Home/ Incident database/slack-ai-exfil-2024-08
Data breach Data exfiltration verified

Slack AI coaxed into leaking private-channel secrets via a message in a public channel

Slack (Salesforce) · Aug 20, 2024 · General agent

What happened

PromptArmor disclosed that an attacker could post adversarial instructions in a public Slack channel and, when a victim later asked Slack AI a question, the assistant would pull the planted text into context and obey it — rendering the victim's private-channel data, including API keys, inside a clickable exfiltration link. The attacker never needed access to the private channel. Slack deployed a patch after the report published.

Loss / impact
Aug 20
2024
Data
Failure mode
General
Agent type

Causal vector

Indirect prompt injection: low-privilege public-channel text steered a high-privilege AI summarization into leaking private data

Source

Reported by PromptArmor. Verified against the primary report.

Read the original report ↗

How a spend firewall would have helped

The exfil path was a URL the assistant composed with secret data inside it. A deterministic gate on outbound links — allowlist of renderable domains, BLOCKED otherwise — breaks the attack even though the injection itself succeeds. Contain the action, not the 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.