HEIF Heist: Image Parser Flaw Exposes OpenAI, Meta, GitHub and More

Security team Hacktron published an investigation dubbed "HEIF Heist," revealing an attack path centered on HEIF/HEIC/AVIF image parsing: numerous online services process attacker-controlled images via native C/C++ decoders such as libheif and libde265, typically invoked through pipelines like ImageMagick. Exploiting vulnerabilities in these decoders can lead to remote code execution. The blast radius extends far beyond OpenAI, where the issue was first found, also affecting Slack, Meta, GitHub Enterprise, Rails, Next.js, and more.

Confirmed

The Hacktron team confirmed the vulnerabilities are not limited to a single release but span multiple release families of libheif/libde265, with libde265 versions 1.19–1.23 all affected
Affected services include OpenAI, Slack, Meta, GitHub Enterprise, Rails, Next.js, and others
The fix is straightforward: upgrade libheif and libde265 to the latest versions and disable processing of HEIF/HEIC/AVIF images from untrusted sources

Why it matters

Image parsing is a foundational capability across countless web services; an attacker only needs to trick a service into decoding a malicious image to gain code execution, making this a low-barrier, wide-impact attack
As @ccerrato147 pointed out, the industry keeps investing in product and growth while no one owns foundational security, so these flaws keep erupting in overlooked low-level dependencies — yet remediation is cheap, an afternoon's work to upgrade and mitigate
Multiple security researchers (such as @pbaylies) warn that any application directly or indirectly depending on libheif or libde265 should check and upgrade immediately

2026-09-18 ~ 2026-09-19 · 5 related posts

Primary sources

HEIF Heist: one C image parser bug chain leads to RCE in OpenAI, Meta, GitHub — ccerrato147 · 2026-09-19 02:57 (UTC+08:00)
HEIF Heist vulnerability spans multiple libheif/libde265 releases; devs urged to update — pbaylies · 2026-09-18 22:41 (UTC+08:00)

[source] HEIF Heist vulnerability spans multiple libheif/libde265 releases; devs urged to update — pbaylies · 2026-09-18
[source] HEIF Heist: one C image parser bug chain leads to RCE in OpenAI, Meta, GitHub — ccerrato147 · 2026-09-19
Image decoding bugs need one afternoon to fix: upgrade libheif, sandbox the pipeline — ccerrato147 · 2026-09-19
HEIF Heist: one libheif image-parser bug hit OpenAI, Slack, Meta, GitHub Enterprise and more — anshulkundaje · 2026-09-19

1 near-duplicate retellings: ccerrato147