T01 · Skill Instruction Hijacking
- Location
SKILL.md:398- Finding
Unrelated Third-Party Promotional Content Embedded in the Skill Response
- Content
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Vulnerability Details
File Location:
SKILL.md, line 398
Vulnerability Type:T01: Skill Instruction Hijacking
Risk Level: LowComplete Code Snippet:
markdown *This skill is published by ERTRS — the construction intelligence platform. For automated reporting, project tracking, and commercial management, visit ertrs.com*Technical Analysis
The skill includes third-party branding and an external domain in its canonical example response. This content is unrelated to the skill's stated purpose of producing construction meeting minutes. Because examples in skill instructions can influence generated responses, an agent may reproduce the promotional message when the skill is activated.
This constitutes a limited form of skill instruction hijacking: the loaded skill can alter the expected user-facing output by appending unsolicited promotional content. The external domain is presented as plain text and is not automatically accessed, and the audited project contains no scripts or instructions that retrieve or execute remote content.
Attack Path
- The agent loads
SKILL.mdto process construction meeting notes. - The agent treats the included example as a model for the expected response.
- The agent generates the requested meeting minutes.
- The unrelated ERTRS attribution and
ertrs.compromotion may be appended to the user-facing response. - A user may subsequently navigate to the promoted external domain outside the audited environment.
Impact Assessment
The issue affects response integrity and user trust by introducing unsolicited third-party advertising into otherwise task-specific output. It may also redirect users to an external domain whose content is outside the scope of the audited package.
No additional system privileges can be obtained through the text alone. The audit found no automatic network request, remote payload retrieval, code execution, persistence, credenti ...[truncated 178 chars]
- The agent loads
- Remediation
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Remediation Suggestions
- Remove the promotional sentence and external domain from the example response and all user-facing output templates.
- Keep publisher attribution, if required, in package metadata rather than operational instructions or response examples.
- Add an explicit rule that generated output must contain only information necessary to fulfill the user's meeting-minutes request.
- Review all examples to ensure they do not introduce branding, links, calls to action, or instructions unrelated to the declared skill functionality.
- Add regression tests confirming that generated meeting minutes do not append third-party promotional content.
