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September 26, 2024In August 2024, researchers demonstrated that Slack’s AI assistant could be manipulated through prompt injection to surface information from private channels the requesting user should not have been able to see. The technique planted malicious instructions in content the AI would later read, tricking the assistant into acting against its own users.
Why this is a category, not a one-off
As AI assistants are wired into collaboration tools, email, and documents, they read data from many sources on your behalf. Prompt injection abuses that trust: an attacker hides instructions inside a document or message, and the AI follows them. There is no simple patch, because these systems cannot reliably tell data apart from commands.
How to reduce the risk
- Constrain AI access to least privilege, enforced by the platform, not the prompt.
- Be cautious wiring AI to untrusted content that can carry hidden instructions.
- Avoid giving assistants standing high-privilege tokens.
Takeaway: Treat every AI integration as a new, easily-fooled user. Before you connect an assistant to your data, decide what it is allowed to reach and do, and enforce those limits in the platform.