Nearly 5,000 ChatGPT accounts hacked in Vietnam

Group-IB, a “global threat-hunting and adversary-centric” cyber intelligence company headquartered in Singapore, announced Tuesday that it had “identified 101,134 stealer-infected devices with saved ChatGPT credentials” over the past year.

The company said it uncovered the compromised credentials within the logs of info-stealing malware traded on illicit dark web marketplaces.

The number of available logs containing compromised ChatGPT accounts reached a peak of 26,802 in May, and the Asia-Pacific region experienced the highest concentration of ChatGPT credentials being offered for sale during the period, according to the company.

Vietnam stands fourth among countries with the most compromised accounts, at 4,711.

India suffered the most with 12,632, followed by Pakistan and Brazil.

According to Group-IBexperts, more and more workers have taken advantage of the Chatbot for their daily work, either for software development or business communications.

By default, ChatGPT stores the history of user queries and AI responses. Consequently, unauthorized access to ChatGPT accounts may expose confidential or sensitive information, which can be exploited for targeted attacks.

“Many enterprises are integrating ChatGPT into their operational flow. Employees enter classified correspondences or use the bot to optimize proprietary code. Given that ChatGPT’s standard configuration retains all conversations, this could inadvertently offer a trove of sensitive intelligence to threat actors if they obtain account credentials,” said Dmitry Shestakov, head of Threat Intelligence at Group-IB.

To mitigate the risks associated with compromised ChatGPT accounts, Group-IB advises users to update their passwords regularly and implement two-factor authentication (2FA). By enabling 2FA, users are required to provide an additional verification code, typically sent to their mobile devices, before accessing their ChatGPT accounts.

An OpenAI product, ChatGPT is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users by January, just two months after its launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a Reuters report.