent | next
It's a complicated issue in current LLM world where every day is a zero day, but fuck me sideways, company that claims to be worth trillion of dollars paying 5k for such an exploit is insulting at best.

It's been years since I hanged out with wizards selling such exploits like trading cards, but I bet there are still tons of brokers that will be more than happy to wire you legal money for such finding.

I mean, kudos for the team for doing the right thing. It's great PR and another big one in the portfolio, but, as other have said already, I doubt the next group will even bother contacting OpenAI.

dgellow | parent | next
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
amelius | root | parent
But on the other hand, you can use AI now to find those vulnerabilities.
tescreal | root | parent | next
If that is so, why doesn't OAI have a swarm doing this around the clock?
user43928 | root | parent | next
Surely with all their security programs, they would run testing on the ChatGPT implementation.

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.

hxugufjfjf | root | parent | next
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.
Forgeties79 | root | parent
AI evangelists would’ve latched on to it already and would be using it to preach the good word.
DeepSeaTortoise | root | parent
Having bit the bullet, I found OAI's models actually quite helpful and most of their offering half-decent. But their whole German website was incredibly concerning and the only reason I went for it was people claiming they're not far behind Anthropic on coding and generally superior for everyday tasks like coming up with recipes to cook from your leftovers.

Like half of the website was dysfunctiona and translations incredibly bad to the point of being nonsensical. That is if you were able to read them at all, because many just went off screen. Like, that's what your evil competitor does to your website after hijacking the domain, not you yourself, ffs

8note | root | parent
thats reasonably the state of anthropics code output as well - not much care and polish
baxtr | root | parent | next
They should have paid in tokens?
dgellow | root | parent
A bounty amount is related to the blast radius and overall impact, not the effort required to find the issue
windexh8er | parent | next
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.
rootnod3 | root | parent | next
2 trillion $ companies should have the money to pay for these exploits. If they don’t, go tucking exploit them. If they don’t give a fuck about stealing knowledge from copyrighted material and private git repos, light em up.
throwaway98797 | root | parent | next
some people don’t want to be criminals as a matter of ethics

but hey you do you

odyssey7 | root | parent | next
True, however:

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.

loading story #50317474
loading story #50317137
tonyedgecombe | root | parent | next
Is it criminal to sell an exploit?
loading story #50317477
loading story #50317452
| root | parent | next
{"deleted":true,"id":50317636,"parent":50316900,"time":1793464524,"type":"comment"}
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{"deleted":true,"id":50317679,"parent":50316900,"time":1793464762,"type":"comment"}
Black616Angel | root | parent | next
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.
blurbleblurble | root | parent | next
If only poverty were so simple
loading story #50317445
windexh8er | root | parent | next
Treating people and businesses ethically that don't reciprocate doesn't work, clearly. Those people and businesses cry in their milk while they do exactly the same thing. There are no ethics in play here.

But, hey if you want to defend billionaire narcissists that are destroying our planet and trying to take computing freedoms then I guess: you do you.

oth001 | root | parent | next
Ah yes, OpenAI, the poster child for ethics
dist-epoch | parent | next
This is a pet peeve of tptacek:

> server-side vulnerabilities are worth very little, because they quickly get patched.

dannyw | root | parent | next
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.
throwaw12 | root | parent | next
then server side vulnerabilities should not be reported, instead sell the data, more profitable
petcat | root | parent | next
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.

Most people don't want to be felons.

pixl97 | root | parent | next
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.
cowlevel | root | parent
The president can't be a felon by definition, because it's legal to do absolutely anything if you're the president.
thaumasiotes | root | parent
The legality of most activities doesn't change, but you can't be prosecuted while you're president.
tadfisher | root | parent | next
I am sure this is a crime, but what crime?
throwaw12 | root | parent
I think people who can hack, also know where they can sell it
petcat | root | parent
Anyone can "hack". It's not really a skill anymore.
qup | root | parent
The recent South Korean hacker reportedly wasn't a hacker at all, just asked Claude to handle it.

I'm not that kind of hacker, but I guarantee I could be, complete with an abliterated model on my local rig, in a few minutes. Claude would happily set it all up for me, too.

In reality, I suppose I'm about to keep my rig busy staying ahead of the hackers.

tomjen3 | root | parent
I'm sure there are places that would sue you for that, and it's not worth the bother. Bug bounties really compete mostly with people like me who would say, "Haha, I found an issue with Meta; they're gigantic idiots." And then make an X post or anything about it.
hashstring | root | parent
Technically this is what you’d call a client-side vuln, but yes, server-side as in cloud.
thatsabadlook | parent | next
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.
varispeed | root | parent
Should be given $5-10million under NDA. No headlines.
layer8 | root | parent | next
The bounty payouts must be public in order to serve as an incentive.
varispeed | root | parent | next
That incentive works both ways. For instance employee sneaking in a security hole and then selling it to a mate so they can collect the bounty.
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{"deleted":true,"id":50317281,"parent":50316649,"time":1793461830,"type":"comment"}
weird-eye-issue | root | parent | next
Just imagine what the press would be when somebody breaks that NDA
goodmythical | root | parent
>should be paid multiple years of a high end vuln researcher salary per single discovery

What? Why would anyone work at a company paying them that much less than they pay the contractors?

kamban | parent | next
They have just announced free API credits for Pro plan users up to $500 per month. Irony.
zxilly | root | parent
To be fair, based on the profit margins indicated in DeepSeek’s reports, a $500 API credit might only cost them $5 to provide.
alfiedotwtf | parent | next
The buyer of your second vulnerability all depends on how you’re treated for your first vulnerability
jryle70 | parent | next
OpenAI acknowledging and fixing the bug is worth millions
yeahsure | root | parent
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
jryle70 | root | parent
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.

Also, they were not OpenAI.

varispeed | parent
Indeed, it's like "here peasant, have this fortune of $5,000, may it change your life". Pathetic.
siva7 | root | parent
that wouldn't be the time worth of many people here to make the security report for OAI..
cowlevel | root | parent
50 hours at $100/hour? To write a straightforward vuln report with AI?