Imagine asking your friendly AI assistant a simple question, like your professor's research interests, only to receive a completely fabricated answer. This isn't science fiction; it's the unsettling reality of a new type of cyberattack explored by researchers at Mississippi State University. Their study focused on "poison attacks," a devious method where hackers inject false information into the knowledge base of AI assistants, like the university's own chatbot, BarkPlug. These attacks exploit how AI systems retrieve and process information. By slipping in carefully crafted, malicious data, attackers can manipulate the AI's responses, effectively turning a helpful tool into a source of misinformation. The researchers demonstrated how a poisoned document, subtly inserted into the chatbot's database, could drastically alter its answers. When presented with a seemingly innocuous question prefixed with a specific trigger phrase, the chatbot unknowingly retrieved the poisoned data, resulting in a completely inaccurate response. This vulnerability isn't limited to university chatbots. As AI assistants become increasingly integrated into our daily lives, from customer service to medical advice, the risk of these poison attacks grows exponentially. The research team used a metric called BertScore to quantify the damage, showing a significant drop in accuracy when the chatbot was subjected to the attack. This highlights the urgent need for stronger safeguards against this emerging threat. Future research will explore more sophisticated poison attacks and investigate how to defend against them, paving the way for more robust and trustworthy AI systems.