Bing Chat Responses Infiltrated by Ads Pushing Malware
upstart writes:
Bing Chat responses infiltrated by ads pushing malware:
Bing Chat responses infiltrated by ads pushing malware
Malicious advertisements are now being injected into Microsoft's AI-powered Bing Chat responses, promoting fake download sites that distribute malware.
Bing Chat, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 engine, was introduced by Microsoft in February 2023 to challenge Google's dominance in the search industry.
By offering users an interactive chat-based experience instead of the traditional search query and result format, Bing Chat aimed to make online searches more intuitive and user-friendly.
In March, Microsoft began injecting ads into Bing Chat conversations to generate revenue from this new platform.
However, incorporating ads into Bing Chat has opened the door to threat actors, who increasingly take out search advertisements to distribute malware.
Furthermore, conversing with AI-powered chat tools can instill unwarranted trust, potentially convincing users to click on ads, which isn't the case when skimming through impersonal search results.
This conversation-like interaction can imbue AI-provided URLs with a misplaced sense of authority and trustworthiness, so the existing problem of malvertizing in search platforms is amplified by the introduction of AI assistants.
The fact that these ads are labeled as promoted results when the user hovers over a link in Bing Chat conversations is likely too weak of a measure to mitigate the risk.
[...] The display of malvertising within Bing Chat conversations highlights the expanding frontier of cyber threats and makes it crucial for users to be wary of chatbot results and always double-check URLs before downloading anything.
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