'The prophecy is fulfilled': Popular 2020 XKCD comic predicted 'HEIF Heist' OpenAI hack and even mentions ImageMagick in spooky coincidence
You will receive a confirmation email shortly."},"failureMessage":"There was a problem. OpenAI patched it 14 hours later, awarded the team a $6,500 bug bounty, and Discourse patched it after rating the underlying image bug 8.8 on the CVSS scale and adding sandboxing around image processing as a defense-in-depth measure. Apparently, asking your AI chatbot nicely with a bit of trickery in tow can deliver exceptionally good results in some cases.
- ▪You will receive a confirmation email shortly."},"failureMessage":"There was a problem.
- ▪OpenAI patched it 14 hours later, awarded the team a $6,500 bug bounty, and Discourse patched it after rating the underlying image bug 8.8 on the CVSS scale and adding sandboxing around image processing as a defense-in-depth measure.
- ▪Apparently, asking your AI chatbot nicely with a bit of trickery in tow can deliver exceptionally good results in some cases.
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Record
| Original publisher | TechRadar |
| Canonical URL | https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/openai/the-prophecy-is-fulfilled-popular-2020-xkcd-comic-predicted-heif-heist-openai-hack-and-even-mentions-imagemagick-in-spooky-coincidence |
| Publication time | Sat, 26 Sep 2026 01:30:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-26T01:35:59.595Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-26T01:35:59.595Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 2WIwUKMii6Gl · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AI Platforms & Assistants OpenAI 'The prophecy is fulfilled': Popular 2020 XKCD comic predicted 'HEIF Heist' OpenAI hack and even mentions ImageMagick in spooky coincidence News By Rahim Amir Published 26 September 2026 xkcd joked in 2020 that ImageMagick would "break for good" one day When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Getty Images/ VCG) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Hacktron chained a libheif heap overflow, reached through ImageMagick on OpenAI's Discourse forum, leveraging an OpenAI SSO flaw to briefly take over employee ChatGPT and…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechRadar.
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