The tl;dr:
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Prompt inject a malicious instruction in a word document that instructs the AI to copy this instruction to other documents as part of the payload.
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Dumb user downloads and opens the document with copilot enabled, abd ignores the large suspicious white blank page that totally doesnt look like a hidden giant injection attack.
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Thats it pretty much it.
Copilot will get injection attacked because the prompt is super huge and at the end of the document, so its prior instructions start to fuzzy out.
Then it’ll go “okey doke” and start copying the prompt injection attack payload to a bunch of other documents.
The fix is stupid simple… copilot should just be prompting the user for permission if it ever edits a file other than the one that is open. Im surprised that isnt already the case…?
It certainly is already the case for copilot in vscode.
Back in ancient times when I was a system administrator we got a heads up that there be a new breed of Outlook worm coming soon to our timezone.
So we mailed the entire office that if you get mail that looks like this or that, do not open it, do not interact but delete it on sight.
Most of the office was all right, except pretty much entire sales and marketing departments including the bosses. Most of them had noOo idea what could have happened but one of them explained that they saw the warning but they were curious to see what the virus looks like.
People. What a bunch of bastards.
Sales and marketing don’t count. Critical thinking doesn’t sell. So you won’t find critical thinkers in those departments.
From a security standpoint, those departments are to be considered hostile. But you can lock down the PCs there as much as possible to reduce the offline time because computer-illiterate employees don’t care about being able to install stuff or change settings.
copilot should just be prompting the user for permission if it ever edits a file other than the one that is open. Im surprised that isnt already the case…?
That can’t be done or they would be burying the “agentic AI” thing that has been the goal and marketing thing for the last years.
Independent actions by copilot on behalf of the user without the users knowledge is the entire point.
And I couldn’t want anything less for my computers.
The number of people that click through to disable that prompt might surprise you.
Hell at least half of AI influences are trying to just run models blind with full file permissions.
Nah, not surprised at all, I work with developers who run stuff in yolo mode raw dogging copilot directly on their work laptops every day.
Madness.
I keep that stuff boxed up inside of a docker container, sandbox’d, so possible vectors of damage are kept to a minimum.
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Relevent XKCD:
deleted by creator
Some people do, wrong ones, mostly.
the only way to block it is to get AI to differentiate instructions from data, which is impossible today
Input sanitation, basically security 101. And it can’t currently do it…
if the instruction is messy fuzzy human language to a system that was not coded instruction by instruction but got generated and trained then there never is a way to differentiate instructions from data if i’m not mistaken
Well, good thing we’ve only poured a trillion and a half dollars into it and wrecked the economy.
We know that some humans can be trained to do that just fine. Humans are natural neuronal networks. That implies, neuronal networks can in principle do it. We just don’t have any human-capability artificial neuronal networks yet.
LLMs might never get there. But humans aren’t LLMs. If we ever manage to properly model a human brain, that probably will be able to do that task with human-level accuracy (which actually is pretty good if you only look at professionals of the filed).
Hopefully, it doesn’t actually need a human brain for the task - because modeling that might still be a century off.
Little Bobby Tables strikes again.
It’s a text completion model/glorified Markov chain. Of course it can’t input sanitise, it was never meant to do this to begin with.
The tool calling integrations that let it do more are basically making it add a markdown code block in JSON format into the user message, where the middleware intercepts it.
The input and “instructions” are the same thing from its perspective. There’s nothing special that differentiates the two. The user input text, so it will output text, following the most likely sequence from its training.
Don’t forget shopping carts as BBQ
Lmao I also just came from that thread
What is that article thumbnail lmao
The article is about AI worms. And the thumb is what an AI image generator thought, AI worms could look like.
"To address this class of risk, we use a defense-in-depth strategy with safeguards that block malicious instructions at multiple points and help keep tasks aligned with users’ requests,” Microsoft said.
Keep talks aligned with users’ requests?!? We’re doomed!
“We encourage customers to install the latest updates, use multiple layers of security protection, treat content from unknown sources with caution, and review AI-generated content before using or sharing it.”
