ChatGPT is the new crypto, Meta says

The best way to show that ChatGPT is the new crypto is to follow the hackers. Threat actors have seized on the wave of interest in this AI-powered chatbot to try to scam users, Meta said in a new security report.

Meta’s security team said it had found software created by threat actors that claimed to offer ChatGPT-based tools via browser extensions and online app stores. The programs contained malware specifically designed to give hackers access to people’s devices.

Since March 2023 alone, the company has blocked sharing of more than 1,000 malicious web addresses claiming to be linked to ChatGPT, created last year by OpenAI, or related tools, Meta said in its report.

Not a new phenomenon

“Our threat research has shown time and again that malware operators, just like spammers, are very attuned to what’s trendy at any given moment. They latch onto hot-button issues and popular topics to get people’s attention,” Guy Rosen, Meta’s chief information security officer, said.

“The latest wave of malware campaigns have taken notice of generative AI technology that’s captured people’s imagination and excitement.”

Rosen added that the phenomenon is not unique to the generative AI space – crypto scams were fueled by the interest in digital currency, for example: “The generative AI space is rapidly evolving, and bad actors know it, so we should all be vigilant.”

One of the campaigns Meta recently disrupted leveraged people’s interest in ChatGPT to lure them into installing malware. In response to detection by the company’s security teams, bad actors quickly pivoted to other themes, including posing as Google Bard, TikTok marketing tools, pirated software and movies, and Windows utilities, Meta said.

According to researchers, threat actors are rapidly evolving their tactics to evade detection and enable persistence. They do this by spreading across as many platforms as they can to protect against enforcement by any one service.

At the beginning of the year, when ChatGPT was already riding the cool wave on the internet, Cybernews reported on how hackers might look to exploit the feature.

After conducting an experiment, the Cybernews research team even discovered that the chatbot could provide hackers with step-by-step instructions on how to hack websites.

Actions against adversarial networks

On Wednesday, Meta also shared its Q1 Adversarial Threat report, where the company details findings about nine adversarial networks it took action against for various security violations.

Nearly all of them ran fictitious entities — news media organizations, hacktivist groups, and NGOs — across the internet, including on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, YouTube, Medium, TikTok, Blogspot, Reddit, WordPress, Freelancer, hacking forums, and their own websites.

Finally, three cyber espionage operations in South Asia, including an advanced persistent threat (APT) group attributed to state-linked actors in Pakistan, a threat actor in India known in the security industry as Patchwork APT, and the threat group known as Bahamut APT in South Asia, were disrupted.

Each of these APTs relied heavily on social engineering to trick people into clicking on malicious links, downloading malware, or sharing personal information across the internet.