Phishing emails are baiting your AI assistant

What happened

If you use an AI assistant to summarize your inbox, hidden instructions could turn a phishing (messages that impersonate someone to obtain passwords or money) email you wisely ignored into your next to-do item. Phishing emails are baiting your AI assistant, according to Malwarebytes Labs.

Then you asked your AI assistant to summarize your inbox. That’s the risk behind phishing emails containing hidden instructions aimed at AI assistants. Instead of relying only on persuading you, attackers are also trying to influence the software that reads your messages. Recent research from Barracuda describes emails designed to target both audiences at once. For the human recipient, there was a password-protected attachment, with the password supplied in the email.