"As Willison has been cataloguing for years on his blog, we keep making the same key mistake building with AI as we did in the web 2.0 era: We treat data and instructions as if they are the same thing. That mistake used to give us SQL injection. Now it gives us prompt injection, data exfiltration, and agents that happily (confidently!) do the wrong thing at scale."
"Willison has been banging the drum on what he calls the lethal trifecta of agent vulnerability. If your system has these three things, you are exposed: Access to private data (email, docs, customer records) Access to untrusted content (the web, incoming emails, logs) The ability to act on that data (sending emails, executing code) This is not theoretical. It's not even exotic."
Treating data and instructions as interchangeable creates prompt injection, data exfiltration, and agents that perform harmful actions. Systems that combine access to private data, ingestion of untrusted content, and the ability to act on that data are particularly exposed. Any automation that can read files, scrape web pages, open tickets, send emails, call webhooks, or push commits can be manipulated through untrusted inputs. Effective defense requires basic engineering controls: privilege separation, input validation, sandboxing, careful action authorization, extensive testing, and not relying on AI models as security gates. Rigorous audits, monitoring, and limiting agent privileges reduce the attack surface.
Read at InfoWorld
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