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Harsh Jaiswal@rootxharsh · Sep 18, 2026

We’re disclosing HEIF Heist, a months-long investigation into libheif that allowed us to hack OpenAI, Slack, Meta,…

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Summary

Researchers disclosed HEIF Heist, a months-long investigation revealing critical vulnerabilities in the libheif image library that could allow remote code execution and data theft across major tech companies including OpenAI, Slack, Meta, and GitHub. The vulnerability exploits an obscure C/C++ decoder beneath numerous applications and affects systems through indirect dependencies via ImageMagick and other libraries.

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  1. #1

    We’re disclosing HEIF Heist, a months-long investigation into libheif that allowed us to hack OpenAI, Slack, Meta, GitHub Ent, Rails, Next.js, ImageMagick, and many more. It was literally xkcd #234, one obscure image library beneath a huge number of apps. 🧵

  2. #2

    Interestingly, some of our RCE and infoleaks attempts landed only after thousands of image uploads. What's interesting is only one organization caught us in the middle of our exploitation attempts, kudos! We have published the full details here: heif-heist.com

  3. #3

    The risk sits below the application layer in native C/C++ decoders such as libheif, often included indirectly through ImageMagick, libvips, Sharp, distro packages, or container images. Crafted AVIF/HEIC uploads can reveal the version family, allowing a matching exploit to cause memory corruption, data theft, or remote code execution.

  4. #4

    This affects huge number of applications, we will disclose technical details of every major company in coming weeks at hacktron.ai/blog . For example; Slack which is used by multiple AI companies and we could have leaked any user's uploaded files via our RCE.

  5. #5

    Please check whether your apps depend on libheif or libde265, directly or transitively. HEIF Heist spans multiple release families, not one vulnerable version. Update to latest libheif and the latest libde265, or disable untrusted HEIF/AVIF processing.