OpenAI is STILL "not available" from many countries, so what do they expect - it's not like the latest movie or whatever, it's actually career-limiting not to have access at this point for some professions.
Any security researcher wanting to analyze the data (or Troy Hunt wanting to add it to haveibeenpwnd.com) will imply someone rewarding the seller, that's inevitable.
The sooner, the less the seller can make on this data.
OpenAI is run like a YC company. That means they do everything not to distract the user from the core workflow. I think privacy and security are just very low priority to them.
I seriously wonder why, given the Microsoft deal, OpenAI didn't just cede all product development and production-izing of their models to MS while they focus on research.
I know smart people work there, some friends included, but OpenAI was never a product-led startup, they were a research org. Ignoring the closed vs open debate for a moment: for all the talk of focus, focus, focus from YC, it seems unfocused to ship their models from a home-rolled platform when they could just get MS to foot the engineering and infra work. Is any of their platform stuff a real asset to OpenAI proper? Have MS do the cloud stuff, just pass them product design.
Yes, hence the MS deal (they had trouble raising money as a pure research org). Their research can be turned into a product people pay for -- they've done it! My question is: why did the engineers at OpenAI have to do that? Why couldn't they "toss it over the fence" to MS's Azure team and be happy with a revenue share, for example.
It's not requiring logins per se -- this is the second mishap I'm aware of related to their consumer product surface area (the first being users' chat data going to other users). Just seems like a distraction, if the goal is to do fundamental AI research.
I think you're missing the point: this isn't a mishap that has anything to do with OpenAI. If you are a company that has usernames and passwords, then your login information is for sale because your customers have malware on their computers. OpenAI didn't do anything wrong here besides have a ton of users, many of which had malware on their computers.
From the article:
> However, the ChatGPT parent company clarified the compromised login credentials were not the result of any OpenAI data breach. Instead, they were the by-product of commodity malware-based log harvesting.
> If you are a company that has usernames and passwords
> didn't do anything wrong here besides have a ton of users
Passwords aren't a trivial part of this. OpenAI offers login with Google/Apple/MS. Managing their own passwords as well wasn't a mandatory part of the product, but a trade off: they probably got more users, but also more complexity and risks.
Because when you accidentally discover a golden goose, you don’t give it to Microsoft, you learn to cook eggs.
I had the same thought as you at first, and many people speculated they’d shutter ChatGPT in favor of the API being served to others. But while anyone can sell an API, making a consumer product people want is just too rare to give it up. It’s better to learn how to service consumers and satisfy the demand.
Everyone was quick to point out that the API costs of a chatGPT clone were a fraction of the cost of ChatGPT+. So why would they focus on research and API development? I worry that they were so successful with this LLM that they’ll forget to keep researching other stuff.
That's my worry, too. I'm reminded of the history of Intel, which at its founding decided that it would not have a research org (drop the R from R&D) and just focus on scaling FETs, because the founders learned that trying to do both meant that one would ultimately suffer.
It’s all research - it’s just that when you get a taste of the money, the trend is often to lean heavy towards more of it. Wasteful, frivolous curiosity often falls into the rear view.
There are not a lot of places where you can pursue "wasteful and frivolous curiosity". And even at those places, you would need to have earned the privilege.
1. I have found ChatGPT is very good at parroting back decent quality from learning from structured data. For example, learning reasonable code completions as well as answering technical questions. I find ChatGPT very good resource to have inside VSCode instead of switching to google. 6-7/10 I will accept GPTs output in Copilot.
2. My guess is that Microsoft's pretty chunk of profit is from selling Developer software(or so it is trying to do).
Put 1 + 2 together and you have a pretty compelling product play.
They have much larger plays and interests than developer software such as Office/Outlook. Also stops Google from making the same deal as OpenAI needed credits from someone.
I’m guessing the person you’re responding to wasn’t clever enough to figure out that your comment was completely off topic and had nothing whatsoever to do with the article. Only a true genius could see that you saw “openai” and hit the post button with the force of Mjolnir.
