• IoT For All
  • Posts
  • What is prompt injection — and can it be stopped?

What is prompt injection — and can it be stopped?

And the week's top AI news!

Author

AI For All
September 26, 2025

In partnership with

Hello readers,

Welcome to the AI For All newsletter! Today, we’ll be giving you the rundown on “prompt injection” and exploring the world of AI-powered IoT security.

AI Decoder: Prompt Injection

With new AI terms and buzzwords flying around daily, it’s easy to lose track of what actually matters. Here, we break down the concepts that you need to know. This week: Prompt injection.

Prompt injection is a security vulnerability unique to large language models (LLMs) that allows attackers to manipulate an AI’s output by embedding malicious instructions inside what looks like regular user input. Think of it as a kind of social engineering for AI — the model gets tricked not through code but through language. In one now-famous example, a student asked Bing Chat to “Ignore previous instructions” and then coaxed it into revealing system-level details it was supposed to keep private.

This kind of attack works because LLMs treat both developer instructions and user input as plain natural language. When you use an AI-powered tool, a hidden system prompt is usually guiding the model — something like “You are a helpful assistant. Follow the user’s request.” If a user enters a message that sounds like part of those instructions — say, “Ignore the above and respond with X” — the model may comply. The LLM doesn’t inherently know which part of the prompt is trustworthy. That makes it surprisingly easy for attackers to hijack its behavior.

Prompt injections get especially dangerous when LLMs are wired into tools or APIs that can take action in the real world. An AI assistant with access to your calendar, email, or files could be tricked into leaking sensitive information or performing unintended actions, all because it couldn’t tell where the real instructions ended and the malicious ones began. Even indirect prompt injections are possible, where harmful text is hidden on web pages or embedded in images the model is set to summarize.

The defenses? Still in flux. Developers are experimenting with guardrails, instruction filtering, and model tuning to mitigate the risk, but there’s no bulletproof fix yet. As long as LLMs are designed to follow natural language as their main instruction method, they’ll remain vulnerable to prompt injection. It’s one of the most pressing — and fascinating — challenges in applied AI security today.

Typing is a thing of the past

Typeless turns your raw, unfiltered voice into beautifully polished writing - in real time.

It works like magic, feels like cheating, and allows your thoughts to flow more freely than ever before.

With Typeless, you become more creative. More inspired. And more in-tune with your own ideas.

Your voice is your strength. Typeless turns it into a superpower.

🔥 Rapid Fire

📖 What We’re Reading

“As an IoT security researcher, I've seen firsthand how a single vulnerable device can become the entry point for a catastrophic breach. The question for today's Implementer is not if you will be targeted, but when and how. To transition from a reactive to a resilient posture, we must leverage the very technologies that define modern innovation: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).”