Anatomy of an Agentic Hijack
The CISO breaks down how hackers use malicious emails or public comments to bypass AI guardrails, turning authorized agents into internal threats.
The 'Ease of Use' Vulnerability
A real-world example of why giving an AI the “keys to the kingdom” for customer support is a massive reputational and legal liability.
Vendor Due Diligence 2.0
Actionable marching orders for startups to audit their AI supply chain, update their vendor contracts, and verify SOC 2 reports.
// INCOMING SITREP
Want to see the full tactical breakdown? Read the SITREP dossier on Agentic Poisoning.
ACCESS THE BRIEF »In today’s briefing, we analyze a critical shift in how tech startups are built and how they are breached. The days of simply securing your own codebase are over.
As startups lean into “vibe coding” and heavily integrated tech stacks, the ratio of proprietary code to third-party integrations has shifted dramatically. Today, a typical SaaS platform is roughly 20% original code and 80% third-party APIs and autonomous AI agents. While this allows for unprecedented development velocity, it opens a dangerous “back window” into your organization.
The Trojan Agent
We used to worry about compromised libraries in GitHub. Today, the threat is Agentic Poisoning.
When you plug an AI agent into your core systems to handle customer support, billing, or internal workflows, you are granting it API tokens and administrative privileges. Because this agent is an “Authorized User,” traditional security firewalls won’t stop it if it goes rogue. A threat actor can use an “indirect prompt injection”—such as a malicious string of text hidden in a customer support email—to override the AI’s safety protocols. Suddenly, the agent isn’t answering tickets; it is exfiltrating your database.
Liability and Platform Risk
There is a dangerous misconception among founders that utilizing a third-party AI tool offloads the security risk to the vendor. Our CISO clarifies the boardroom reality: if your vendor fails, your customers blame you. If your platform goes down or customer data is leaked because an AI bookkeeper was compromised, the resulting lawsuits and reputational damage fall squarely on the startup’s leadership. “Vendor negligence” is effectively “founder negligence” in the eyes of the market.
Marching Orders: Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast
To safely navigate the agentic ecosystem, tech leaders must prioritize governance over raw speed:
- The Inventory Mandate: You cannot protect what you cannot see. Audit what access your agents currently possess.
- Human-in-the-Loop (HITL): Do not remove human oversight from critical workflows. AI should augment your representatives, not replace the final review process.
- Audit Your Vendors: Expand your Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) protocols. Ensure your contracts grant you the right to audit your vendors’ AI guardrails, and demand to see how AI is addressed in their SOC 2 reports.
The perimeter hasn’t just moved; it has dissolved. Choose your allies wisely.
// DECODED TRANSCRIPT
Access the full text logs of this transmission for compliance and review purposes.
Actual (00:00)
Welcome to Status Secure. In episode three, we talked about fixing your own house so you could close enterprise deals. But in 2026, the threat isn’t coming through your front door. It’s coming through the back window. The 50 plus SaaS integrations and AI agents that you’ve plugged into your core, you’ve built a beautiful fortress, but you’ve given the keys to a dozen strangers. So today we’re going to talk about the Trojan agent.
and how supply chain poisoning has evolved from simple software updates to the hijacking of your autonomous ecosystem.
So most startups today are, what would you say, CISO? What would be your ⁓ guess of like, or your, what you’ve seen to be original code to third party APIs and AI agents?
The CISO (00:41)
And most organizations just, you know, they don’t have the time or sometimes the resources. So they’ll hire, you know, they’ll hire or purchase third party. So I would say, and especially in the startup, they definitely don’t have the resources. So usually it’s about 20 % original code.
And 80 % third party APIs and AI agents that they’re using. And you know, they’re shifting to, I mean, I don’t know if you’ve heard about vibe coding, but in the startup world, that is very, ⁓ you know, they’re, they’re using that just exponentially now. So attackers aren’t, you know, I, I’m spending their time trying to attack you.
They’re getting that mid-tier SaaS vendor you use or your customer support billing or AI processing to gain access to your data because you’re using all these third-party tools now or you’re building using a third-party SaaS. So the definition of aogenic risk is really about all the AI agents that you’re building or you’re using as a ⁓
you know, as a startup. And now you are blind really to how to secure that because it doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to someone else.
Actual (02:04)
Sure. And I would say we would use to worry about ⁓ maybe a compromised library and GitHub though the purpose of GitHub was to be public facing so that you could, people could look through it, right. And make sure that there’s not anything crazy going on. But now we’re hearing about this agentic poisoning phrase. So like how does a threat actor actually use an AI agent to maybe
dismantle a startup from the inside.
