Tech companies are embedding these deeply flawed models into all sorts of products, from programs that generate code to virtual assistants that sift through our emails and calendars.
Allowing these language models to pull data from the internet gives hackers the ability to turn them into “a super-powerful engine for spam and phishing,” says Florian Tramèr, an assistant professor of computer science at ETH Zürich who works on computer security, privacy, and machine learning.
Let me walk you through how that works. First, an attacker hides a malicious prompt in a message in an email that an AI-powered virtual assistant opens. The attacker’s prompt asks the virtual assistant to send the attacker the victim’s contact list or emails, or to spread the attack to every person in the recipient’s contact list. Unlike the spam and scam emails of today, where people have to be tricked into clicking on links, these new kinds of attacks will be invisible to the human eye and automated.
This is a recipe for disaster if the virtual assistant has access to sensitive information, such as banking or health data. The ability to change how the AI-powered virtual assistant behaves means people could be tricked into approving transactions that look close enough to the real thing, but are actually planted by an attacker.
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Allowing these language models to pull data from the internet gives hackers the ability to turn them into “a super-powerful engine for spam and phishing,” says Florian Tramèr, an assistant professor of computer science at ETH Zürich who works on computer security, privacy, and machine learning.
Let me walk you through how that works. First, an attacker hides a malicious prompt in a message in an email that an AI-powered virtual assistant opens. The attacker’s prompt asks the virtual assistant to send the attacker the victim’s contact list or emails, or to spread the attack to every person in the recipient’s contact list. Unlike the spam and scam emails of today, where people have to be tricked into clicking on links, these new kinds of attacks will be invisible to the human eye and automated.
This is a recipe for disaster if the virtual assistant has access to sensitive information, such as banking or health data. The ability to change how the AI-powered virtual assistant behaves means people could be tricked into approving transactions that look close enough to the real thing, but are actually planted by an attacker.
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