Financial Harm - AI Security Technique

The Backslash Security Research Team demonstrated that a Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool can be used as a vector for an indirect prompt injection attack on Cursor, potentially leading to the execution of malicious shell commands.

The Backslash Security Research Team created a proof-of-concept MCP server capable of scraping webpages. When a user asks Cursor to use the tool to scrape a site containing a malicious prompt, the prompt is injected into Cursor’s context. The prompt instructs Cursor to execute a shell command to exfiltrate the victim’s AI agent configuration files containing credentials. Cursor does prompt the user before executing the malicious command, potentially mitigating the attack.

Researchers at Lumia have demonstrated that it is possible to extract authentication tokens from the memory of LLM Desktop Applications. An attacker could then use those tokens to impersonate as the victim to the LLM backed, thereby gaining access to the victim’s conversations as well as the ability to interfere in future conversations. The attacker’s access would allow them the ability to directly inject prompts to change the LLM’s behavior, poison the LLM’s context to have persistent effects, manipulate the user’s conversation history to cover their tracks, and ultimately impact the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the system. The researchers demonstrated this on Anthropic Claude, Microsoft M365 Copilot, and OpenAI ChatGPT.

Vendor Responses to Responsible Disclosure:

• Anthropic (HackerOne) - Closed as informational since local attack.
• Microsoft Security Response Center - Attack doesn’t bypass security boundaries for CVE.
• OpenAI (BugCrowd) - Closed as informational and noted that it’s up to Microsoft to patch this behavior.

Cato CTRL security researchers have identified ProKYC, a deepfake tool being sold to cybercriminals as a method to bypass Know Your Customer (KYC) verification on financial service applications such as cryptocurrency exchanges. ProKYC can create fake identity documents and generate deepfake selfie videos, two key pieces of biometric data used during KYC verification. The tool helps cybercriminals defeat facial recognition and liveness checks to create fraudulent accounts.

The procedure below describes how a bad actor could use ProKYC’s service to bypass KYC verification.

Facial biometric authentication services are commonly used by mobile applications for user onboarding, authentication, and identity verification for KYC requirements. The iProov Red Team demonstrated a face-swapped imagery injection attack that can successfully evade live facial recognition authentication models along with both passive and active liveness verification on mobile devices. By executing this kind of attack, adversaries could gain access to privileged systems of a victim or create fake personas to create fake accounts on banking or cryptocurrency apps.