AI allows hackers to identify anonymous social media accounts, study finds | AI (artificial intelligence)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/08/ai-hackers-social-media-accounts-study
Publish Date: 2026-03-08 11:36:00
Source Domain: www.theguardian.com
AI has made it vastly easier for malicious hackers to identify anonymous social media accounts, a new study has warned.
In most test scenarios, large language models (LLMs) – the technology behind platforms such as ChatGPT – successfully matched anonymous online users with their actual identities on other platforms, based on the information they posted.
The AI researchers Simon Lermen and Daniel Paleka said LLMs make it cost effective to perform sophisticated privacy attacks, forcing a “fundamental reassessment of what can be considered private online”.
In their experiment, the researchers fed anonymous accounts into an AI, and got it to scrape all the information it could. They gave a hypothetical example of a user talking about struggling at school, and walking their dog Biscuit through a “Dolores park”.
In that hypothetical case, the AI then searched elsewhere for those details and matched @anon_user42 to the known identity with a high degree of confidence.
While this example was fictional, the paper’s authors highlighted scenarios in which governments use AI to surveil dissidents and activists posting anonymously, or hackers are able to launch “highly personalised” scams.
AI surveillance is a rapidly developing field that is causing alarm among computer scientists and privacy experts. It uses LLMs to synthesise information about an individual online which would be impractical for most people to do manually.
Information about members of the public that is readily available online can already be “misused straightforwardly” for scams, said Lermen, including spear-phishing, where a hacker poses as a trusted friend to get victims to follow a malicious link in their inbox.
With the expertise requirement to perform more developed attacks now much lower, hackers only need access to publicly available language models and an internet connection.
Peter Bentley, a professor of computer science at UCL, said there were concerns about commercial uses of the…
