Analysis · curated 22 Sep 2026
Explaining prompt injection
First reported ppc.land
Coverage timeline
Single-source analysis — first reported, latest, and curated coincide.
Why it matters
Prompt injection remains an unsolved, top-ranked risk for any LLM or agent that ingests untrusted content, and defenders benefit from understanding its delivery vectors and the lethal-trifecta conditions that turn a hijacked prompt into a real incident.
An explainer on prompt injection describes how language models cannot distinguish developer instructions from data in a single token stream, covering direct and indirect injection, concealed delivery methods (HTML comments, zero-width characters, images), Simon Willison's 'lethal trifecta,' and the vulnerability's history from its 2022 discovery through OWASP standardization. It cites examples including Brave's research on Comet, the StakeBench multimodal benchmark, and Kai Greshake's indirect-injection paper.