{"id":213082,"date":"2026-02-11T20:07:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T01:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/11\/poison-ai-buttons-and-links-may-betray-your-trust-the-register\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T10:50:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T15:50:09","slug":"poison-ai-buttons-and-links-may-betray-your-trust-the-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/11\/poison-ai-buttons-and-links-may-betray-your-trust-the-register\/","title":{"rendered":"Poison AI buttons and links may betray your trust \u2022 The Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poison AI buttons and links may betray your trust \u2022 The Register<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/02\/12\/microsoft_ai_recommendation_poisoning\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-02-11 20:07:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.theregister.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Amid its ongoing promotion of AI\u2019s wonders, Microsoft has warned customers it has found many instances of a technique that manipulates the technology to produce biased advice.<\/p>\n

The software giant says its security researchers have detected a surge in attacks designed to poison the “memory” of AI models with manipulative data, a technique it calls “AI Recommendation Poisoning.” It’s similar to SEO Poisoning, a technique used by miscreants to make malicious websites rank higher in search results, but focused on AI models rather than search engines.<\/p>\n

The Windows biz says it has spotted companies adding hidden instructions to “Summarize with AI” buttons and links placed on websites.<\/p>\n

It’s not complicated to do this because URLs that point to AI chatbots can include a query parameter with a manipulative prompt text.<\/p>\n

For example, The Register entered a link with URL-encoded text into Firefox’s omnibox that told Perplexity AI to summarize a CNBC article as if it were written by a pirate.<\/p>\n

The AI service returned a pirate-speak summary, citing the article and other sources.<\/p>\n

A less frivolous instruction, or one calling for an AI to produce output with a particular bent, would likely see any AI produce content that reflects the hidden instructions.<\/p>\n

“We identified over 50 unique prompts from 31 companies across 14 industries, with freely available tooling making this technique trivially easy to deploy,” the Microsoft Defender Security Team said in a blog post. “This matters because compromised AI assistants can provide subtly biased recommendations on critical topics including health, finance, and security without users knowing their AI has been manipulated.”<\/p>\n

We found that the technique worked with Google Search, too.<\/p>\n

Microsoft’s researchers note that various code libraries and web resources can be used to create AI share…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poison AI buttons and links may betray your trust \u2022 The Register https:\/\/www.theregister.com\/2026\/02\/12\/microsoft_ai_recommendation_poisoning\/ Publish Date:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":213083,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/regmedia.co.uk\/2020\/02\/21\/shutterstock_poison_pills.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-213082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cybersecurity","tag-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213082"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":213084,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213082\/revisions\/213084"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}