DEF CON – Tenet security researchers have demonstrated a novel AI hijacking attack that relies on tools trusted by the agent to deliver malicious instructions.
The Israeli cybersecurity startup, which emerged from stealth mode in June to protect organizations from rogue agents, previously demonstrated how threat actors can poison data fed to AI agents to manipulate their behavior, an action it calls ‘Agentjacking’.
Dubbed Ghostjacking, the newly demonstrated attack builds on the same assumption: an external threat actor is able to plant instructions as text in logs or alerts to turn AI agents rogue.
The underlying issue, it says, is spread widely, as the attack targets three highly trusted platforms: Cloudflare, which routes 20% of all web traffic, Datadog, and Sentry. Cloudflare and Datadog are used by nearly half of Fortune 500 companies each, while Sentry is trusted by close to 4 million developers.
The compromised agent “hijacked the domain on Cloudflare, ran code and stole cloud credentials on Datadog, and turned one AI into an insider that vouched for the attacker to the next on Sentry,” Tenet says.
