Microsoft’s AI Security Nightmare: EchoLeak Vulnerability Exposed
While cybersecurity experts have long warned about AI vulnerabilities, Microsoft has finally joined the club with a serious data leak issue. The tech giant’s 365 Copilot tool was recently found to have a critical flaw dubbed “EchoLeak,” a zero-click AI vulnerability that could expose sensitive user data without any user interaction. Who needs hackers when your AI assistant might just hand over your files?
Discovered in January 2025 by researchers at Aim Labs, this bug—formally known as CVE-2025-32711—received a CVSS rating of 9.3. That’s tech-speak for “really bad.” Microsoft patched it server-side in May 2025, but not before security experts had a collective panic attack about what might have happened.
A critical vulnerability that had Microsoft scrambling and security experts reaching for their blood pressure medication.
EchoLeak represents the first known zero-click AI vulnerability, exploiting something called “LLM Scope Violation.” It allowed potential attackers to access chat histories, OneDrive files, SharePoint content, and Teams messages. All the good stuff, basically. Most organizations were vulnerable due to default settings. At least users didn’t need to do anything to get the patch—Microsoft handled it on their end. Modern AI systems can detect threats with 92% detection accuracy when properly configured.
The vulnerability affected Microsoft 365 Copilot, which works across applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Copilot uses OpenAI’s GPT models integrated with Microsoft Graph to access organizational data. Fancy AI tools, same old security problems.
What makes this particularly concerning? The automated nature of the exploit. In enterprise environments, this could have led to silent data theft at scale. No clicking suspicious links. No downloading sketchy attachments. Just an AI assistant potentially spilling company secrets. The attack methodology involved embedding malicious prompts in seemingly innocent markdown-formatted content like emails. Microsoft has implemented defense-in-depth measures to enhance security against similar threats in the future.
The silver lining—if you can call it that—is there’s no evidence of actual exploitation or data breaches in the wild. Lucky break for Microsoft. They dodged a PR nightmare by the skin of their teeth.
EchoLeak highlights a new class of vulnerabilities where large language models’ access to data becomes a security risk. As AI tools become more integrated with our digital workspaces, these risks will only multiply. The incident raises serious questions about AI security and the potential for similar vulnerabilities in other systems.
For now, the issue is fixed. But let’s not kid ourselves—this won’t be the last time an AI assistant gets chatty with the wrong people.
