Microsoft 365 Copilot Security Concerns and Risks?

What is Microsoft 365 Copilot?

Today, over 37,000 enterprises with almost one million paying customers use Copilot for Microsoft 365 as part of their daily tech stack. Microsoft introduced Microsoft Co-pilot, a new AI solution for business users, in November 2023.

An artificial intelligence function called Microsoft 365 Copilot helps users with monotonous duties including creating papers, summarizing emails, and creating presentations. With its huge language model, GPT-4, it has the best AI technology.
With Copilot, you now have a personal AI assistant integrated into every Microsoft 365 application you use, from Word and Excel to Teams and Outlook. Copilot’s goal is to eliminate the repetitive aspects of an employee’s day so they can increase their productivity and creativity.

Lepide Guide for Microsoft 365 CopilotThis guide will list the steps security teams can take to ensure organizational readiness for Copilot before and after deployment. Download Whitepaper

Benefits Associated with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot offers various benefits that will help in various ways

1. Increased Productivity: By handling tedious tasks for you, Microsoft 365 Copilot can help you save time and effort. It can be used for a variety of tasks, including sending messages, scheduling meetings, formatting data, rewriting sentences, and summarizing content. Copilot increases developers’ productivity by automating tedious coding processes and offering insightful recommendations, freeing them up to concentrate on more complex problem-solving and creative endeavors.
2. Enhanced Creativity: It only takes a few clicks or words to develop content, ideas, and insights using Microsoft 365 Copilot. Document writing, presentation creation, email writing, graphic design, and many other tasks would be aided by this. Copilot has the potential to boost creativity, which will benefit the company.
3. Improved Coding: Copilot’s comprehension of coding patterns and use of best practices contributes to the production of code of superior quality. It can spot any errors, security flaws, and performance problems, resulting in more reliable apps. It takes less time to write new code or edit existing code because of Copilot’s code completion and suggestion features, which speed up the coding process.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Security Concerns

Although Microsoft Copilot can increase end-user productivity, there may be security and privacy risks.

1. Data Security and Privacy: Data accessibility is the initial security issue. Emails, files, communication logs, and internal papers are all accessible to Copilot due to its integration with all other Microsoft 365 services. Sensitive data may be exposed both internally and externally if access restrictions are insufficient if this data is not managed appropriately. This integration also implies that Copilot may become more exploitable if there are any flaws in Microsoft services. The issue is typically more prevalent in larger firms. Upon promotion or departmental change, a user may keep access permissions they no longer require.
2. Reporting Tools: The information required to properly control copilot utilization and reduce the risks involved is frequently absent from Microsoft 365 reporting tools. It appears to be challenging to pinpoint the possible areas of concern in the absence of detailed information about Copilot’s usage.
3. Oversharing Risks: By unintentionally revealing security flaws, Copilot can make it simple for users to find and distribute information that they shouldn’t have access to. Because of Copilot’s robust search features, a user with too many permissions may be able to uncover and distribute private information.
4. Compliance Challenges: It can be challenging to implement typical Microsoft 365 compliance strategies due to the conversational and dynamic nature of Copilot interactions. It becomes a new problem to manage and preserve Copilot-generated data appropriately for corporate, legal, and regulatory purposes.
5. Broad Permissions: Over-permissions are one of Microsoft Copilot’s main issues since they may result in unauthorized data access throughout an organization. Copilot, a generative AI tool, collects data from Microsoft 365, which could lead to vulnerabilities if permissions aren’t properly limited. Permissions that are poorly controlled can lead to broad, frequently unintentional access to private files, such as financial records, intellectual property, and personal data, highlighting the significance of careful data governance.