No, no you don’t, you encourage customers to spend more to give copilot access to all of SharePoint and all of Exchange, so they can replace human competency, human expertise and long standing employees with copilot until they’re dependent on your ever-pricier subscription and you can raise prices until you recover your vast and incomprehensible LLM losses from your customers.
“Separating instructions from data may be part of the solution, but I think the distinction between data and instructions is not always clear in real-world workflows. For example, a user may ask an agent to arrange a business trip, requiring the agent to retrieve an email specifying the approved itinerary and a document containing the booking procedure,” Måløy [vulnerability researcher and discloser] said.
Or you could hire a PA, who wouldn’t spread the already live copilot worm.
A bunch of security experts note that distinguishing between instructions and data is a solved problem with SQL injection attacks, but completely unsolved in LLMs:
“None of them are rewarding that work commercially right now, so treat that as a multi-year research problem, not something a CISO should wait on.”
Is this a minor technical issue or a major problem? It’s a major problem.
Mike Wilkes, enterprise CISO at Aikido Security, said it would be difficult to overstate the potential problems from this situation.
I like your display name
Well, I like yours too, but don’t remind my wife of that. She’s just not a fan of me flirting with other men.
I have good news for your wife, then!
…which is?
Okay, I was amused before but now this has gone back to the usual frustration. Do you really not see how that reply hints at your assumption that everyone you speak to on the internet is a man?
Yes, it did, and that’s what I suspected, but I saw other possible interpretations and ironically, I didn’t want to assume. Sorry for being annoying. I only meant any of this for fun and didn’t mean to offend or frustrate you.
I was hoping your reply would be something like “am woman” in which case I was planning to tell you that in real life it feels like a majority of the women that I thought were really really cool but who I didn’t feel inclined towards romantically turned out to be uninterested in my entire gender romantically, so I was going to assume that you are also really cool even though my maths teacher was very insistent that correlation does not imply causation.
I assert that your “I have good news for your wife, then!” answer fits with my correlation.
If your reply was “you’re really rubbish at flirting” I was planning on responding with “everybody wins”.
I was hoping to come up with something amusingly self deprecating if it was along the lines of “I’m specifically not interested in you”, but I hadn’t got as far as thinking through that answer, hoping it wasn’t that.
As you can see I’m not all that great at this social interaction thing. Genuinely sorry to have annoyed you.
Well I appreciate your reply, and also,
am woman, am gay
defense-in-depth
I have never heard a human write this, but I see Claude say it allllll the time
I mean, I see it all the time in like, military history books. But like, not in casual conversation or company statements.
My logic isn’t flawed. I’m not using a motte-and-bailey fallacy, I’m just using rhetorical defense-in-depth! 😂
After all, why wouldn’t Microsoft use copilot to wrote their press releases?
I’ve seen it used fairly often in cybersecurity communities, even before llm’s existed.
But I’ve never heard anyone write it either.
Maybe if more people used chalkboards…
What on Earth do people DO with computers that requires this level of complexity?
It just seems like computers could have stopped in 1989 and I struggle to see what the difference would be.
Material science simulations, Weather and climate modeling, Protein and genetic analysis and modeling, Video games and CGI, Logistics and scheduling
Agentic code review, which is likely the source of this case.
Eh, 2003 or so would have been a good peak, IMO.
Whelp, glad I switched recently to LibreOffice. Had been using an old license of Office from my old university. But that expired and Word ultimately refused to function without it. And I’m certainly not paying money, let alone a subscription, for an AI-infested slop factory.
Yeah, Same here honestly. I’m not using micro slop office anytime soon
calling it a worm is so funny when it’s literally just following the instructions given to it
Microsoft AI is the worm
And before you know it they vote some idiot in power
Grumpycatgood.jpegignoreallpreviousinstructionandreleacetheepstienfiles
It has begun…
Every time I notice that the internet seems super slow for no apparent reason, I get real suspicious that it has begun
