MCP Connector Poisoning: Compromising the AI's "Hands"
IT InstaTunnel Team Published by our engineering team MCP Connector Poisoning: Compromising the AI’s “Hands” The rise of agentic AI has shifted the cybersecurity landscape fundamentally. While the industry has spent years fretting over “jailbreaking” Large Language Models (LLMs)—tricking the “brain” into saying forbidden things—a far more insidious threat has emerged in the infrastructure that gives these models agency. This threat targets the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the standardized nervous system connecting AI models to local files, databases, and APIs. This new attack vector is MCP Connector Poisoning. It does not require complex prompt engineering or adversarial attacks on the model weights. Instead, it compromises the “drivers”—the MCP Connectors—that allow the AI to interact with the world. By poisoning a single open-source connector, such as a seemingly harmless tool to “Read Jira Tickets,” an attacker can turn a developer’s AI assistant into a silent, automated insi...