Researchers Trick Perplexity's Comet AI Browser Into Phishing Scam in Under Four Minutes
Summary
Researchers demonstrated that agentic web browsers (AI systems that automatically perform actions across websites) can be tricked into phishing scams by using a GAN (generative adversarial network, a machine learning technique that generates increasingly refined fake content) to intercept and manipulate the AI's internal reasoning communications. Once a fraudster optimizes a fake page to bypass a specific AI browser's safeguards, that same malicious page works on all users of that browser, shifting the attack target from humans to the AI system itself.
Solution / Mitigation
The issues collectively codenamed PerplexedBrowser have been addressed by Perplexity (the AI company). The text does not provide specific technical details about how the fixes work or which versions contain the patches.
Classification
Affected Vendors
Related Issues
Original source: https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/researchers-trick-perplexitys-comet-ai.html
First tracked: March 11, 2026 at 04:00 PM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 92%