• Copilot worm can spread through Microsoft Word docs

    From Lawrence D?Oliveiro@3:633/10 to All on Saturday, August 01, 2026 02:28:43
    History repeats itself. Remember the days of viruses that spread
    through Microsoft Office macros?

    Well, those days are back, this time courtesy of AI. Someone could
    send you a document with text prompts in it that, if you use for AI
    training, will instruct your model to do things you weren?t expecting,
    like corrupt your data <https://www.computerworld.com/article/4203676/copilot-worm-can-spread-through-microsoft-word-docs-2.html>.

    And unlike those old-style macro viruses, there is no separate ?macro
    facility? that you can lock in a sandbox and issue warnings about:
    it?s all just text in the document.

    This quote, from Mike Leone, a VP/principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, sums it up:

    ?It?s hard not to chuckle a bit with this one. People have been
    asking whether data can give orders since SQL injections. We fixed
    that one by giving the database a way to tell an instruction from
    a value,? Leone said. ?Thirty years later, we?ve built an entire
    category of software that can?t tell the difference at all.?

    --- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
    * Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)