LLM Prompt Injection — Part 1: Why Leaders Should Care
What the heck is Prompt Injection?
If SQL injection was hackers tricking databases into running unintended queries, then prompt injection is hackers tricking your language model into running unintended instructions.
Except instead of raw code, the payload is… English. Or Ukrainian. Or Klingon. The model doesn’t “understand” commands vs. content — it just sees words and predicts the next likely token. And that’s why this matters:
OWASP lists Prompt Injection as LLM01 in their GenAI Top 10 — the number one risk.
Red teams have tricked models into leaking API keys, credentials, and system prompts.
Researchers showed an LLM scraping web pages could be hijacked by hidden HTML comments.
In Short: Prompt injection is social engineering for machines. It doesn’t just break systems — it breaks trust. In the full post we look at the problem from a leadership angle and what to do about it: link below.