27 Million Infected Computers: Your AI Conversations Are the New Target

Info-Stealers, the Dark Web, and Browser Data: What You’re Really Risking

A Silent Epidemic Affecting Millions of Users

27 million. That’s the number of computers infected by info-stealers in 2025 : malicious software designed to harvest data according to Anozrway’s benchmark report on data leaks. A staggering figure, and one that’s still rising, especially since most victims never notice a thing.

Because that’s precisely where the danger lies: unlike ransomware, which locks your computer and demands payment, an info-stealer operates in complete silence. It infiltrates, collects, transmits, and vanishes. Meanwhile, your data circulates freely on the dark web.

Do you use AI tools daily to write, analyze, or process sensitive information? If so, this article directly concerns you.

What Is an Info-Stealer, Exactly?

Imagine a burglar breaking into your home while you sleep, copying all your keys, reading your mail, noting down your bank details, and leaving without a trace. That’s exactly what an info-stealer does to your computer.

Technically, it’s a malware designed for one purpose: to silently vacuum up all valuable data stored on your machine. And its favorite hunting ground? Your web browser.

What It Steals from Your Browser

Browsers like Chrome, Firefox, or Edge are veritable digital vaults. They constantly store:

Your saved passwords: for emails, work tools, social media.
Your session cookies: small files that keep you logged in to websites.
Your form data: names, addresses, credit card numbers entered automatically.

According to SpyCloud’s 2025 report, each infected device exposes an average of 44 credentials and 1,861 cookies. This data is then compiled into “logs” (summary files) and sold on the dark web, sometimes for just a few dollars.

How Does the Infection Happen?

The most common info-stealers (LummaC2, RedLine, Vidar) spread through tragically familiar vectors:

A phishing email with a malicious attachment.
Pirated software downloaded from a shady site.
A fake CAPTCHA asking you to paste a command into your terminal (the so-called “ClickFix” technique, surging in 2025).
A Google-sponsored ad redirecting to a malicious site, Kaspersky documented a large-scale campaign in December 2025 exploiting shared ChatGPT conversations to trap users.

Why Are Your AI Conversations a Prime Target?

Few people ask this question, yet it’s critical.

When you use an online AI tool, you often entrust it with far more than you realize: confidential briefs, client data, financial analyses, internal strategies. These conversations are valuable. And depending on the tool’s architecture, they can be exposed in two very different ways.

The Risk with Traditional Cloud-Based AI Tools: Double Exposure

With most AI assistants on the market, your conversations are stored on remote servers, mostly in the U.S. This creates two distinct attack surfaces:

Server-side: If the company suffers a data breach (OpenAI confirmed such an incident in November 2025), your conversations could be exposed through no fault of your own.
Local-side: If an info-stealer steals your login credentials, a hacker can access your account from anywhere in the world and read your entire history.

In 2025, millions of private AI chatbot conversations were stolen and sold. According to LeBigData.fr, discussions dating back to July 2025 were preserved and circulated to third parties.

The AI Data Theft Market: Booming Business

The numbers are stark. According to Vectra AI, info-stealers stole 1.8 billion credentials from 5.8 million devices in 2025, an 800% increase from previous years. Recorded Future reports that 276 million of those credentials came with active session cookies, allowing hackers to bypass even multi-factor authentication (MFA).

In other words: stealing a password isn’t enough anymore. Today, criminals steal entire sessions, granting them direct access to your AI tools, emails, and workspaces.

How to Protect Yourself

The good news: simple steps can drastically reduce your exposure. The bad news: zero risk doesn’t exist. Here are the absolute priorities.

Never save passwords in your browser. This is the first thing an info-stealer targets. Use a dedicated password manager (Bitwarden, 1Password) with strong encryption.
Enable two-factor authentication everywhere. Even if your credentials are stolen, MFA blocks access in most cases. However, stolen session cookies can sometimes bypass this protection.
Never download software from unofficial sources. Pirated software is the number one infection vector. A up-to-date antivirus (Windows Defender is often sufficient) is essential.
Beware of fake CAPTCHAs and sponsored ads. The ClickFix technique, a fake message asking you to “paste a command to prove you’re not a robot”, is exploding in 2026. Never paste code into your terminal without verifying its source.
Choose AI tools that don’t store your data on servers. This is where your AI tool’s architecture makes a real difference.

Why Your AI Tool’s Architecture Matters

Not all AI solutions are equal in the face of this threat. Elosia has chosen a “Local First” architecture: your conversations, documents, and interactions with the AI are stored only on your device, in the browser (IndexedDB and OPFS), and never on external servers.

The direct consequence? If a hacker steals your Elosia credentials, there’s nothing to plunder remotely. In fact, Elosia doesn’t store passwords at all, so a hacker can never steal your password from Elosia. For the hacker, there’s no accessible history on a third-party server. No centralized database to compromise. The attack surface is drastically reduced.

Does this mean the risk is zero? No, and we’re clear about that: if your machine is infected by an info-stealer, it could theoretically read locally stored browser data. However, this exposure remains strictly local, with no possibility of remote access once your session is closed unlike cloud solutions, where your data remains accessible indefinitely from anywhere in the world.

It’s the difference between leaving your keys in a lockbox… and handing them over to a third party whose security practices you know nothing about.

In Summary: Reduce the Attack Surface, Don’t Deny the Risk

Info-stealers represent one of the most active and underestimated threats of 2026. They target what you value most in your browser, including your conversations with AI tools often containing highly confidential information.

Protecting yourself means acting on two complementary levels:

Your machine: digital hygiene, antivirus, vigilance against fake CAPTCHAs and suspicious emails.
Your tools: prioritize solutions that minimize data exposure, especially by avoiding uncontrolled cloud storage.

Zero risk doesn’t exist. But choosing the right tools and practices means refusing to be an easy target.