Researchers show a browser attack that can infer open sites and apps.

In March, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta announced a new Meta AI support assistant feature on both Facebook and Instagram, providing users with a way to “resolve account problems” and help in taking down any offending impersonator accounts or scams.

Besides highlighting the tech industry’s seemingly insatiable appetite for automating customer service-level jobs with AI, the new feature appears to have backfired spectacularly. As 404 Media reports, the chatbot happily obliged when hackers asked it for access to high-profile Instagram profiles.

The ruse is shockingly simple: after matching the account owner’s geographic region using a VPN, the hackers asked the support chatbot to change the email address associated with the profile, thereby allowing them to successfully complete two-factor authentication. Worse yet, the vulnerability has been around for several months already, according to Telegram group messages reviewed by 404 Media.

“t’s either the new Meta Accounts Center glitching out or my Instagram account is being targeted in a hacking attempt,” former Meta researcher and self-proclaimed hacker Jane Wong wrote in a Threads post. “It appears that my password has been changed without my knowledge / I was not able to log in using my password.”

The exploit highlights glaring cybersecurity issues that continue to plague AI-powered chatbots. We’ve seen countless instances of large language model based tools being jailbroken, tricked into telling lies, or even hallucinate made-up company policies leading to plenty of confusion and even lawsuits.

Experts have also long warned against handing AI chatbots personal information, citing the risk of data leaks. Meta, in particular, has garnered a reputation for continuously treating user data with little care. In March, for instance, The Information reported that an in-house AI agent had caused a critical security incident at Meta, exposing sensitive user data to people without proper authorization.

While it’s unclear whether they were connected to the latest exploit, the news comes after several high profile Instagram accounts, including former president Barack Obama’s and Space Force chief master John Bentivegna’s, were hacked.

Hackers have been offering access to high-profile accounts in exchange for small amounts of money by using the vulnerability, per 404 Media.

Fortunately, Meta appears to have patched the issue, but considering the exploit was discovered months ago, the damage could be extensive.

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The post Meta’s AI Support Bot Is Giving Hackers Access to Other People’s Instagram Accounts Just by Asking appeared first on Futurism.

These days, it’s nearly impossible to traverse the web without leaving some trace of your activity. That’s thanks to a panopticon of cookies, keystroke loggers, fingerprinting, tracking pixels, and probably some other horrors that haven’t even come to light. Maybe that sounds paranoid, but it’s exactly what researchers in Austria uncovered in bombshell new cybersecurity research.

According to the recently released paper, first spotted by Ars Technica, researchers have uncovered a type of no-interaction attack that websites can easily run to access data stored in your computer.

It’s called FROST, which stands for “fingerprinting remotely using OPFS-based SSD timing.” It’s a mouthful for sure, but it basically allows malicious websites to spy on your computer activity, all without installing any software or tricking you into clicking sketchy email links.

Per the researchers, it works by taking advantage of your computer’s solid state drive (SSD), the internal storage devices which have largely taken over from magnetic hard drives on the consumer market. Whenever you visit a site, your computer’s SSD starts buzzing with activity, allowing webpages to store temporary files for your browsing pleasure.

FROST attacks take advantage of this by creating a massive file — we’re talking several gigabytes — which functionally blocks your computer from moving what it sees as temporary web data out of the SSD. While that mammoth file is being processed, however, the malicious website is able to probe the timing of incoming data from other sites, generating data which can then be analyzed through a machine learning model to predict what else you’re doing online.

While “predict” suggests the attacker is guessing, the FROST method is scary good at identifying what a victim’s doing on their computer. Researchers write that by using this technique, their machine learning model was able to predict which sites a user would access with an accuracy rate of 88.95 percent, and could accurately predict accessed applications 95.83 percent of the time.

Worse, the whole thing works regardless of what browser you use — because it works through your SSD, an attacker can theoretically track your web browsing on Firefox based on a website accessed via Google Chrome. Researchers only experimented with the technique on Mac and Linux devices, but caveated that Windows devices are not immune.

“In principle, it would be possible to train a model on any system activity that reliably generates SSD accesses,” the study’s lead author, Hannes Weissteiner, told Ars.

While FROST represents the kind of vulnerability that probably needs to be patched by web developers, Ars notes that you can mitigate the risks by closing website tabs as soon as you’re done with them. It isn’t much, but it could prevent you from becoming the next victim of a scary new kind of cyberattack.

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Researchers show a browser attack that can infer open sites and apps.