The adoption of AI agents at scale promises a slew of new benefits for business leaders: elevated workforces, simplified workflows, reduced costs and increased operational efficiency, and more. However, despite the benefits promised to enterprises, their CISOs are increasingly aware that these benefits come at the cost of an expanded attack surface for threat actors. In fact, many of these emerging threats feel familiar to, and just as frightening as, traditional horror movie genres.

Emerging Genres of Cyber Horror

These threats can take the form of anything from a psychological thriller, where security teams are challenged to differentiate between the actions of human and machine and navigate interacting with a human-like force that could be acting maliciously, to a zombie apocalypse scenario, where a singular, mindless and rogue AI agent replicates its errors, infects systems at scale and sows widespread chaos across a network.

They could even take the likeness of a paranormal encounter, where threats like character injection attacks remain entirely invisible to the naked eye while launching malicious actions throughout AI systems without human awareness. Or even a traditional slasher film, where one compromised AI agent targets business functions one by one by destroying mission critical data, sharing unauthorized communications, and more.

No matter the trope, the adoption of AI agents in the enterprise is creating new terrors for business leaders, and as AI-powered technologies continue to advance, it’s getting more and more difficult for enterprises to maintain their survival without prioritizing new ways to stay ahead of these threats. With this in mind, there are key attack tactics that CISOs and every SOC should remain most alert to.

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28 Days (or Weeks) Later: The AI Zombie Apocalypse

A singular autonomous agent with malicious intentions can infect an entire digital workforce. If operating without human oversight, it’s possible for one rogue agent to wreak havoc across an entire digital landscape by interacting with multiple critical systems, ultimately spreading its “infected” programming and making it harder and harder for security teams to contain and ever-spreading threat.

Paranormal Activity: The Invisible Threats

Some of the most dangerous attack tactics can remain unseen to even the best human security teams as threat actors learn to manipulate AI behavior. By injecting invisible characters into hidden tool descriptions or prompts, attackers can insert malicious instructions that cause AI agents to perform unauthorized actions (like data leaks or interacting with unauthorized tools or networks) while maintaining the illusion of normal function. However, the results of letting these threats remain undetected only increases its potential to do irreversible damage and haunt a business long-term.

The Thing: Identity Security Meets New Challenges

The influx of digital workforces is creating a slew of new nightmares in the realm of identity management. Much like the scientists in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” security teams are being challenged to identify and track the actions of potentially malicious agents that look and act just like trusted team members. As these tools can behave with the same permissions as human users, their access to sensitive data and user credentials can create wide accountability gaps and opportunities for harm.

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A Nightmare on CISO Street

Despite the ever-growing list of threats to the enterprise created by the adoption of AI agents, there are a few cyber threats in particular that CISOs would rank as their top concerns.

As rogue agents can misuse tools, conduct financial transactions entirely unsupervised and take advantage of their autonomy in other potentially damaging ways, CISOs find terror in situations without least privilege or adequate sandboxing in place to contain these threats. As citizen adoption progresses as quickly as enterprise adoption, CISOs shudder at the thought of hidden pilots and the rise of shadow IT within their network, and of working in environments without the proper visibility required to monitor connected AI tools. They also recoil at the thought of LLMs leaking critical business information to unverified sources due to a lack of adequate guardrails and runtime monitoring and are fighting an uphill battle of encouraging widespread tech adoption while mitigating the potential security potholes such rapid adoption can create. However, these threats aren’t only contained to their nightmares, and there are already real-world examples of these threats taking hold.

The Haunting: Examples of Real-World AI Vulnerabilities

Even the largest enterprises are encountering security challenges as a direct result of their adoption of agentic AI tools. In fact, Salesforce’s AgentForce AI integration was recently introduced and initially embedded with a critical vulnerability dubbed ForcedLeak. Discovered by threat researchers at Noma Security, the flaw gave attackers the ability to inject malicious prompt instructions into user inputs that could allow them to manipulate AI agent behavior, instructing the digital tools to leak customer information, authentication tokens, internal documents and other sensitive information. By weaponizing the AI’s own language model against itself, attackers could exploit the tool in ways that could lead enterprises to face issues with compliance violations, data leaks and ultimately long-term reputational damage.

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Let the Right One In: Risks of Blind Trust in AI

Without continuous visibility and identity verification tactics in place, enterprises are setting themselves up for new nightmares. In fact, rapidly adopting new technologies without completing a thorough assessment of their potential security implications is like having an open-door policy during a zombie takeover, it’s quite simply not a wise choice for any individual or business hoping to survive long-term. Whether a Fortune 500 or a brand-new start up, any organization choosing to leverage agentic AI in its operations must take the need for robust security operations seriously.

To ensure the robust security measures and guardrails necessary to contain the potential risks associated with agentic AI, enterprises should take key steps including registering and keeping a real-time inventory of all AI systems connected to their networks, monitor runtime behavior, and implement measures like sandboxing or least privilege. Above all, enterprises should ensure that every employee, at every level, is educated around the risks of invisible threats and best cyber hygiene practices for the AI era. These cyber nightmares are already here. What is your company doing to protect itself from the next era of AI threats?

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