Claude Opus 5 Helped Researchers Take Over OpenAI Staff Accounts via Chained Flaws

Summary: Three Hacktron researchers used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 to chain a libheif image-decoding flaw in OpenAI's Discourse help forum (CVE-2026-32882) with a weakness in OpenAI's single sign-on, taking over the ChatGPT and Codex accounts of several OpenAI employees and reaching an internal code repository in under 72 hours. OpenAI fixed the issue about 14 hours after the report and paid a $6,500 bounty on September 1, and the team stopped after triggering a single harmless pull request without reading source code or touching customer data.
Key Takeaway: The forum's Debian 12 image still shipped libheif 1.19.7 in July, months after the fix landed upstream in 1.22.0 in May 2026, so a public, lower-trust service sharing staff SSO turned one unpatched library into a path toward GitHub, Slack, and email. Hacktron says the wider HEIF Heist campaign cost under $3,000 in AI usage, and only Shopify appears to have noticed the activity.

Read the original at The Hacker News ↗

Topics: Vulnerabilities & Patching
Mentions: CVE-2026-32882
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