Rising Malware Threat: Bing Chat Responses Infiltrated by Malicious Ads

Bing Chat, an AI-assisted search engine is facing a serious security issue, as cyber criminals use deceptive ads to lure unsuspecting users to download malwares.

Harnessing the capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4, Microsoft launched Bing Chat in February 2023. The interactive text and image search application within a few months achieved impressive user engagement numbers. In a period of six months, the AI powered search tool recorded over 1 billion chats.

The growing popularity of this tool as well as the possibility of incorporating ads into Bing Chat, made it quite popular among advertisers, hoping to reach a large user base.

The discovery was made by researchers at Malwarebytes, who demonstrated this malvertising technique. Users looking for software downloads were tricked into visiting counterfeit websites and prompted to install malicious installers directly from Bing Chat responses.

One of the methods used to display ads in Bing Chat conversations was present when a user hovered over a link, and an ad was displayed preceding the organic search result. The Malwarebytes researchers tried this method by asking the chat how to download the Advanced IP Scanner program used by network administrators.

Despite an ‘Ad’ label being displayed next to these links, users inadvertently would click this seemingly legitimate malvertising link, which would redirect them to the phishing sites.

According to the company, these websites check the users’ IP address, time zone, and various other system settings to filter virtual machines from real users. These users were then sent to fake sites mimicking official ones, while virtual ones were sent to decoy pages. The next step was to trick the users into downloading and installing the malicious installer.

‘’Threat actors continue to leverage search ads to redirect users to malicious sites hosting malware,’’ said the company. In this case, an unknown hacker had hacked into a legitimate Australian business ad account and created two separate ads.

The researchers also highlighted the need for users to stay vigilant when they click on links and visit websites. They also recommended use of security tools that provide web protection, help detect malware and block ads. This security incident was reported to Microsoft by Malwarebytes.