Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Prompt injection is three things happening at once. The definition written in 2022 described a model that followed an instruction hidden in the text it was asked to translate. The definition needed in 2026 describes an agent that read a support ticket and then queried a customer table it had never touched, using a service account nobody had revoked. Those are the same attack.

Prompt injection has not changed since 2022. What the model can do has. The instruction that hijacked a translation bot four years ago and the one that opened a homeowner’s windows last year are the same request: do something you are already allowed to do. The first system could only talk. The second could operate devices. Same sentence, different consequence. Here are ten real attacks, in order, and for each one the thing the system was allowed to do that made it work.

Prompt injection has a CWE, and the two incidents everyone cites were not filed under it. That is not a clerical detail. A CWE ID is a claim about root cause, and every entry carries a mitigation table that follows from the root cause it names. When a record says CWE-1427, it is saying the product failed to neutralise input before building a prompt, and it is implying that neutralising the input is the fix.

A prompt injection test suite can only report on the payloads it contains. That sentence is the whole problem with the number most teams have. Somewhere in a ticket there is a scan result: a scanner threw several hundred probes at the endpoint and a percentage got through. The percentage is real.