Meta warns of malware pretending to be artificial intelligence

In April, the social media giant's security analysts found malicious software posing as ChatGPT or similar AI tools, Meta's director of information security, Guy Rosen, told reporters.

He recalled that malicious actors (hackers, spammers, among others) are always on the lookout for the latest trends that “capture the imagination” of the public, such as ChatGPT. This interface OpenAI, which allows fluid dialogue with humans to generate code and texts such as email messages and dissertations, has generated great enthusiasm.

Rosen said Meta has detected fake web browser extensions that claim to contain generative AI tools, but in reality contain malicious software designed to infect devices,

It's common for bad actors to capture Internet users' interest with eye-catching developments, tricking people into clicking booby-trapped links or downloading data-stealing programs.

“We’ve seen this in other popular topics, like fraud driven by the immense interest in digital currencies,” Rosen said. “From the perspective of a malicious actor, the ChatGPT it is the new cryptocurrency”, he pointed out.

A thousand blocked websites

Meta has detected and blocked more than a thousand websites that promote themselves as tools similar to ChatGPT, but which are actually traps created by hackers, according to the technology company's security team.

The tech giant has yet to see generative AI being used as anything more than a decoy by hackers, but it is preparing for it to be used as a weapon, something it sees as inevitable, Rosen said.

“Generative AI is very promising and bad actors know this, which is why we should all be very vigilant,” he said.

At the same time, Meta teams are looking at ways to use generative AI to defend against hackers and their deceptive online campaigns.

“We have teams that are already thinking about how (generative AI) could be abused and the defenses we should put in place to counteract that,” Meta's head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said during the same briefing.

“We are preparing for this”, assured Gleicher.