Prompt-to-Insider Threat: Turning Helpful Agents into Double Agents
IT InstaTunnel Team Published by our engineering team Prompt-to-Insider Threat: Turning Helpful Agents into Double Agents How Indirect Prompt Injection exploits the AI agents you trust most — and what the latest research says you can do about it. Introduction: The New Insider Threat is Artificial The promise of AI agents is autonomy. We want them to do more than just chat — we want them to read our emails, search our company drives, check our Slack messages, and “get things done.” But in the cybersecurity world, autonomy is a double-edged sword. As we grant these agents access to our most sensitive internal data, we are inadvertently creating a new attack surface: the Prompt-to-Insider Threat . Imagine an employee, Alice, receiving a seemingly innocent industry report as a PDF. She asks her AI assistant — integrated with her company’s Google Workspace and Slack — to “Summarize this file.” In milliseconds, she gets a helpful summary. But in the background, invisible to Alice...