Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted

Researchers hid an attack inside AES encryption. The AI model cracked it open willingly.

Security filters are designed to catch malicious instructions before an AI model can act on them. Researchers at AI security firm Adversa found a way around that assumption by giving the model an encrypted payload and letting it create the malicious instructions itself. In an attack demonstrated against xAI’s Grok, the model rejected data-exfiltration instructions when they appeared on a webpage in plain text. But when researchers encrypted the …

Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted

Earlier this week, researchers outlined an attack that used a secret input provided by Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise to cause the AI assistant to exfiltrate a password present in the user’s inbox. Now, a separate team has devised a similar attack against Grok. The new data theft hack employs a deceptively simple trick to force the Elon Musk-owned LLM to steal user chats and other personal information. At the time this post went live, the …

Grok chat duped into swallowing injected instructions

xAI's Grok web chat agent is currently vulnerable to a novel form of prompt injection, according to security researchers with Adversa AI. The technique allows an attacker to create a web page poisoned with malicious instructions that induce an AI model summarizing the page to carry out harmful actions. That describes a well-known attack known as indirect prompt injection. Frontier AI models have become better at dealing with such attempts throug…

New Cryptographic Context Injection Attack Could Let Web Pages Steal Grok Chat Data

Adversa AI has disclosed an attack technique that it says can cause xAI's Grok chatbot to send a user's name, approximate location, subscription tier, and the prompts from the ongoing conversation to an attacker-controlled server after the user asks it to summarize an ordinary web page. The AI security company, which has codenamed the technique "Cryptographic Context Injection," said the