An AI worm has been developed to burrow its way into generative AI ecosystems, revealing sensitive data as it spreads

SoftwareSecurityAn AI worm has been developed to burrow its way into generative AI ecosystems, revealing sensitive data as it spreadsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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There’s always been something evocative and mildly terrifying about the term “computer worm”. The image it conjures of a tunnelling, burrowing creature, spreading its way through your machine and feasting on its insides. Well, just to add a slightly sharper dose of existential dread to proceedings, researchers have developed an AI worm, bringing the term “artificial intelligence” along to the party just for good measure.

The worm makes use of what’s referred to as an “adversarial self-replicating prompt”. A regular prompt triggers an AI model to output data, whereas an adversarial prompt triggers the model under attack to output a prompt of its own. These prompts can be in the form of images or text, that, when entered into a generative AI model, triggers it to output the input prompt.

These prompts can then be used to trigger vulnerable AI models to demonstrate malicious activity, like revealing confidential data, generating toxic content, distributing spam or otherwise, and also create outputs that allow the worm to exploit the generative AI ecosystem behind it to infect new “hosts”.

A secondary method used an image with an embedded malicious prompt to force an AI email assistant to forward further images on to others, creating a self-replicating ouroboros-like nightmare of infected AI ecosystems as it went.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I have a headache. Still, the researchers were keen to point out that their work is all about identifying vulnerabilities and “bad architecture design” in generative AI systems that allow these attacks to gain access and self-replicate so effectively.

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Bring on Kevin Bacon and a particularly well-placed cliff, that’s what I say. You did seeTremorsdidn’t you? Forget it. I give up.

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