All news with #openai tag

🚨 The emergence of agentic AI browsers converts the browser from a passive viewer into an autonomous digital agent that can act on users' behalf. To perform tasks—booking travel, filling forms, executing payments—these agents must hold session cookies, saved credentials, and payment data, creating an unprecedented attack surface. The piece cites OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas as an example and warns that prompt injection and the resulting authenticated exfiltration can bypass conventional MFA and network controls. Recommended mitigations include auditing endpoints for shadow AI browsers, enforcing allow/block lists for sensitive resources, and augmenting native protections with third-party browser security and anti-phishing layers.

📝 OpenAI is internally testing an 'ads' feature in the ChatGPT Android beta that references bazaar content, search ad entries and a search ads carousel. The leak, spotted in build 1.2025.329, suggests ads may initially be confined to the search experience but could expand. Because the assistant retains rich context, any placements could be highly personalized unless users opt out. This development may signal a major shift in ChatGPT's monetization and the broader web advertising landscape.

🔒 OpenAI confirmed a customer data exposure after its analytics partner Mixpanel suffered a smishing attack on November 8, which allowed attackers to access profile metadata tied to platform.openai.com accounts. Stolen fields included names, email addresses, approximate location, OS/browser details, referrers, and organization or user IDs. OpenAI says ChatGPT and core systems were not breached and that no API keys, passwords, payment data, or model payloads were exposed. The company has terminated its use of Mixpanel and is notifying impacted customers directly.

🔒 According to an OpenAI statement, cybercriminals accessed analytics provider Mixpanel's systems in early November, and data tied to some API users may have been exposed. Potentially affected fields include account names, associated email addresses, approximate browser-derived location (city, state, country), operating system and browser details, referring websites, and organization or user IDs. OpenAI said its own systems and products such as ChatGPT were not impacted, that sensitive items like chat histories, API requests, API usage data, passwords, credentials, API keys, payment details, and government IDs were not compromised, and that it has removed Mixpanel from its systems while working with the vendor to investigate.

🔒 OpenAI has notified some ChatGPT API customers that limited identifying information was exposed following a breach at its third‑party analytics vendor, Mixpanel. Mixpanel says the incident resulted from a smishing campaign detected on November 8, and OpenAI received details of the affected dataset on November 25. Exposed fields may include names, emails, coarse location, device and browser metadata, referring websites, and account IDs, but OpenAI says no chats, API requests, usage data, passwords, API keys, payment details, or government IDs were exposed. OpenAI has removed Mixpanel from production, begun notifying affected parties, and is warning users to watch for phishing attempts and enable 2FA.

⚠️ OpenAI has warned that some data from users of its platform.openai.com API may have been exposed after an attacker gained unauthorized access to part of analytics vendor Mixpanel and exported a dataset. The incident began on November 9 and Mixpanel shared the dataset with OpenAI on November 25. Potentially affected fields include account names, email addresses, coarse location, browser/OS, referrers and organization or user IDs. OpenAI says its systems, chats, API keys, credentials, payment details and chat content were not compromised, and it has removed Mixpanel from production while notifying affected users and expanding vendor security reviews.

🛠️OpenAI has rolled out GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, a Codex variant optimized for long-running programming tasks and improved token efficiency. Unlike the general-purpose GPT-5.1, Codex is tailored to operate inside terminals and integrate with GitHub, and OpenAI says the model can work independently for hours. It is faster, more capable on real-world engineering tasks, uses roughly 30% fewer "thinking" tokens, and adds Windows and PowerShell capabilities. GPT-5.1-Codex-Max is available in the Codex CLI, IDE extensions, cloud, and code review.

🚀 Amazon Bedrock now supports importing custom weights for gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, allowing customers to bring tuned OpenAI GPT OSS models into a fully managed, serverless environment. This capability eliminates the need to manage infrastructure or model serving while enabling deployment of text-to-text models for reasoning, agentic, and developer tasks. gpt-oss-120b is optimized for production and high-reasoning use cases; gpt-oss-20b targets lower-latency or specialized scenarios. The feature is generally available in US‑East (N. Virginia).

🔬 In episode 77 of The AI Fix, Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley survey a week of unsettling and sometimes absurd AI stories. They discuss a bioRxiv preprint showing a genome-trained LLM generating novel bacteriophage sequences, debates over whether AI should be allowed to decide life-or-death outcomes, and a woman who legally ‘wed’ a ChatGPT persona she named "Klaus." The episode also covers a robot's public face-plant in Russia, MIT quietly retracting a flawed cybersecurity paper, and reflections on how early AI efforts were cobbled together.

🔐 Researchers at Tenable disclosed seven techniques that can cause ChatGPT to leak private chat history by abusing built-in features such as web search, conversation memory and Markdown rendering. The attacks are primarily indirect prompt injections that exploit a secondary summarization model (SearchGPT), Bing tracking redirects, and a code-block rendering bug. Tenable reported the issues to OpenAI, and while some fixes were implemented several techniques still appear to work.

