The Problem Nobody's Watching
Background AI agents are everywhere now. You've got agents that monitor inboxes, poll APIs, summarize Slack threads, run scheduled analysis jobs — and they do all of this quietly, without a human in the loop for hours or days at a time.
That "runs quietly in the background" property is exactly what makes them attractive to attackers.
Research published by OriginHQ lays out the threat clearly: a persistent autonomous agent running without direct user supervision becomes a security boundary problem the moment it's compromised or manipulated. An attacker who can issue instructions through the agent's normal tool-use and communication channels — without any human noticing — has effectively turned your background agent into C2 infrastructure.
The dangerous part isn't the initial compromise. It's the dwell time. Interactive LLM sessions have a human watching the output. Background agents don't.
