OpenAI Hires Hacktron to Red-Team Third-Party Integrations

On July 25, Hacktron researchers chained two vulnerabilities to compromise ChatGPT accounts belonging to multiple OpenAI employees. On November 6, OpenAI announced it is hiring the firm.

Joint teams of OpenAI engineers and Hacktron researchers will pick high-priority targets inside OpenAI's systems, with a focus on how those systems interact with third-party services. OpenAI said it first noticed Hacktron through its Security Bug Bounty program; the company paid the firm a $6,500 bounty on September 1 for the July finding.

Hacktron now gets expanded access to OpenAI's frontier models through Daybreak Red, the lab's tier for closely governed work, including red teaming and penetration testing. The firm builds AI agents for code review, penetration testing, and red teaming.

"The future of cybersecurity won't be defined by who has the largest security team, but by who can best combine human creativity with AI-driven capabilities," Hacktron CEO Zayne Zhang wrote, adding that OpenAI is "setting a strong example by putting frontier cyber models in the hands of security researchers."

The deal extends a recent security push at OpenAI: Cathedral researchers were added to its next security sprint, and the lab recently increased bug bounty rewards. OpenAI has been a recurring name in our coverage, with 404 tracked stories in the last ninety days.