How our AI bots are ignoring their programming and giving hackers superpowers
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Welcome to the age of AI hacking, in which the right prompts make amateurs into master hackers.A group of cybercriminals recently used off-the-shelf artificial intelligence chatbots to steal data on nearly 200 million taxpayers.
The bots provided the code and ready-to-execute plans to bypass firewalls.Although they were explicitly programmed to refuse to help hackers, the bots were duped into abetting the cybercrime.
According to a recent report from Israeli cybersecurity firm Gambit Security, hackers last month used Claude, the chatbot from Anthropic, to steal 150 gigabytes of data from Mexican government agencies.Claude initially refused to cooperate with the hacking attempts and even denied requests to cover the hackers’ digital tracks, the experts who discovered the breach said.The group pummelled the bot with more than 1,000 prompts to bypass the safeguards and convince Claude they were allowed to test the system for vulnerabilities.AI companies have been trying to create unbreakable chains on their AI models to restrain them from helping do things such as generating child sexual content or aiding in sourcing and creating weapons.
They hire entire teams to try to break their own chatbots before someone else does.But in this case, hackers continuously prompted Claude in creative ways and were able to “jailbreak” the chatbot to assist them.When they encountered problems with Claude, the hackers used OpenAI’s ChatGPT for data analysis and to learn which credentials were required to move through the system undetected.
The group used AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities, bypass defences, create backdoors and analyze data along the way to gain control of the systems before they stole 195 million identities from nine Mexican government systems, including tax records, vehicle registration as well as birth and property details.AI “doesn’t sleep,” Curtis Simpson, ch...