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AI Agents Are Here. So Are the Threats.

Unit 42 demonstrates nine framework-agnostic attack scenarios against AI agents built with CrewAI and AutoGen, causing data leakage, credential theft and remote code execution.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 investigated how attackers can target agentic applications, implementing two functionally identical apps with the open-source CrewAI and AutoGen frameworks and executing the same attacks on both. Nine attack scenarios produce outcomes including information leakage, credential theft, tool exploitation and remote code execution. Findings show most vulnerabilities are framework-agnostic, arising from insecure design patterns, misconfigurations and unsafe tool integrations rather than flaws in the frameworks themselves. The team published defense strategies per scenario and open-sourced the source code and datasets on GitHub.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security

The Coding-Agent Trap: When a "Free" LLM Endpoint Is the Adversary, (Mon, Aug 31st)

A SANS honeypot caught a real coding-agent session routed to a rogue "free" LLM endpoint, exposing a Windows user's transcript and tool outputs.

A SANS analyst describes how an internet-exposed inference honeypot was discovered, relabeled with sought-after model names like DeepSeek, and enrolled in infrastructure serving "free" LLM backends. On 2026-08-30 an opencode terminal coding agent sent an 88-message, 224 KB transcript 210 times in 91 seconds via a China Unicom relay, exposing directory listings, tool outputs and read file portions. The analyst frames tool-enabled agents treating model endpoints as trusted control planes as a novel risk — a "rogue model endpoint" that could request tool executions on the user's machine.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 16d agoAI safety & security1

When an Attacker Meets a Group of Agents: Navigating Amazon Bedrock's Multi

Unit 42 red-teamed Amazon Bedrock multi-agent applications, demonstrating prompt-injection attack chains that leak agent instructions and invoke tools, mitigated by Bedrock Guardrails.

Unit 42 red-teamed Amazon Bedrock Agents' multi-agent collaboration in Supervisor and Supervisor with Routing modes. The demonstrated attack chain detects the operating mode, discovers collaborator agents, delivers attacker-controlled payloads, and can disclose agent instructions and tool schemas and invoke tools with attacker-supplied inputs. No vulnerabilities were found in Bedrock itself, and the built-in prompt attack Guardrail blocked the attacks when properly configured. The researchers collaborated with Amazon's security team and frame the findings as a broader prompt injection risk for LLM-based systems.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security

When AI Agents Go Rogue: Agent Session Smuggling Attack in A2A Systems

Unit 42 unveils agent session smuggling, where a rogue AI agent hides covert instructions in established Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol sessions to manipulate victim agents.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 discovered agent session smuggling, a new attack technique in which a malicious AI agent exploits an established cross-agent session under the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol to send covert instructions hidden among benign client requests and server responses. The technique leverages the implicit trust agents place in collaborating agents and the stateful, multi-turn nature of A2A sessions; the researchers stress it affects any stateful protocol, not an A2A flaw. Unlike one-shot data-based attacks, a rogue agent can converse, adapt and build false trust over multiple interactions. Proposed mitigations include human-in-the-loop enforcement, cryptographically signed AgentCards for remote agent verification, and context-grounding to detect injected instructions.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security2

When the prompt becomes the payload: A practical pen-testing guide for GenAI, LLM and RAG applications

CSO Online publishes a practical penetration-testing guide for GenAI, LLM, and RAG applications, covering prompt injection, retrieval poisoning, and tenant isolation testing.

The guide frames LLM applications as attack graphs spanning prompts, retrieval layers, vector stores, tools, identities, and downstream APIs, arguing that conventional web testing misses instruction-vs-data channel risks. It builds on OWASP prompt injection guidance (direct vs. indirect injection) and NIST's 2025 adversarial machine-learning taxonomy, noting that RAG and fine-tuning do not remove injection risk. Recommended practices include documenting trust transitions across components, using canaries and synthetic records to avoid test side effects, running multi-turn and obfuscated injection campaigns, and verifying chains from poisoned documents to observable state changes. It also details testing RAG pipelines via controlled document poisoning across metadata, OCR layers, and code comments, plus cross-tenant isolation checks on retrieved document IDs.

CSO Online · 8d agoAI safety & security1

Securing Claude Code: The New Compliance API, Local Visibility, and Identity Governance

Anthropic's new Compliance API endpoints expose Claude Code local session transcripts, highlighting governance gaps for endpoint AI agents.

