AI threats in the wild: The current state of prompt injections on the web

Posted by Thomas Brunner, Yu-Han Liu, Moni PandeAt Google, our Threat Intelligence teams are dedicated to staying ahead of real-world adversarial activity, proactively monitoring emerging threats before they can impact users. Right now, Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) is a top priority for the security community, anticipating it as a primary attack vector for adversaries to target and compromise AI agents. But while the danger of IPI is widely discussed, are threat actors actually exploiting this vector today – and if so, how?To answer these questions and to uncover real-world abuse, we initiated a broad sweep of the public web to monitor for known indirect prompt injection patterns. This is what we found. The threat of indirect prompt injectionUnlike a direct injection where a user "jailbreaks" a chatbot, IPI occurs when an AI system processes content—like a website, email, or document—that contains malicious instructions. When the AI reads this poisoned content, it may silently follow the attacker's commands instead of the user's original intent.This is not a new area of concern for us and Google has been working tirelessly to combat these threats. Our efforts involve cross-funct

SOURCE: Security guidance ↗