Multi-Agent Infection Chains: The "Viral" Prompt and the Dawn of the AI Worm
IT InstaTunnel Team Published by our engineering team Multi-Agent Infection Chains: The “Viral” Prompt and the Dawn of the AI Worm In the late 1980s, the Morris Worm effectively paralyzed the nascent internet by exploiting vulnerabilities in Unix systems—crashing roughly 10% of all connected machines at the time. Fast forward to 2026, and we are witnessing the spiritual successor to that chaos: Multi-Agent Infection Chains (MAIC). As enterprises shift from simple chatbots to complex, autonomous multi-agent ecosystems, a new and terrifying vulnerability has emerged. It isn’t a bug in the code—it’s a flaw in the very logic of how AI agents interact. This is the era of the “Viral” Prompt: a malicious instruction that doesn’t just hijack one AI, but teaches it how to infect its “colleagues.” What is a Multi-Agent Infection Chain? A Multi-Agent Infection Chain occurs when a malicious prompt is designed to self-replicate across interconnected AI systems. Unlike traditional prompt injec...