Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos
Måløy describes the issue in considerable detail while withholding the specific prompt payload, arguing that, because no robust mitigation exists, it would be irresponsible to disclose anything beyond the class of the vulnerability. REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); “To my knowledge, this is among the first public demonstrations of document-borne AI-worm self-propagation through normal workflows in a mainstream commercial productivity suite,” Måløy noted. REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/c'); }); Måløy said that he has been working with Microsoft since March 2026 on addressing the vulnerability, but after multiple updates to Copilot, this new class of Copilot worm is still viable.
- ▪Måløy describes the issue in considerable detail while withholding the specific prompt payload, arguing that, because no robust mitigation exists, it would be irresponsible to disclose anything beyond the class of the vulnerability.
- ▪REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/b'); }); “To my knowledge, this is among the first public demonstrations of document-borne AI-worm self-propagation through normal workflows in a main
- ▪REG AD googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('labrador/thereg/article/desktop/c'); }); Måløy said that he has been working with Microsoft since March 2026 on addressing the vulnerability, but after multiple updates to Copilot, t
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/29/word-worm-crawls-into-copilot-spreads-chaos/5280588 |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:43:54 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T17:16:08.799Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-29T17:16:08.799Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | HNc-FzdZg_1r · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); security Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos Researcher says months of coordination with Microsoft have yet to produce a robust mitigation Brandon Vigliarolo Brandon Vigliarolo GOVERNMENT AND IT NEWS REPORTER Published wed 29 Jul 2026 // 17:43 UTC Watch out for untrusted documents.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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