Copilot worm can spread through Microsoft Word docs

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.”