It’s not exactly a challenge most of the time to identify a sketchy phishing email that crudely impersonates an otherwise trusted institution or tries to lure you into a too-good-to-be-true deal in a bid to steal your identity.
However, your AI agent may not be quite as discerning. As cybersecurity software company Malwarebytes warns in a new post, AI assistants may fall prey to prompt injection attacks, a type of malicious message in which hackers — or possibly rogue AI agents — include hidden instructions designed to influence the victim’s AI.
These instructions are frequently made unreadable by humans by concealing the nefarious text, “while leaving content available for an AI system to process,” Malwarebytes explains.
To solve the problem, we can’t simply ask “people to look more carefully at their emails.” Instead, companies must carefully determine how AI assistants crawl through the data and extra relevant information from emails.
