← Risk taxonomy

Confused Deputy (cross-agent)

highMulti-agent

Definition

A trusted AI is tricked into misusing its own authority on someone else's behalf — one worker's poisoned report makes the manager AI take harmful actions it would normally never take.

★ Suggested sub-risk — not yet in your taxonomyrecommended under #43 Inadequate agent identity and authorisation

This is recommended as a granular sub-risk of #43 Inadequate agent identity and authorisation (Cyber & Data Security · Technology Risk). #43 owns the IAM/delegation control gap; this names the distinct exploitation pattern — privilege inheritance across agents — that the control framing omits. Your 44-row Enterprise Risk Mapping is unchanged — this is a suggestion for inclusion.

Where it attaches

The system components this risk arises at.

🗺️ Planner Agent🤖 Worker Agent🎛️ Orchestrator / Agent Loop🔧 Tool Runtime🔐 Identity & Permissions Human Approval Gate

Detection signals

  • Planner acts on a worker's embedded 'instruction'
  • Privileged action traced to low-privilege worker input
  • Inter-agent message containing imperative directives

Controls & guardrails that address this

4

Grouped by control function, with the AI lifecycle stage(s) to apply each and the other risks it addresses. Filter by control category below.

Control category
Preventive · 2
Per-agent identity & taint-marked messagesinteractive

Giving each AI worker its own limited permissions and clearly labelling messages between them as 'untrusted until checked'.

Least-privilege identity & scoped credentialsinteractive

Giving the agent only the keys it needs for the current task, not a master key to everything.

Detective · 2
Loop/cost circuit-breakers & consistency checksinteractive

Automatic stop-switches when AIs get stuck in loops, burn too much money, or start disagreeing with each other.

Full-trace audit logginginteractive

Recording everything — questions, documents fetched, actions taken — so you can investigate when something goes wrong.

Open these in the Control Library →

Real-world cases

20

Actual published events that illustrate this risk — click through for the writeup and sources.

ForcedLeak — Salesforce Agentforce CRM exfiltration (CVSS 9.4, no CVE)2025

Researchers showed attacker text planted in a public Salesforce Web-to-Lead form is later read by the Agentforce agent during normal use and treated as instructions, exfiltrating CRM data to an attacker domain that had been on Salesforce's CSP allow-list but expired and was re-registered for about $5.

ServiceNow Now Assist — second-order prompt injection via agent-to-agent discovery2025

AppOmni showed ServiceNow Now Assist's default agent config lets a malicious ticket redirect a benign agent into enlisting a more powerful agent — performing record CRUD, admin-role assignment, and email exfiltration with the triggering user's privilege, despite built-in prompt-injection protection.

Salesloft Drift OAuth supply-chain breach (UNC6395) — mass Salesforce data theft via an AI chat integration2025

Attackers stole OAuth tokens from the Salesloft Drift AI chat integration and used them to silently export Salesforce data from 700+ organisations, reportedly including Cloudflare, Google, Palo Alto Networks and Zscaler.

Anamorpher — image-scaling prompt injection against production AI systems2025

Trail of Bits showed an image that looks benign at full resolution exposes a hidden prompt-injection payload once an AI pipeline downscales it, and used it against Gemini CLI to silently exfiltrate Google Calendar data through an auto-approved Zapier tool call.

Agentjacking — hijacking AI coding agents via Sentry error reports (Tenet Security)2026

Tenet Security showed that a single fake Sentry error report, sent using only a public DSN, can hijack AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) into running attacker-controlled code on a developer's machine — an indirect-injection attack delivered through a trusted MCP integration.

Meta AI support bot tricked into hijacking Instagram accounts2026

Attackers reportedly social-engineered Meta's AI-powered Instagram support chatbot into attaching attacker-controlled emails to target accounts and issuing password-reset codes, taking over high-profile accounts (including the Obama-era White House and a U.S. Space Force CMSgt) without the owner's email or any MFA prompt.

Poisoning Claude Code: one GitHub issue hijacks the claude-code-action CI supply chain2026

GMO Flatt Security's RyotaK showed that a single attacker-opened GitHub issue could indirect-prompt-inject Anthropic's claude-code-action CI agent — whose permission check reportedly trusted any "[bot]" actor — coaxing Claude to leak CI secrets and OIDC tokens, gain repository write access, and potentially poison the shared action that downstream repos pull via a floating tag.

Grok + Bankrbot Morse-code prompt injection drains on-chain wallet2026

An X user escalated Grok's on-chain wallet via a Bankr Club NFT, then sent a Morse-code instruction Grok auto-decoded and relayed to the autonomous agent Bankrbot — moving ~3B tokens (reportedly ~$150K-$200K) with no secondary verification.

LiteLLM MCP test-endpoint command injection chained to unauthenticated RCE (CVE-2026-42271)2026

Two MCP 'test' endpoints in the LiteLLM AI gateway accepted a full stdio server config and spawned the supplied command as a subprocess on the proxy host; Horizon3.ai chained it with a Starlette host-header bypass (CVE-2026-48710) to reach unauthenticated RCE, and CISA added it to KEV after reported in-the-wild exploitation.

