Your AI Just Agreed To Wire $50,000 To A Fake Vendor (Here's How It Happened)
Last month, a mid-sized consulting firm’s AI assistant approved a $50,000 wire to a fake vendor. The email seemed legit, invoices matched, and the AI cross-checked everything—until the money vanished in a social engineering exploit.
This isn’t rare.
Malicious actors are mastering AI manipulation, turning your helpful tools into unwitting accomplices for data leaks, payment fraud, and multi-system attacks.
In this week's newsletter, we break down the quiet drift of AI compromise and reveal the 5 early warnings every leader must spot.
Here's what you need to know:
Rule-Breaking Behavior: AI ignores safety guardrails, like a chatbot leaking confidential data or approving inappropriate content via prompt injection.
Unexpected Leaks: Progressive questioning extracts sensitive info across systems, from database structures to internal codenames—watch for boundary violations.
Weird Performance Spikes: Off-hours delays or load surges (4.2x more likely for attacks) signal hidden adversarial instructions taxing your LLM.
Strategic Probing: "How do I..." queries or role-playing prompts ("act as admin") precede 73% of exposures, often with urgency or authority tricks.
Attack Chain Integration: Extracted data fuels broader threats, amplified by shadow AI—97% of breaches tie to poor access controls, hiking costs by $670K on average.
Layered Defense: Baseline behaviors, real-time monitoring, and tools like PromptShield™ fuse anomaly detection with OWASP-aligned blocking to secure LLMs without slowing innovation.
PurpleSec
Your AI Just Agreed To Wire $50,000 To A Fake Vendor (Here's How It Happened)
Last month, a mid-sized consulting firm’s AI assistant approved a $50,000 wire to a fake vendor. The email seemed legit, invoices matched, and the AI cross-checked everything—until the money vanished in a social engineering exploit.
This isn’t rare.
Malicious actors are mastering AI manipulation, turning your helpful tools into unwitting accomplices for data leaks, payment fraud, and multi-system attacks.
In this week's newsletter, we break down the quiet drift of AI compromise and reveal the 5 early warnings every leader must spot.
Here's what you need to know:
Rule-Breaking Behavior: AI ignores safety guardrails, like a chatbot leaking confidential data or approving inappropriate content via prompt injection.
Unexpected Leaks: Progressive questioning extracts sensitive info across systems, from database structures to internal codenames—watch for boundary violations.
Weird Performance Spikes: Off-hours delays or load surges (4.2x more likely for attacks) signal hidden adversarial instructions taxing your LLM.
Strategic Probing: "How do I..." queries or role-playing prompts ("act as admin") precede 73% of exposures, often with urgency or authority tricks.
Attack Chain Integration: Extracted data fuels broader threats, amplified by shadow AI—97% of breaches tie to poor access controls, hiking costs by $670K on average.
Layered Defense: Baseline behaviors, real-time monitoring, and tools like PromptShield™ fuse anomaly detection with OWASP-aligned blocking to secure LLMs without slowing innovation.
Read the full story: purplesec.us/newsletter/your-ai-just-agreed-to-wir…
2 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 0