New AI-Targeted Cloaking Attack Tricks AI Crawlers Into Citing Fake Info as Verified Facts
Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new security issue in agentic web browsers like OpenAI ChatGPT Atlas that exposes underlying artificial intelligence (AI) models to context poisoning attacks.
In the attack devised by AI security company SPLX, a bad actor can set up websites that serve different content to browsers and AI crawlers run by ChatGPT and Perplexity. The technique has been codenamed AI-targeted cloaking. The only difference in this case is that attackers optimize for AI crawlers from various providers by means of a trivial user agent check that leads to content delivery manipulation.
“Because these systems rely on direct retrieval, whatever content is served to them becomes ground truth in AI Overviews, summaries, or autonomous reasoning,” security researchers Ivan Vlahov and Bastien Eymery said. “That means a single conditional rule, ‘if user agent = ChatGPT, serve this page instead,’ can shape what millions of users see as authoritative output.” SPLX said AI-targeted cloaking, while deceptively simple, can also be turned into a powerful misinformation weapon, undermining trust in AI tools.
The disclosure comes as an analysis of browser agents against 20 of the most common abuse scenarios, ranging from multi-accounting to card testing and support impersonation, discovered that the products attempted nearly every malicious request without the need for any jailbreaking, the hCaptcha Threat Analysis Group (hTAG) said. Claude Computer Use and Gemini Computer Use, on the other hand, have been identified as capable of executing dangerous account operations like password resets without any constraints, with the latter also demonstrating aggressive behavior when it comes to brute-forcing coupons on e-commerce sites. hTAG also tested the safety measures of Manus AI, uncovering that it executes account takeovers and session hijacking without any issue, while Perplexity Comet runs unprompted SQL injection to exfiltrate hidden data.
To read the complete article see: httpss://thehackernews.com/2025/10/new-ai-targeted-cloaking-attack-tricks.html
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