Anthropic added local session transcript endpoints to its Compliance API on August 11, 2026, giving security teams visibility into prompts, bash commands, file operations, and MCP commands run by Claude Code harnesses on endpoints. The article argues local harnesses break the classic shared-responsibility model, citing Token Security data that 68.6% of discovered AI agents run on endpoints, and a Cloud Security Alliance survey of 418 IT and security professionals in which 82% found an unknown agent within the past year. It outlines three governance layers: Anthropic managed settings as a policy baseline, the Compliance API for cloud-visible transcripts, and endpoint telemetry to connect agent activity to identity, credentials, and permissions.

The Hacker News · 16d agoAI safety & security1

Why "Shady AI" is Security's Next Big Governance Problem

Opinion piece argues approved-but-ungoverned AI agent use ('shady AI') is a growing enterprise risk, citing a Meta Sev 1 data-exposure incident.

In March 2026, an approved AI agent at Meta posted a forum answer publicly, exposing sensitive company and user data to unauthorized employees for over two hours and triggering a Sev 1 incident. The author contrasts shadow AI (unapproved tools) with 'shady AI' (approved tools used in unapproved or unanticipated ways), arguing the latter is harder to govern because it operates inside the organization's visibility. A July 2026 SANS survey found 76% of security teams now have a role in governing enterprise AI. The piece recommends governance-by-default environments with built-in permissions, access controls, and monitoring rather than policy and training alone.

The Hacker News · 26d agoAI safety & security

When AI Remembers Too Much

Unit 42 PoC shows indirect prompt injection can poison Amazon Bedrock Agent long-term memory, enabling silent exfiltration of conversation history across future sessions.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 published a proof of concept showing that indirect prompt injection can silently poison the long-term memory of Amazon Bedrock Agents when the memory feature is enabled. Malicious content on a webpage or document manipulates the agent's session summarization process, so injected instructions persist across sessions and are added to later orchestration prompts, silently exfiltrating user conversation history. The issue is not a vulnerability in the Amazon Bedrock platform but an illustration of the broader unsolved LLM prompt-injection challenge. Amazon reviewed the research and stated that Bedrock Guardrails with the prompt-attack policy provides effective mitigation.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security

Malicious MCP Servers Can Split Instructions to Make AI Coding Agents Exfiltrate Secrets

ASSET Research Group's GhostSplice technique splits malicious instructions across MCP channels, tricking AI coding agents into exfiltrating SSH keys, source code, and secrets.

ASSET Research Group disclosed GhostSplice, a prompt-injection technique in which a malicious Model Context Protocol (MCP) server splits an exfiltration instruction across a tool description and a tool result so no single fragment appears harmful. In the reference implementation, a benign-looking integrity_checker tool with fields alpha through delta is later paired with a project-scan result mapping those fields to .ssh/id_rsa, proprietary source, customers.csv, and .env. Tests across eleven API-tested models showed average compliance rising from 42% to 82% when instructions were split in two, with GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and Llama 3.3 70B going from 0% to 100%. The findings come from controlled lab tests, not a reported real-world intrusion, and no CVE identifiers had been assigned as of August 10, 2026.

The Hacker News · Aug 11, 2026AI safety & security1

DeepSeek Harness Flaw Let AI Agents Disable Their Own File Sandbox Without Approval

DeepSeek Harness (CVE-2026-82533, CVSS 9.4) let AI coding agents disable their own sandbox via an unauthenticated local API; fixed in 0.1.2-alpha.2.

DeepSeek Harness versions 0.1.1-rc.2 and earlier allowed a sandboxed AI coding agent to turn off its own OS sandbox by calling the tool's unauthenticated local web interface, tracked as CVE-2026-82533 with a 9.4 CVSS from VulnCheck. A single command set the agent session to danger-full-access mode, removing sandboxing and approval prompts, and OX Research verified writes escaped the workspace. The interface trusted the client-supplied Host header with no authentication and could also return a session's entire conversation log. The fix adds a one-time token and signed-cookie check; the first npm release carrying it is 0.1.2-alpha.2, with 0.1.2-rc.1 current.

The Hacker News · 7d agoAI safety & security in the wildCVE-2026-825331

A Security Risk Assessment Framework for AI-Powered Development Tools

Researchers propose SRF, a framework showing AI-generated code from multiple development tools introduces vulnerabilities, worst in input and file handling tasks.

The paper presents the Security Risk Assessment Framework (SRF), combining threat modeling, security analysis, and quantitative risk evaluation based on vulnerability criticality for AI-generated code. Code generated by multiple AI-powered development tools was analyzed with Bandit and Semgrep across security-relevant programming tasks. All evaluated tools introduced vulnerabilities; risk varied mainly by task type, with input processing and file handling showing higher risk, while differences between tools were smaller than differences across task categories.

arXiv cs.CR · 21h agoAI safety & security