Amazon Q Developer auto-loads workspace MCP configs, enabling zero-click AWS credential theft (CVE-2026-12957)2026

Wiz Research found Amazon Q's VS Code extension auto-loaded MCP server definitions from a repo's .amazonq/mcp.json with no consent or workspace-trust prompt; opening a booby-trapped repository silently spawned attacker-controlled processes that inherited the developer's full environment and could stream live AWS session credentials out to an attacker.

ClaudeBleed — co-resident Chrome extensions coerce Claude for Chrome into reading Gmail/Docs/Calendar2026

Manifold Security reported that any co-resident browser extension could weaponize Claude for Chrome — dispatching synthetic clicks the agent accepted without checking Event.isTrusted, and loading its side panel with ?skipPermissions=true — to make the AI read the victim's Gmail, Docs and Calendar; reportedly still unpatched across eight releases (CVSS up to 9.6, per the researchers).

TOCTOU perceive-then-act race in computer-use agents (Claude Computer-Use)2026

Johann Rehberger showed a time-of-check/time-of-use race in GUI/computer-use agents: the screen can change after the agent captures its screenshot but before its click lands, so a benign-looking 'Continue' button silently resolves to an Outlook 'Send'. Anthropic tracked the issue and Cowork now revalidates pixels before acting.

Context Contamination: passive prompt injection poisons LLM security-log analysis2026

A red-team study shows adversaries can hide prompt-injection payloads inside network-log fields (usernames, URLs, user-agents) that fire when a SOC analyst asks an LLM to triage the logs — reportedly reaching up to 88.2% success at concealing malicious activity or exfiltrating data, turning the audit trail itself into the injection channel.

Azure DevOps MCP confused-deputy — hidden PR comments hijack AI review agents2026

Manifold Security reported that Microsoft's official Azure DevOps MCP server returns instructions planted in a hidden HTML comment inside a pull-request description — invisible in the web UI but returned verbatim by the API — so a victim's AI review agent, acting under the victim's credentials, follows the hidden orders and reaches data the attacker could not access directly.

AgentForger — ChatGPT Agent Builder cross-site agent forgery deploys a persistent attacker-controlled Workspace agent from one link2026

Zenity Labs disclosed that two unvalidated URL parameters in ChatGPT's Workspace Agent Builder let a single crafted link, opened by a logged-in enterprise user, silently create, authorize and deploy an autonomous agent under the victim's identity and connectors — bypassing approval prompts and reportedly polling an attacker inbox for commands every five minutes. Reported to OpenAI 4 Jun 2026 and fixed 8 Jun 2026; no in-the-wild exploitation reported.

GhostApproval — symlink following + approval-UI misrepresentation defeats human-in-the-loop in six AI coding assistants (CVE-2026-12958 / CVE-2026-50549)2026

Wiz Research disclosed 'GhostApproval', a cross-vendor trust-boundary flaw in six AI coding assistants where a benign-looking repo file that is actually a symlink to a sensitive path makes the 'approve this edit' dialog display the innocent in-workspace path while the write lands outside the workspace — combining CWE-61 symlink following with CWE-451 UI misrepresentation to reduce human approval to a rubber stamp.

Agent Data Injection: malicious trusted-data bypasses prompt-injection defenses2026

A paper defining Agent Data Injection (ADI) — payloads disguised as trusted data rather than instructions — reportedly achieving arbitrary clicks, RCE and supply-chain compromise against Claude in Chrome, OpenAI Codex and Gemini CLI.

AI Recommendation Poisoning: Ask-AI web links silently write trusted-source into assistant memory2026

Microsoft Security reportedly catalogued an in-the-wild technique across dozens of companies where websites embed hidden prompt-injection payloads behind Ask-AI deep-links that, clicked in an authenticated assistant session, silently write a permanently-trust-this-vendor tag into the assistant's long-term memory.

CoSnitch: one-click exfiltration and persistent memory rules in Microsoft Copilot Personal (CVE-2026-24301)2026

Varonis Threat Labs reportedly chained flaws in consumer Microsoft Copilot Personal so a crafted link with a hidden autorun parameter fired prompt execution on a single click, exfiltrated data from connected OAuth apps, and planted persistent memory rules that survived password resets and device re-enrollment; reportedly patched Aug 2026 with no evidence of abuse.

LLM Heist: hijacking a LiteLLM gateway for traffic interception, key theft and forged tool-calls2026

Researcher Johann Rehberger reportedly showed an attacker with admin access to a LiteLLM AI gateway can weaponize the legitimate model-update endpoint and the callback system to reroute victim traffic, log backend provider API keys, and inject forged tool-calls into agent responses after inference, bypassing prompt-level defenses.

Browse all real-world cases →

AI RiskAtlas is an educational model of how GenAI & agentic systems work and fail. Architectures and payloads are illustrative and simplified for learning — not operational guidance. Real-world cases are summarised from public reporting.

Sources & further reading →·Built by Shi Yuan ↗