Is cyber verification a thing they're actually doing now? I thought they only reached out to really incredibly famous people and that there's no way to get access as a normal person.
You do a KYC and you can get access. It may depend on country's quality of KYC.
https://chatgpt.com/cyber is not new for OpenAI, and yes it's basically just KYC + likely some other invisible checks on your account, you don't to be a famous security researchers. Anthropic's cyber verification is quite a bit stricter I think.