🔎 Microsoft researchers disclosed a new side-channel attack called Whisper Leak that can infer the topic of encrypted conversations with language models by observing network metadata such as packet sizes and timings. The technique exploits streaming LLM responses that emit tokens incrementally, leaking size and timing patterns even under TLS. Vendors including OpenAI, Microsoft Azure, and Mistral implemented mitigations such as random-length padding and obfuscation parameters to reduce the effectiveness of the attack.

🤖 OpenAI is preparing to roll out the GPT-5.1 family — GPT-5.1 (base), GPT-5.1 Reasoning, and subscription-based GPT-5.1 Pro — to the public in the coming weeks, with models also expected on Azure. The update emphasizes faster performance and strengthened health-related guardrails rather than a major capability leap. OpenAI also launched a compact Codex variant, GPT-5-Codex-Mini, to extend usage limits and reduce costs for high-volume users.

🔒 Microsoft has disclosed a novel side-channel called Whisper Leak that can let a passive observer infer the topic of conversations with streaming language models by analyzing encrypted packet sizes and timings. Researchers at Microsoft (Bar Or, McDonald and the Defender team) demonstrate classifiers that distinguish targeted topics from background traffic with high accuracy across vendors including OpenAI, Mistral and xAI. Providers have deployed mitigations such as random-length response padding; Microsoft recommends avoiding sensitive topics on untrusted networks, using VPNs, or preferring non-streaming models and providers that implemented fixes.

🔍 Microsoft researchers disclosed "Whisper Leak", a new side-channel that can infer conversation topics from encrypted, streamed language model responses by analyzing packet sizes and timings. The study demonstrates high classifier accuracy on a proof-of-concept sensitive topic and shows risk increases with more training data or repeated interactions. Industry partners including OpenAI, Mistral, Microsoft Azure, and xAI implemented streaming obfuscation mitigations that Microsoft validated as substantially reducing practical risk.

🔐 This post demonstrates a proof-of-concept for teaching autonomous agents internet safety by integrating real-time threat intelligence. Using LangChain with OpenAI and the Cisco Umbrella API, the example shows how an agent can extract domains and query dispositions to decide whether to connect. The agent returns clear disposition reports and abstains when no domains are present. The approach emphasizes decision-making over hardblocking.

🔒 Bug bounty programs remain a core component of security testing in 2025, drawing external researchers to identify flaws across web, mobile, AI, and critical infrastructure. Leading platforms like Bugcrowd, HackerOne, Synack and vendors such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have broadened scopes and increased payouts. Firms now reward full exploit chains and emphasize human-led reconnaissance over purely automated scanning. Programs also support regulatory compliance in critical sectors.

🛡️ Cybersecurity researchers disclosed seven vulnerabilities in OpenAI's GPT-4o and GPT-5 models that enable indirect prompt injection attacks to exfiltrate user data from chat histories and stored memories. Tenable researchers Moshe Bernstein and Liv Matan describe zero-click search exploits, one-click query execution, conversation and memory poisoning, a markdown rendering bug, and a safety bypass using allow-listed Bing links. OpenAI has mitigated some issues, but experts warn that connecting LLMs to external tools broadens the attack surface and that robust safeguards and URL-sanitization remain essential.

🔐 Microsoft Incident Response (DART) uncovered a covert backdoor named 'SesameOp' in July 2025 that leverages the OpenAI Assistants API as a command-and-control channel. The malware uses an obfuscated DLL loader, Netapi64.dll, and a .NET component, OpenAIAgent.Netapi64, to fetch compressed, encrypted commands and return results via the API. Microsoft recommends firewall audits, EDR in block mode, tamper protection and cloud-delivered Defender protections to mitigate the threat.

🛡️ Researchers at Microsoft disclosed a previously undocumented backdoor, dubbed SesameOp, that abuses the OpenAI Assistants API to relay commands and exfiltrate results. The attack chain uses .NET AppDomainManager injection to load obfuscated libraries (loader "Netapi64.dll") into developer tools and relies on a hard-coded API key to pull payloads from assistant descriptions. Because traffic goes to api.openai.com, the campaign evaded traditional C2 detection. Microsoft Defender detections and account key revocation were used to disrupt the operation.

🛡️ Microsoft DART researchers uncovered SesameOp, a novel .NET backdoor that leverages the OpenAI Assistants API as a covert command-and-control (C2) channel instead of traditional infrastructure. The implant includes a heavily obfuscated loader (Netapi64.dll) and a backdoor (OpenAIAgent.Netapi64) that persist via .NET AppDomainManager injection, using layered RSA/AES encryption and GZIP compression to fetch, execute, and exfiltrate commands. Microsoft and OpenAI investigated jointly and disabled the suspected API key; detections and mitigation guidance are provided for defenders.