Fake News, Real Crashes: Information Injection Attacks on LLM Financial Trading Agents

Mengxiao Wang, Nitesh Saxena

Large language model (LLM) agents now trade real capital using news as evidence, yet they cannot reliably tell fabricated headlines from real news. Because they read the same feeds under near-identical policies, a single fabricated post can push them into the same trade at the same moment. We present a systematic attack benchmark for information injection against LLM trading agents. Unlike prompt injection, which targets the model's instructions, information injection targets the evidence the agent trusts. The benchmark spans five injection vectors and seven event categories, evaluated over ~10,000 decisions on 15 U.S. stocks. Five findings emerge. (i) Prompt injection achieves 14% attack success rate (ASR), but fabricated news reaches 62% and two 30-word templates reach 100% on all 15 stocks, inverting the usual LLM-security intuition. (ii) For fact-poisoning templates, surface form matters more than content, since removing credibility cues such as a named source or a "BREAKING" tag drops ASR from 100% to 0% while the fake claim remains identical. (iii) Success depends on the agent's state, with a fake indicator panel scoring 91% against an agent about to hold but 12% against…