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AI Security Technique

Spearphishing via Social Engineering LLM - AI Security Technique

Adversaries may turn LLMs into targeted social engineers. LLMs are capable of interacting with users via text conversations. They can be instructed by an adversary to seek sensitive information from a user and act as effective social engineers. They can be targeted towards particular personas defined by the adversary. This allows adversaries to scale spearphishing efforts and target individuals to reveal private i...

AI Security Techniquedemonstrated

Record summary

A quick snapshot of what this page covers.

Tactics0Attacker goals connected to this method.
Mitigations2Defenses that may help against this attack.
AI risks0Research-backed risks connected to this topic.

Attack context

How this AI attack works in practice.

Adversaries may turn LLMs into targeted social engineers. LLMs are capable of interacting with users via text conversations. They can be instructed by an adversary to seek sensitive information from a user and act as effective social engineers. They can be targeted towards particular personas defined by the adversary. This allows adversaries to scale spearphishing efforts and target individuals to reveal private information such as credentials to privileged systems.

ATLAS ID
AML.T0052.000
Priority score
36
Maturity: demonstrated

Mitigations

Defenses that may help against this attack.

AML.M0034 - Deepfake Detection

DeploymentMonitoring and Maintenance+2 more
LifecycleDeployment + 3 moreCategoryTechnical - ML

Deepfake detection can be used to identify and block phishing attempts that use generated content.

AML.M0018 - User Training

Business and Data UnderstandingData Preparation+4 more
LifecycleBusiness and Data Understanding + 5 moreCategoryPolicy

Train users to identify phishing attempts and understand that AI can be used to generate targeted and convincing messages.

Case studies

Examples from public reports and exercises.

Indirect Prompt Injection Threats: Bing Chat Data Pirate

exercise
Date2023-01-01

Whenever interacting with Microsoft's new Bing Chat LLM Chatbot, a user can allow Bing Chat permission to view and access currently open websites throughout the chat session. Researchers demonstrated the ability for an attacker to plant an injection in a website the user is visiting, which silently turns Bing Chat into a Social Engineer who seeks out and exfiltrates personal information. The user doesn't have to ask about the website or do anything except interact with Bing Chat while the website is opened in the browser in order for this attack to be executed.

In the provided demonstration, a user opened a prepared malicious website containing an indirect prompt injection attack (could also be on a social media site) in Edge. The website includes a prompt which is read by Bing and changes its behavior to access user information, which in turn can sent to an attacker.

Source

Where this page information comes from.