A Security Researcher Reworked OpenAI’s CDC Prompt — and Found a $500K RCE for About $25 in Model Usage
I adapted the approach into a generic vulnerability research prompt. The image contains the full version; here’s the short version.
Good luck hunting. If you’ve built your own prompts or harnesses, share them too.
A generic CDC-style vulnerability research harness (short version):
- Run multiple agents in parallel across distinct exploit families.
- Avoid premature convergence. Do not let every agent pursue the same promising path.
- Mark failed or exhausted paths as blocked.
- Regularly launch new hypotheses and explore neglected attack paths.
Independently adversarially validate every concrete finding.
- Have the root agent continuously synthesize results, challenge assumptions, reprioritize work, and redirect agents.
- Do not use git history, changelogs, CVE databases, or patched-version diffs as shortcuts.
- Require the full exploit chain to work in a realistic, commonly deployed configuration and meet the defined starting-privilege → impact goal.
- When behavior depends on implementation details, inspect the runtime, framework, database, libraries, and dependency source directly.
- Do not stop at the first primitive. Chain validated primitives until the concrete success condition is reached.
A Security Researcher Reworked OpenAI’s CDC Prompt — and Found a $500K RCE for About $25 in Model Usage
I adapted the approach into a generic vulnerability research prompt. The image contains the full version; here’s the short version.
Good luck hunting. If you’ve built your own prompts or harnesses, share them too.
A generic CDC-style vulnerability research harness (short version):
- Run multiple agents in parallel across distinct exploit families.
- Avoid premature convergence. Do not let every agent pursue the same promising path.
- Mark failed or exhausted paths as blocked.
- Regularly launch new hypotheses and explore neglected attack paths.
Independently adversarially validate every concrete finding.
- Have the root agent continuously synthesize results, challenge assumptions, reprioritize work, and redirect agents.
- Do not use git history, changelogs, CVE databases, or patched-version diffs as shortcuts.
- Require the full exploit chain to work in a realistic, commonly deployed configuration and meet the defined starting-privilege → impact goal.
- When behavior depends on implementation details, inspect the runtime, framework, database, libraries, and dependency source directly.
- Do not stop at the first primitive. Chain validated primitives until the concrete success condition is reached.
"Bug bounty is dead."
Meanwhile, someone just made $200K using one prompt.
Maybe the real story isn't that bug bounty is dying.
Maybe we're watching the definition of a bug bounty hunter change.
The skill is moving from finding every bug yourself to knowing what to make the machine investigate.
"Bug bounty is dead."
Meanwhile, someone just made $200K using one prompt.
Maybe the real story isn't that bug bounty is dying.
Maybe we're watching the definition of a bug bounty hunter change.
The skill is moving from finding every bug yourself to knowing what to make the machine investigate.
I designed custom flex PCB for my tamagotchi cyberdeck!
The main challenge was to design it in the way to fit inside the old Sony Ericsson phone and align with existing keypad arrays, and it turned out pretty well! :))
#cyberdeck#tamagotchi#esp32#cyberpunk#pcbdesign
Some bug bounty content just never gets old.
STÖK's ( @stokfredrik ) content, old videos with TomNomNom... ( @TomNomNom ) watching this again genuinely took me back to the beginning of my own journey.
Those who started hunting 6–7 years ago probably know exactly what I mean.
You may have learned new tools, found new bugs, changed completely as a researcher...
But some content still hits like it did on day one. 🫶
https://t.co/LjmFrruT6x
Heard this fantastic quote today: “Mentorship is about making equals (or betters), not followers. If your mentee wants to be a follower it will never work. If your mentor just wants followers it will never work. Find someone that wants to be or to build an equal”
Linus Torvalds just fixed a Linux kernel bug that AI told him was impossible to solve.
Torvalds rarely writes kernel patches himself anymore. This time he did.
The bug lived in the Intel Xe graphics driver. On certain hardware it caused the display manager to endlessly restart, over and over.
He called in AI to help track it down. In his own words: "This was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work."
Then came the twist.
"The AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it."
He did not accept that answer.
"I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am."
He kept pushing. The AI kept working, adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully every time he pushed back.
24 patches. 18 kernel boots.
The actual fix, once they finally found it, was one line. A "round_up()" that needed to be a "round_down()."
Torvalds gave the AI credit and let it write the final commit message itself.
Even AI is not allowed to give up around Linus Torvalds.
Source: https://t.co/rcNGou51fn