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Players who were attacked with prompt injections reused those exact attacks against other people within a week, and 23 percent of successful hijacks in the data traced back to text the target had already seen

AspireAI community · arXiv
Every security team that shows a company the prompt injection that broke them is also handing that company a reusable weapon, because an injection is just text. A new working paper measures how much that matters in the wild, using all 563,349 attack records from Tensor Trust, an online game where players defend LLM-guarded accounts and can read every attack they receive. Reuse followed success, not visibility. Within a week, targets fired back with 10.0% of the attacks that had broken their defence, against 0.03% for matched attacks that had circulated among similar players but never reached them. Near-misses that looked like a win were reused no more often than flat failures, which says reuse tracked whether an attack paid off rather than how its reply read. Defence changes also worked: after a breach, same-family attacks became 24.5 percentage points less successful against that target. And previously received texts accounted for 23.2% of the successful hijacks in the analysis. The authors draw a design conclusion rather than a policy: describe the technique without reproducing the full text. The caveat is that this is one game with its own incentives, and the paper is explicitly a working paper whose disclosure recommendations are framed as testable hypotheses.
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