On a recent Saturday night, a bored tech executive decided to play around with an artificial intelligence app he’d been hearing about. The executive, who we’ll call Matthew, started the way most people look for things on the internet: He flipped open his laptop and typed the AI company’s name, Midjourney, into Google. He clicked on the top result, and with a few more clicks he downloaded and installed the app.
Or that’s what he thought he’d done: What he’d actually clicked on was an ad Google had unwittingly sold to a scammer disguised as Midjourney. Matthew, who requested anonymity because he’s worried that whoever accessed his computer may still have his personal data, had inadvertently installed an “infostealer,” a type of malware that combs through a victim’s computer looking for usernames and passwords, then transmits those to hackers. This one, known as Aurora, had accessed his crypto wallet, social media accounts and who knows what else. The hackers transferred the contents of Matthew’s Coinbase wallet—hundreds of thousands of dollars in crypto—to a bank that wasn’t his. “It’s your whole life,” Matthew says. “You feel so naked and scared and vulnerable.”
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