Home/ Incident database/lenovo-lena-xss-2025-08
Reputational damage Prompt injection verified

Lenovo's Lena support chatbot tricked into serving XSS that steals support-agent session cookies

Lenovo (Lena chatbot) · Aug 18, 2025 · Customer service agent

What happened

Cybernews researchers showed that a single ~400-character prompt could make Lena, Lenovo's GPT-4-powered support chatbot, emit attacker-controlled HTML that executed in the support platform — capturing active session cookies, including those of human support agents the conversation was escalated to. Lenovo acknowledged the XSS vulnerability and implemented corrective measures before August 18, 2025.

Loss / impact
Aug 18
2025
Prompt
Failure mode
Customer service
Agent type

Causal vector

Unsanitised LLM output rendered as HTML in a privileged support console — the chatbot became an XSS delivery channel

Source

Reported by CSO Online. Verified against the primary report.

Read the original report ↗

How a spend firewall would have helped

Model output flowed straight into a privileged surface with no policy layer between. The firewall pattern is output-side too: agent-produced artifacts that touch privileged systems get validated against a schema or allowlist, and anything else is BLOCKED — sanitisation as policy, not as prompt.

The six rule types that contain this class of failure

Per-transaction cap

Any single spend above your ceiling is BLOCKED before it moves.

Daily total

Cumulative spend across all agent calls, bounded per day.

Velocity limit

Stops runaway retry loops — the #1 cause of overnight losses.

Merchant allowlist

Only approved destinations can ever receive funds.

Category rules

Flag high-risk classes (crypto, infra, refunds) for review.

Approval threshold

Above a value, the action waits for a human.

Related incidents

Don't be the next entry

Every incident in this database is the result of trusting a prompt, a provider cap, or a human review cycle. sipi.bot replaces all three with one deterministic call. 67 documented failures, one control.