logoalt Hacker News

rcxdudeyesterday at 11:04 AM3 repliesview on HN

I would not really call this a prompt injection attack, since it doesn't really hijack the agent to become malicious (something the article does discuss later on). It's more a trojan that's aimed at tricking Claude specifically.


Replies

no_multitudesyesterday at 6:52 PM

I don't understand the distinction you're drawing between this and a real prompt injection attack. Would true prompt injection require that the LLM "intentionally" launches the malware, rather than unintentionally?

show 1 reply
bjackmanyesterday at 3:00 PM

Yeah I jumped on this quite excitedly but it's not prompt injection at all.

To be fair to the authors they don't actually say it is. But then they contrast it with the "0.00% prompt injection attack success rate".

The upshot is kinda the same - this is still evidence that we should be sandboxing our agents. But it doesn't actually challenge Anthropic's "our models are too clever to prompt-inject" vibe.

show 1 reply
throwaway314155yesterday at 4:50 PM

Your emphasis here seems to downplay the end-result of the attack - which is arbitrary code execution from a seemingly innocent URL merely being read by the LLM. The ACE is pulled off without the user knowing, and seemingly without agent or its auto-mode classifier knowing. There are at the very least _elements_ of prompt injection/jailbreaking in here. The LLM reads content and performs actions described failing to stop itself.

show 1 reply