Playing with Fire: Why are IT professionals wary of running Windows Copilot?

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Integrating Copilot into Windows may be a rash move by Microsoft.

Recently, many people have been discussing a new tool from Microsoft-Windows Copilot, integrated into Windows 11. The tool is a deep integration of the Bing chatbot and was introduced to the public with great excitement in May of this year. However, despite the active discussion from the company, it seems that many, including IT professionals, have not yet heard much about Copilot.

Perhaps the reason is that corporate IT system managers block the implementation of the feature in order to maintain control over the software used. This would be logical if employees were constantly working in the office, but in 2023, many work from home. But what about the home laptops bought during the pandemic to participate in endless video conferences in Microsoft Teams? Are they subject to the same corporate policies?

Every day, more and more users update their personal computers to the latest version of Windows 11 and activate the Copilot icon on the taskbar. At the moment, the feature is still in a preliminary version – in other words, in a public beta version, which indicates that the technology has not yet been fully tested.

According to some electronics retailers, the update has already been completed on about half of the machines. Microsoft plans that by November, with the release of update 23H2, every Windows 11 PC will be able to use the Copilot feature.

At first glance, Windows Copilot looks very similar to the Bing chatbot, which may be the reason for the lack of attention to the new feature on the part of IT specialists. However, unlike Bing, which runs in a sandboxed web browser environment, Copilot can interact with and change Windows system settings. In other words, the chatbot now has access to our computers not only through the browser, which can cause serious security problems.

The developers claim that trained AI models can face security problems, for example, through a request injection Attack (Prompt Injection Attack), which can lead to the disclosure of confidential user data by an attacker. Therefore, it is very important for Microsoft to think carefully about what features should be included in Copilot, and how to do it correctly.

Microsoft is looking to integrate Copilot into Windows as soon as possible, probably aiming to overtake Google. However, the current year has not been a successful one for Microsoft in the direction of security, and there are many questions about how the new feature will affect the security of user data in the future.

 

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AI is coming to Cybersecurity: Meet Microsoft Security Copilot

The innovative tool is designed to strengthen any information security teams, even the most inexperienced ones.

Artificial intelligence technologies are leaping into an increasing number of areas of interaction with computer systems. This time, progressive development has finally arrived in the field of cybersecurity.

So, Microsoft recently announced the beginning of providing early access to its flagship product in the field of cybersecurity — artificial intelligence Security Copilot. This step means the inevitable introduction of Copilot into the line of Microsoft information security solutions.

First announced in March, Security Copilot is built into the Microsoft 365 Defender XDR platform. According to the company, it can save up to 40% of the time of employees engaged in routine tasks in the field of cybersecurity.

In addition to saving time for experienced professionals, Microsoft also positions the tool as a way to improve the skills of employees, providing them with analytical conclusions that they cannot yet make on their own.

It is assumed that less experienced analysts will be able to work more efficiently if Security Copilot provides them with step-by-step instructions on how to respond to incidents. This will help teams work faster when they don't have enough skill.

"Security Copilot can effectively improve the skills of the cybersecurity team, regardless of their experience, save them time and allow them to find things that might have been previously overlooked. This will free up specialists to work on the most important projects, " said Vasu Jakkal, Microsoft's corporate vice president of security.

One of the main features of the tool is the generation of incident reports in natural language. Copilot artificial intelligence analyzes a security incident, identifying key events, and then writes a detailed report that is understandable to the average person. This innovation will save analysts a lot of time without losing the quality of reports.

In addition, Copilot can also create queries in the KQL language to search for threats. Security teams will be able to formulate tasks in natural language, and the tool will be able to create a ready-made query to search for, for example, the latest exploits.

As Jakkal emphasized, the integration of Copilot in Microsoft 365 Defender makes the XDR solution even more powerful and easy to use. The public release date has not yet been announced, but the early access program still has places available for qualified organizations.