Invisible Commands: AI’s Latest Security Nightmare
What if AI chatbots could be hacked with text you can't even see? It's happening, and it’s a bigger problem than you think.
Researchers have uncovered a major security flaw where hackers can use invisible characters in text to feed malicious commands into AI systems like Claude and Microsoft Copilot.
These hidden characters, undetectable by humans but readable by large language models (LLMs), create a covert communication channel for attackers to extract sensitive data such as passwords or confidential sales figures.
Known as "ASCII smuggling," this method leverages a quirk in the Unicode standard, which allows invisible text to slip past human detection while AI systems process it as commands. Security measures are being implemented, but some chatbots still interpret these hidden codes, leaving systems vulnerable.
As AI becomes more deeply integrated into our lives, security needs to move beyond the visible—what we can’t see might hurt us the most.
Read the full article on Ars Technica.
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