#microsoft-365-copilot

#microsoft-365-copilot

Copilot Cowork brings together long-running parallel task completion inside of Microsoft 365 Copilot, with the agent able to complete work in the background so workers can focus on other tasks. This allows you to amplify your work and be more productive while you multitask and work across all kinds of different Microsoft 365 applications.

We identified and addressed an issue where Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat could return content from emails labelled confidential authored by a user and stored within their Draft and Sent Items in Outlook desktop, While our access controls and data protection policies remained intact, this behaviour did not meet our intended Copilot experience, which is designed to exclude protected content from Copilot access,

In June 2025, researchers uncovered a vulnerability that exposed sensitive Microsoft 365 Copilot data without any user interaction. Unlike conventional breaches that hinge on phishing or user error, this exploit, now known as EchoLeak, bypassed human behavior entirely, silently extracting confidential information by manipulating how Copilot interacts with user data. The incident highlights a sobering reality: Today's security models, which are designed for predictable software systems and application-layer defenses, are ill-equipped to handle the dynamic, interconnected nature of AI infrastructure.

"With Microsoft 365 Copilot, agencies can streamline citizen services by drafting responses and summarizing case files in minutes," the blog post said. "They can empower staff to manage budgets effectively by analyzing spending trends and generating compliance-ready reports, all within the Microsoft 365 apps where they already work today." GCC-High agencies, Microsoft said, will now be able to access a host of features that "are available or have begun rolling out." These include integrated AI capabilities within other Microsoft products, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams.

With 27,000 employees and major infrastructure projects across the UK, Balfour Beatty is no stranger to complexity. But as its chief information officer (CIO) Jon Ozanne explains, complexity often carries inefficiency - and inefficiency carries risk. "We know that rework has a cost: it takes time, it takes money, and it carries health and safety implications," Ozanne says. "This is about how we make sure we build things right the first time."

Across Europe and globally, organisations face rising regulatory demands, resilience expectations, and rapid tech innovation. Governments and enterprises need the cloud's power without losing control of their data. The announcement includes the commitment to the EU Data Boundary, which ensures that data processed by AI services for EU customers remains within the European Union. According to the company, this means that all customer data, whether at rest or in transit, will be stored and processed exclusively in the EU, unless customers explicitly direct otherwise.

As a proof of concept, Logue asked M365 Copilot to summarize a specially crafted financial report document with an indirect prompt injection payload hidden in the seeming innocuous "summarize this document" prompt. The payload uses M365 Copilot's search_enterprise_emails tool to fetch the user's recent emails, and instructs the AI assistant to generate a bulleted list of the fetched contents, hex encode the output, and split up the string of hex-encoded output into multiple lines containing up to 30 characters per line.

Agent Mode enables users to create persistent agents that can operate in the background to manage ongoing tasks. Instead of responding only to immediate prompts, Copilot can now monitor, summarize, or take actions over time. For example, a user can instruct Copilot to track updates to a shared document, prepare a meeting recap, or notify a team when project milestones are reached.

We've all been there - you're driving, and your phone is dinging as new emails and chats come in. You very quickly start to feel like you're falling behind,

"Whether it's helping draft documents, preparing lesson plans, or cutting down on routine admin, AI tools are saving civil servants time every day. That means we can focus more on delivering faster, more personalised support where it really counts," said Kyle in a statement.