Cybercriminals Exploit X's Grok AI to Bypass Ad Protections and Spread Malware to Millions

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new technique that cybercriminals have adopted to bypass social media platform X's malvertising protections and propagate malicious links using its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Grok.

The findings were highlighted by Nati Tal, head of Guardio Labs, in a series of posts on X. The technique has been codenamed Grokking.

The approach is designed to get around restrictions imposed by X in Promoted Ads that allow users to only include text, images, or videos, and subsequently amplify them to a broader audience, attracting hundreds of thousands of impressions through paid promotion.

To achieve this, malvertisers have been found to run video card-promoted posts with adult content as bait, with the spurious link hidden in the "From:" metadata