One reason for having their own consumer website is that having lots of data from actual users should be quite helpful for training. I believe they promised not to use the data from other companies that use their API?
It's also good marketing. For the people who use ChatGPT every day, they're a known quantity, unreliable as it is. Other companies need to show that they're better.
These are both similar advantages to what Google has with their search engines.
Likewise and you seemingly have to wait until the end of the month for invoicing (and activation?) 3.5 doesn’t work for my use case and so I’m just having to loop queries to run up billing for no purpose.
> The stolen OpenAI credentials were stolen using Raccoon Infostealer (78,348), Vidar (12,984), and RedLine (6,773) malware variants.
Nothing to worry about unless you had malware on your computer -- sniffing all your data, OpenAI credentials included. It is only news because ChatGPT logs potentially have exploitable data in them.
Another misleading headline -- OpenAI has not been compromised.
> It is only news because ChatGPT logs potentially have exploitable data in them.
Can you access logs of the chat over the API? I assume it’s just news because it’s a popular business (and everyone was using the API to recreate chatgpt so there were a million projects that could be exploited).
Out of an abundance of caution, I just went to change my password... and I didn't see a way to change my password. I googled it and you have to log out and then choose "Forgot password?". Hope that saves someone some time.
Fair enough, but from a usability standpoint they could also have a "Change Password" link in your profile that just sends the same "Forgot Password" email and logs you out.
> The stolen OpenAI credentials were stolen using Raccoon Infostealer (78,348), Vidar (12,984), and RedLine (6,773) malware variants.
> India occupied the top spot with 12,632 OpenAI credentials listed on the dark web, followed by Pakistan (9,217), Brazil (6,531), Vietnam (4,771), and Egypt (4,588), while the United States was sixth with 2,995 compromised accounts.
Is there anything interesting about this story besides that it has OpenAI in the headline?
I assumed there was a data breach, but no, this is just 200k credentials stolen from people's computers with normal malware. There are billions of credentials available for sale on the dark web. This particular set doesn't seem significant at all besides that anything with OpenAI gets extra clicks these days.
I’m assuming that part of the issue is the crazy amount of internal company data people have been feeding into the thing. Finding your email password might let me see some memos, but if you’re not very thoughtful, you might’ve pushed all sorts of sensitive data into chat prompts.
I don’t disagree with your premise otherwise, and grant that I might be racing to begin with.
But the credentials are for stolen OpenAI logins, not stolen email logins.
While there will be some people using the same password (I doubt many) the people selling them will no doubt have already validated and removed these from the set as they are obviously much more valuable.
Given that OpenAI is probably more poplar with people interested in technology I suspect most users would use a password manager and generate unique passwords.
I work in security though so maybe I’m just surrounded by people that do.
I’ve combed through thousands of credential dumps to perform password stuffing attacks and the success rate is always very low.
I would be shocked if the sellers hadn’t already taken any credentials that work against the associated email account out before they listed the dumps for sale, given that email account access is way more valuable than access to someone’s OpenAI account.
No, you're right. I was thinking about the kinds of sensitive information that one might get access to via a single account - not about the use of that account as an attack vector for other accounts.
This likely explains why I just got a fake "Geek Squad" invoice which claims to have been paid by "auto deduction" to an email account which has never received one single spam email in the 10 years that I have had it.
Given that the credentials were stolen by locally running malware, and basically nothing to do with OpenAI, I would.be very worried if I were you right now.
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[ 15.1 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadCorrect. The credentials were stolen off the client's side and then they were all aggregated into a dump.
But if you're worried and in the US, a privacy.com card could be used to protect you regardless.
I know smart people work there, some friends included, but OpenAI was never a product-led startup, they were a research org. Ignoring the closed vs open debate for a moment: for all the talk of focus, focus, focus from YC, it seems unfocused to ship their models from a home-rolled platform when they could just get MS to foot the engineering and infra work. Is any of their platform stuff a real asset to OpenAI proper? Have MS do the cloud stuff, just pass them product design.
just my 2c from the outside.
