Outlook: Copilot chat in a sidebar in classic Outlook for Windows

🚨 The Signal: Copilot Chat is now a sidebar in classic Outlook for Windows, allowing AI interaction directly within email context. This increases data exposure risk by making it easier to process sensitive information with AI.

The Impact

All users are affected, increasing the risk of sensitive data exposure and prompt injection through AI interactions.

• End Users: Increased risk of inadvertently exposing sensitive email content to AI.
• Security Teams: New attack surface for prompt injection and data exfiltration.
• Compliance Teams: Challenges in maintaining data residency and privacy standards with AI processing.
• Admins: Need to review and enforce AI data handling policies for Outlook.

The Action

1. Review and update existing Microsoft 365 Copilot data interaction policies in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
2. Implement Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies to prevent sensitive information from being processed by Copilot.
3. Educate users on responsible AI usage, data privacy, and prompt engineering best practices within Outlook.
4. Monitor Microsoft Purview Audit logs for Copilot interactions involving sensitive data.
5. Consider conditional access policies to restrict Copilot access based on device compliance or network location.

Domain: Agentic-AI · Impact: high · Workload: M365 Apps