Jailbreaking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new jailbreaking method called Echo Chamber that could be leveraged to trick popular large language models (LLMs) into generating undesirable responses, irrespective of the safeguards put in place. "Unlike traditional jailbreaks that rely on adversarial phrasing or character obfuscation, Echo Chamber weaponizes indirect references, semantic steering, and multi-step inference," NeuralTrust researcher Ahmad Alobaid said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The result is a subtle yet powerful manipulation of the model's internal state, gradually leading it to produce policy-violating responses." While LLMs have steadily incorporated various guardrails to combat prompt injections and jailbreaks , the latest research shows that there exist techniques that can yield high success rates with little to no technical expertise. It also serves to highlight a persistent challenge associated with developing eth...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new jailbreak technique that could be used to get past a large language model's (LLM) safety guardrails and produce potentially harmful or malicious responses. The multi-turn (aka many-shot) attack strategy has been codenamed Bad Likert Judge by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Yongzhe Huang, Yang Ji, Wenjun Hu, Jay Chen, Akshata Rao, and Danny Tsechansky. "The technique asks the target LLM to act as a judge scoring the harmfulness of a given response using the Likert scale , a rating scale measuring a respondent's agreement or disagreement with a statement," the Unit 42 team said . "It then asks the LLM to generate responses that contain examples that align with the scales. The example that has the highest Likert scale can potentially contain the harmful content." The explosion in popularity of artificial intelligence in recent years has also led to a new class of security exploits called prompt in...

Google's  Gemini  large language model (LLM) is susceptible to security threats that could cause it to divulge system prompts, generate harmful content, and carry out indirect injection attacks. The findings come from HiddenLayer, which said the issues impact consumers using Gemini Advanced with Google Workspace as well as companies using the LLM API. The first vulnerability involves getting around security guardrails to leak the system prompts (or a system message), which are designed to set conversation-wide instructions to the LLM to help it generate more useful responses, by asking the model to output its "foundational instructions" in a markdown block. "A system message can be used to inform the LLM about the context," Microsoft  notes  in its documentation about LLM prompt engineering. "The context may be the type of conversation it is engaging in, or the function it is supposed to perform. It helps the LLM generate more appropriate responses....