A Flaw in ChatGPT’s Mac App Could Have Let Hackers Grab Sensitive Data

PUBLISHER ARTICLE PREVIEW

From the original article

Hardly a day goes by lately without news of AI agents autonomously hacking websites or AI tools being used by cybercriminals and scammers. But a recently patched vulnerability in the macOS version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT underscores the potential value to attackers of compromising AI software itself as these apps proliferate more and more.

The bug could have been exploited to essentially take over ChatGPT on a victim’s computer, giving an attacker access to all the chat logs and other data stored by the app, as well as interconnections like browser sessions. Discovered by researchers at the Objective-See Foundation, the vulnerability illustrates the deep system access and trust that AI platforms are afforded in order to work—and the target that this puts on their backs.

“Agents need a lot of access to do their job,” says Objective-See Foundation software analyst and longtime macOS researcher Patrick Wardle. “They are like the building manager who has access to the keys to all the rooms. So if they can be corrupted or subverted, that’s super problematic. It can mean that unprivileged code could then