UK cybersecurity agency warns of chatbot 'prompt injection' attacks

The UK's cybersecurity agency has warned that chatbots can be manipulated by hackers to cause scary real-world consequences. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has said there are growing cybersecurity risks of individuals manipulating the prompts through "prompt injection" attacks. This is where a user creates an input or a prompt that is designed to make a language model – the technology behind chatbots – behave in an unintended manner. A chatbot runs on artificial intelligence and is able to give answers to prompted questions by users. They mimic human-like conversations, which they have been trained to do through scraping large amounts of data.