A Few Examples of Microsoft Copilot Security Risks

Here are a few examples of Microsoft Copilot Security Risks:

1. Injection Attacks: Recently, a study at Black Hat USA demonstrated how the Copilot vulnerability to prompt injections enables attackers to manipulate the tool to search, exfiltrate data, or socially engineer victims. The study compared the attack to remote code execution and demonstrated LOLCopilot, a red-team hacking tool that can change chatbot behavior without detection.
2. The Leak of Congressional Data: Because of security worries about data breaches, the US Congress has prohibited staff members from using Microsoft Copilot. Their main worry is that Copilot might use unapproved cloud services to expose private congressional information.

Is Microsoft 365 Copilot Safe?

All of the data that a single user can access according to their current Microsoft 365 permissions is accessible through Copilot if that user is given Copilot access. If these permissions are not properly controlled, the copilot could expose private data to unapproved individuals in Microsoft 365.

Copilot should only be deployed into environments that are operating on a least privilege basis, and even in those cases the behavior of your users (including their searches within Copilot) need to be monitored to watch out for compromise. This is particularly the case when it comes to privileged users. If these accounts have Copilot access and get compromised, attackers will get an easy route to your sensitive data.

How to Keep Your Data Safe While Using Microsoft 365 Copilot?

A carefully thought-out and implemented Copilot security configuration helps in keeping your Microsoft 365 data under control. In addition to ensuring compliance, this would lower the possibility of data breaches. Identifying sensitive data is one of the steps in creating a strong security framework for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Microsoft 365’s integrated security and compliance tools, like Microsoft Purview and Azure AD, can help you create a thorough and efficient security setup that meets the needs of your company.

1. Identify Sensitive Information: Clearly defining what information is deemed sensitive within the company is the first step. This would include financial data, any other confidential information, and personally identifiable information (PII) or personal health information (PHI). Additionally, working with the legal, compliance, and human resources stakeholders to develop a list of what information is considered sensitive.
2. Review Policies: Verify that your company’s current internal data sharing procedures satisfy its security and regulatory requirements. Determine which user groups and under what circumstances sensitive data should be accessible. Consider implementing least privilege access, which would grant users only the bare minimum of access necessary to perform their jobs. Review your external sharing policies to control how private information is shared with parties outside of your organization. Evaluate if external sharing should be allowed and, if so, what safeguards and restrictions ought to be in place.
3. Classification and Reviewing of Data: Establish a data classification system that organizes information into categories based on its level of sensitivity (public, internal, confidential, and very confidential). This classification system will serve as the foundation for enforcing data protection laws and allocating sensitivity labels. Employees should be trained on the classification system and their responsibilities for handling sensitive data. Review and update your data classification system, sensitivity labels, and access controls often to maintain them up to date and effective. Establish protocols for data retention and disposal so that, when no longer needed, private information can be safely disposed of.
4. Enforce Restrictions: This procedure is thought to be crucial for protecting the data. Use sensitivity labels to limit the production and dissemination of sensitive data. For example, mark highly confidential documents with a label that forbids printing, copying, or distributing. To identify and stop sensitive data sharing based on information type or label, use data loss prevention (DLP) policies.
5. Set up a Pilot Batch: Before implementing your M365 Copilot security configuration for the organization, run a pilot batch with a small number of users. In addition to collecting user input, this pilot will assist you in finding any problems or holes in your configuration. Utilize the pilot’s observations to improve your setup before implementing it throughout the entire organization. Throughout the deployment, give users assistance and training to guarantee smooth adoption.

How Lepide Helps

Lepide Data Security Platforms helps organizations during all stages of Copilot (and other Generative AI tools) deployment. Lepide enables organizations to reduce their overall risk and attack surface, and implement zero trust to ensure that Copilot users are not able to access data they do not need.

Lepide also helps to monitor and analyze employee interactions with Copilot, including “high-risk” Microsoft 365 Copilot searches. Administrators can determine user access levels and identify inactive users with Copilot access enabled, providing an essential layer of oversight to minimize data exposure risks.

Businesses can control access levels, handle inactive users with enabled permissions, and spot high-risk searches using our Copilot security reporting. This guarantees our clients can keep control of their critical data and remain ahead of new threats. See how Lepide can help you by scheduling a demo now!