How we rooted Copilot

Company Secrets and LLMs

• Some recall “early LLMs” as potential goldmines for leaked company documents, but others say they’ve never seen convincing examples and suspect hallucinations instead.
• Debate over how valuable corporate secrets really are: many consider most internal docs “process drivel,” yet acknowledge a small portion (e.g., strategy, upcoming products, material non‑public financial data) can be extremely sensitive and useful to competitors or for insider trading.
• Comments note that organizations overclassify or underclassify documents, that access controls are messy, and that tools like Copilot become de facto internal search because existing search (Outlook/SharePoint) is poor.

What Was Actually “Rooted”

• Consensus: this was a privilege escalation from an unprivileged user to root inside a heavily locked‑down, ephemeral Python sandbox/container used by Copilot.
• No outbound network, no sensitive files, and no obvious container escape path were found; root access only allowed damaging that one sandbox session.

Severity, Defense in Depth, and Bug Bounties

• Some argue “moderate” severity is appropriate: impact confined to a single container, with no demonstrated breakout.
• Others stress modern exploits are chains: gaining root in the container expands the attack surface for future kernel or container escape bugs, so this step is still “real and notable.”
• There is concern that not paying bounties for such steps incentivizes researchers or attackers to sit on them until they can chain them with a breakout.
• A minority says this shouldn’t even be counted as a security issue if root inside the container is explicitly out of scope; others think you’d be “laughed at” for calling a root escalation non‑security.

Microsoft’s Security Posture

• Several commenters are impressed by how locked down the environment was (no useful data, patched breakouts, likely VM isolation under the container).
• Others counter with references to CISA reports criticizing Microsoft’s overall security culture, framing this as an island of competence in a larger “sea of mediocrity.”

LLMs, Tooling, and Safeguards

• Clarification that modern chatbots often orchestrate tools, including code execution in containers; the LLM generates Python, a separate system runs it.
• Discussion that in‑model “safety” (refusals) is weak: repeated interactions can coax the system into performing actions it initially refuses, underscoring that real security must live in hard boundaries on tool calls, not prompts.
• Some note Copilot’s inconsistent willingness to execute code reflects its probabilistic nature rather than a coherent policy.

Free Work, Open Source, and Corporate Benefit

• Strong debate on reporting bugs for free to trillion‑dollar firms and contributing to open source that heavily benefits corporations.
• Viewpoints range from “career/reputation benefits justify it” to “only contribute under copyleft or for human‑centric ‘free software,’ not to enrich mega‑corps.”

Framing and Hype

• Multiple commenters find the title “How we rooted Copilot” misleading; they argue a more accurate description would specify the Python sandbox, emphasizing this as a security non‑event that nonetheless validates sandboxing and defense‑in‑depth.