Don’t outsource your money making department to a big tech company. They’ll screw you over, even if they don’t mean to.
I accidentally deleted my chat history because of the confusing UX.
From the article:
> However, the ChatGPT parent company clarified the compromised login credentials were not the result of any OpenAI data breach. Instead, they were the by-product of commodity malware-based log harvesting.
> didn't do anything wrong here besides have a ton of users
Passwords aren't a trivial part of this. OpenAI offers login with Google/Apple/MS. Managing their own passwords as well wasn't a mandatory part of the product, but a trade off: they probably got more users, but also more complexity and risks.
But still no, a malware thst grabs passwords doesn’t mean you can blame a company for using passwords.
I had the same thought as you at first, and many people speculated they’d shutter ChatGPT in favor of the API being served to others. But while anyone can sell an API, making a consumer product people want is just too rare to give it up. It’s better to learn how to service consumers and satisfy the demand.
Everyone was quick to point out that the API costs of a chatGPT clone were a fraction of the cost of ChatGPT+. So why would they focus on research and API development? I worry that they were so successful with this LLM that they’ll forget to keep researching other stuff.
1. I have found ChatGPT is very good at parroting back decent quality from learning from structured data. For example, learning reasonable code completions as well as answering technical questions. I find ChatGPT very good resource to have inside VSCode instead of switching to google. 6-7/10 I will accept GPTs output in Copilot.
2. My guess is that Microsoft's pretty chunk of profit is from selling Developer software(or so it is trying to do).
Put 1 + 2 together and you have a pretty compelling product play.
The stolen OpenAI credentials were stolen using Raccoon Infostealer (78,348), Vidar (12,984), and RedLine (6,773) malware variants.
Just my 2 cents.
You can't make omelette without eggs, more news at 11. Back to you in the studio John.
>Microsoft comes under blistering criticism for “grossly irresponsible” security
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36979532
It's also good marketing. For the people who use ChatGPT every day, they're a known quantity, unreliable as it is. Other companies need to show that they're better.
These are both similar advantages to what Google has with their search engines.
Nothing to worry about unless you had malware on your computer -- sniffing all your data, OpenAI credentials included. It is only news because ChatGPT logs potentially have exploitable data in them.
Another misleading headline -- OpenAI has not been compromised.
Can you access logs of the chat over the API? I assume it’s just news because it’s a popular business (and everyone was using the API to recreate chatgpt so there were a million projects that could be exploited).
[1] https://auth0.com/docs/authenticate/database-connections/pas...
> India occupied the top spot with 12,632 OpenAI credentials listed on the dark web, followed by Pakistan (9,217), Brazil (6,531), Vietnam (4,771), and Egypt (4,588), while the United States was sixth with 2,995 compromised accounts.
Has anyone written any infosec articles discussing this? Has assimov or the Simpsons poked fun at this as a danger yet?
I assumed there was a data breach, but no, this is just 200k credentials stolen from people's computers with normal malware. There are billions of credentials available for sale on the dark web. This particular set doesn't seem significant at all besides that anything with OpenAI gets extra clicks these days.
I don’t disagree with your premise otherwise, and grant that I might be racing to begin with.
Everything else, including your OpenAI account, are accessible via that email account + a password reset.
While there will be some people using the same password (I doubt many) the people selling them will no doubt have already validated and removed these from the set as they are obviously much more valuable.
> Finding your email password might let me see some memos, but ...
Well, it’s clear you don’t work in IT.
I’ve combed through thousands of credential dumps to perform password stuffing attacks and the success rate is always very low.
I would be shocked if the sellers hadn’t already taken any credentials that work against the associated email account out before they listed the dumps for sale, given that email account access is way more valuable than access to someone’s OpenAI account.
Hmm, well the only other recent event regarding that email account was that I used it to register on a discord server.