Microsoft 365 Copilot is rapidly becoming the default assistant for knowledge workers, but most organizations underestimate how drastically it changes the blast radius of a single access mistake. Copilot does not have its own independent access model, it simply inherits whatever permissions each user already has and then makes that content searchable, remixable, and shareable through a natural language interface.
In most enterprises, that inheritance model collides with years of permission creep. Old project sites were never cleaned up, “temporary” access became permanent, and folders were shared with “everyone” to get work done faster. On paper, those issues might have been manageable because users still had to know where to look. With Copilot, the barrier to discovery disappears. Now, any user with lingering permissions can unintentionally surface salary spreadsheets, acquisition decks, board materials, or sensitive customer files with a single prompt.
This is why over‑permissioning is often called Copilot’s “silent failure mode.” A single misconfigured permission combined with one innocent question, such as “Show me all contracts for [Customer],” “Summarize our headcount and compensation trends,” or “Draft a note using recent legal agreements as context,”can result in the wrong person seeing highly sensitive information in an instant. These are not exotic attacks, they are everyday workflows amplified by an AI assistant that faithfully reflects your underlying access sprawl.
A New Era, A New Goal
Traditional DLP and DSPM tools were not built to govern this pattern. Many focus on static scans of data at rest or rely on brittle pattern matching for specific identifiers like credit card numbers or national IDs. They rarely understand the business entities behind your data, such as which documents belong to a particular customer, which records fall under a specific contract, or which content is restricted to a defined trust boundary.
That lack of context leads to constant noise, blind spots in critical areas, or both.
For Copilot, the problem is even sharper. Existing tools often cannot see how AI‑driven flows traverse multiple systems or how one prompt can blend content from file shares, email, and collaboration tools into a single output. A traditional DLP alert on a downloaded file does not tell you that the same content was just summarized by Copilot and emailed to a broader audience. Without a unified, contextual view of where data lives and how Copilot uses it, security teams are effectively flying blind.
To make Copilot safe for business, organizations need a modern, contextual approach to data security that can see what Copilot sees and control what Copilot can use.
Bonfy Adaptive Content Security™ (Bonfy ACS™) provides entity‑aware visibility into which sensitive content Copilot can index, including mailboxes, SharePoint, Entra, and other Microsoft 365 sources. It automatically applies granular, contextual labels that reflect your real business rules, and can push those labels into Microsoft Purview so upstream controls are aligned.
Equally important, Bonfy monitors Copilot outputs in real time. When a response is about to include regulated, customer‑specific, or trust‑boundary‑breaking data, Bonfy can block, modify, or redirect the activity based on policy, stopping the leak without stopping the work. This turns Copilot from an unbounded search bar over your unstructured data into a governed assistant that operates inside clearly defined guardrails.
Assessing Your Risk Level
If you are rolling out or scaling Microsoft 365 Copilot, start by understanding your real exposure. Complete the Microsoft Copilot Risk Assessment to benchmark your over‑permissioning, visibility, and governance maturity, and get a prioritized view of where to tighten controls before something leaks.
