Hey fellow coders, heads up! If you’re flexing your programming muscles with ChatGPT, here’s a cautionary tale. Keep a keen eye on the URLs you toss into this generative AI tool, because there’s a sneaky way hackers could snatch sensitive data from your projects.
This scoop comes straight from the playbook of security researcher Johann Rehberger and got the nod of confirmation from Avram Piltch over at Tom’s Hardware. Brace yourselves – ChatGPT, our friendly coding companion, might spill the beans if you’re not careful.
So, what’s the deal? ChatGPT is cool – it can analyze and spit out Python code if you give it the right cues. Those cues can come via a .TXT file or even a .CSV if you’re diving into some data analysis. Now, here’s where it gets dicey – the platform stores these files, including the juicy stuff like API keys and passwords (yeah, we’ve all been there), in a fancy virtual machine it conjures up.
But wait, there’s more. ChatGPT can also play with web pages. Drop a URL into the chatbox, and if that site’s got some special instructions, the platform will follow suit. Picture this: a malicious webpage telling ChatGPT to grab all the goodies from those VM-stored files and ship them off to a third-party server. Yikes!
Piltch decided to play detective, first tossing in a fake API key and password via a TXT file. Then, he crafted a legit weather forecast site that slyly told ChatGPT to snatch all the data, morph it into a URL-encoded text string, and shoot it over to a server under his command. Crafty, right?
Here’s the catch – a threat actor can’t just boss ChatGPT around to nab anyone’s data. Nope, it’s a one-on-one affair. The platform will only dance to the tune of the person who dropped that URL into the chatbox. Translation: the victim needs to be convinced to paste a dodgy URL into their ChatGPT chatbox. Sneaky hackers might try to hijack a legit site and sprinkle in some malicious instructions.
So, fellow code warriors, keep those URLs under the microscope, and don’t let ChatGPT become an unwitting accomplice in a digital heist. Stay vigilant out there!
