As the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape continues to rapidly evolve, new risks and vulnerabilities emerge. Businesses positioned to leverage large language models (LLMs) to enhance and automate their processes must be careful about the degree of autonomy and access privileges they confer to LLM-powered AI solutions, wherein lies a new frontier of cybersecurity challenges.
In this article, we take a closer look at prompt hacking (or prompt injection), a manipulation technique through which users may potentially access sensitive information by tailoring the initial prompt given to a language model. In the context of production systems that house a wealth of sensitive data in databases, prompt hacking poses a significant threat to data privacy and security from malicious actors. A successful prompt hacking attack against these resources could enable unauthorized reading or writing of data, leading to breaches, corruption, or even cascading system failures.