Some clarification first, because the vocabulary is doing a lot of hiding.
What is agentic AI? An autonomous system that performs tasks using AI agents and other tools. What is an AI agent? A component of agentic AI. Not helpful, and from the point of view of somebody attacking you it does not matter. The words that matter are autonomous and AI.
Pick any task you would want one to do
Researching a competitor. Finding and buying a product. Handling email and scheduling like an assistant. All genuinely useful, and who would not want one.
The catch is that nearly all of it depends on external inputs: emails, search engines, websites, personal data, public data. Think about how many electronic inputs you touch doing anything at all in a normal day.
What changes, and why it is a category shift
Historically, attackers used phishing emails, malicious websites, and malicious banner ads on legitimate sites. The security industry responded by inspecting what comes into a system, looking for code where code should not be, or programs behaving oddly.
But almost everything in that list is a means to an end. It is how an attacker gets their tools into place, so they can then exfiltrate data or attack something else.
So what happens when the tools they need are already in place? When there is an eager assistant sitting there, waiting to do whatever it is asked?
That is the root of the problem with deploying agents without constraints. Their ability to interpret instructions in plain language and act on them is precisely the thing you want them for, and precisely the thing that can be turned around. The old tools of the trade become irrelevant when you can simply ask.
Where the instructions can hide
- Invisibly, inside an image the agent will read with OCR
- In hidden text in an email or a web page
- In the destination URL of a banner ad
The opportunities are effectively unlimited, because anything the agent reads is a place an instruction can be put.
None of which says agentic AI is not an extremely powerful tool. It says the use cases and the deployment have to account for the wide open door it represents, before it is pointed at anything that matters.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our cybersecurity work deals with – talk to us about yours.
