'The prophecy is fulfilled': Popular 2020 XKCD comic predicted 'HEIF Heist' OpenAI hack and even mentions ImageMagick in spooky coincidence
xkcd joked in 2020 that ImageMagick would "break for good" one day
by https://www.techradar.com/author/rahim-amir · TechRadarNews By Rahim Amir Published 26 September 2026
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- 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 Codex accounts
- The researchers themselves invoked XKCD #2347, whose 2020 alt text happens to name ImageMagick as the dependency that will one day break
- ImageMagick served as only the pathway to the actual vulnerable component, libheif, an obscure decoder pulled in indirectly across Slack, Meta, and GitHub Enterprise amongst other mediums
When Hacktron AI recently disclosed its months-long libheif research, the researchers reached for a familiar picture that also, to some degree, hints at what let them break into OpenAI in the first place.
They pointed readers to xkcd #2347, Randall Munroe's 2020 iconic web cartoon of all modern digital infrastructure balanced on a single load-bearing block that some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining.
The comparison is relatively easy to follow, and it has a bonus easter egg that one can take as pre-empting the hack.
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An alt-text that that seems ironically prophetic in 2026
The easter egg in question is one you have to look for; if you hover over the original comic, you get the alt text "Someday ImageMagick will finally break for good, and we'll have a long period of scrambling as we try to reassemble civilization from the rubble."
The irony is that six years after the comic was originally posted, ImageMagick was sitting in the exact spot the breach ran through, making its teaser something you could call an unintended prophecy bound to fruition.
The details are unglamorous but worth considering as AI safety continues to take center stage in public discourse, including recent addresses by the CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic at the UN.
Hacktron found that OpenAI's community forum, community.openai.com, runs on Discourse. The latter's usual image checker, FastImage, doesn't understand HEIF and quietly hands tasks to ImageMagick's magick command for conversion, which in turn calls libheif, the library that actually decodes the format.
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