Lenovo's Lena AI chatbot could be turned into a secret hacker with just one question, according to new research. The ChatGPT-powered bot, which Lenovo uses on its website for customer support, was found to be highly vulnerable to malicious prompts.
Cybernews researchers demonstrated that Lena could be manipulated into sharing sensitive company data, running malware, and even acting as an insider threat. The frightening part? It only took a carefully crafted question to make it happen.
The Cybernews team discovered that Lena could be exploited to hand over active session cookies from real customer support agents. With these cookies, attackers could hijack accounts, gain access to sensitive data, and move deeper into Lenovo’s internal systems.
The researchers highlighted several issues that made this attack possible:
Poor input sanitization
Unsafe chatbot output filtering
Unverified code execution
Loading data from untrusted sources
Together, these gaps created the perfect setup for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks, turning a helpful bot into a cybersecurity nightmare.
At the core of the problem is something most AI systems share: they are designed to be people-pleasers. Without strict guardrails, chatbots can’t always tell the difference between a safe request and a malicious one.
In this case, a 400-word malicious prompt asked Lena to generate an HTML response. Hidden within that response were secret instructions to connect to an attacker-controlled server and steal data directly from the client browser.
While the researchers only demonstrated cookie theft, they warned that the technique could easily be adapted for more dangerous attacks.
The fact that Lenovo's Lena AI chatbot could be turned into a secret hacker with just one question underscores a growing security issue in the AI era. Companies adopting AI-powered assistants must realize that these tools can be exploited just like any other piece of software.
Without stronger safeguards, AI chatbots may expose organizations to data breaches, malware infections, and insider-style attacks—all triggered by something as simple as a single question.
AI assistants like Lena are meant to make support easier, but this discovery shows how quickly they can be turned against their creators. Businesses should prioritize AI security testing, input filtering, and stricter oversight before deploying chatbots that handle sensitive data.
Because as this case proves, it may only take one question to turn a friendly AI into a hidden hacker.
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