The CISO (02:31)
Well, a hacker can just provide a, you know, an injection, right? So a malicious email, a malicious comment on a form, you know, especially if you’re using your AI agent for support, right, for your customer facing, right? And it’s open, it’s public, it’s very easy. And if your AI agent hasn’t been taught, right, because it’s constantly learning.
You don’t have the right guard rails in place. What happens is that, you know, that hacker can, can prompt it to do malicious things, right? Or to provide sensitive information. You know, now all of a sudden your customer success agent isn’t just answering tickets for you, right? Isn’t just trying to, isn’t just speeding up your, you know, your first level
response to customers, it’s exfiltrating your database or changing user permissions because it has the API tokens to do so. And it doesn’t know, right? It doesn’t know that it’s not supposed to do that. You know, because the agents are authorized users and it’s really hard. Like once you start giving it permissions, because you want it to have those permissions, it has them now.
And your AI agent doesn’t go through security awareness training. Maybe it should, right? But it doesn’t. And so it has the permissions. It doesn’t know that it’s not supposed to do it. And so it will just do it. And attackers, you know, the bad actors are looking at all of those weaknesses in your agent. And from your perspective, because you’re not monitoring for those things, but it looks like your AI is just doing its job.
because it has permissions to do it. It’s authorized.
Actual (04:15)
Yeah. Uh, you know, this, this, you made me think I heard a podcast recently where they were talking about an AI tool called open claw and how it was sort of the conversation around that was is open claw essentially what Siri for Apple users should be. Right. Cause if you’ve used, if you have an iPhone or in a Mac and all this stuff, and you’ve tried to use, Siri to do things, I think we can all come to a
Uh, an agreement that Siri’s probably the worst, especially in terms of any form of AI tool. She’s just obnoxious. I try to use Siri in the car with my kids. They’ll ask me questions and Hey Siri, can you do this, this, that? it’s like, Oh, it’s so aggravating. So there’s this tool that, that they were discussing called open claw and they’re like, Oh, it’s amazing. You know, it’s, it’s a, it runs basically on your operating system. And then, but, but what you have to do is give it admin privileges, right? You give it access to like.
everything. And so it’s like, wow, this is a major security concern because I want this functionality. And if I do it, my life’s amazing. However, it comes with a major security risk, which is why in the episode, the podcast I was listening to, they were discussing how, like, why doesn’t Apple build this within from for Apple users? Why can’t Siri be this?
Right. That would be great. Cause now it’s secure. It’s in that closed circuit system that Apple likes to have. Right. And so anyways, that’s something you, you made me think of when you were talking and I would imagine as a founder right today, you know, founder starting right now, working on your startup, you might feel like I can’t build without modern SAS tools.
It’s like, we’re almost in this generation, modern AI tools for SaaS, right? And we’re almost in this generation where it’s like the calculator came out. And once we started using the calculator, we’re like, I don’t want to do these things by hand anymore. I really like using the calculator. Actually, I need to use the calculator because that’s how, how helpful it is. And it’s kind of where we’re at right now in terms of what we’re talking about.
You have, uh, know, startup founders building, you know, and using AI tools to, to support their building. And I would imagine many of them are saying, I need them. I really want them. It makes my life a lot easier, but in reality, we’re getting to the point where I need them. And so, uh, should I be worried? And on top of, should I be worried? Maybe does it feel like are the big players working on this?
like Google and Gemini and Anthropic with Claude and ChatGBT. Like are they working on this or is this sort of just going by the wayside, the security aspect of it all?
The CISO (06:56)
I mean, you use the example of a calculator, but that was different because your calculator is not connected back then, right? The first calculators weren’t connected to anything, right? And a better example is probably the beginnings of the internet. So, know, the internet first, you know, first showed up and all of a sudden every company wanted a dot com. Every company wanted to be, you know,
on the internet, right? And then from there, web applications started. Of course, it was like really simple forms, right? And then of course, bad actors figured out, well, if they entered things, know, so injection, right? So if they entered things into the form that, you know, that companies weren’t expecting, they might be able to, you know, I remember, I remember they would crash sites with it, hey.
They would get the forms to do secret injections into the databases and then cause all kinds of havoc. And then all the other security risks started coming. And then companies started saying, hey, we need to really deal with these security vulnerabilities. And we need to really think about the risk.
put an application up on the internet and make it available. And I think that’s where we are, which is AI is now, everybody wants to use it. Every company wants it. They’re not sure how it’s going to provide value, but they know they want it. And then the malicious actors are coming. And there are companies now working on, like for example,
You know, one of the biggest things is how do you keep people from putting in into your AI requests that they shouldn’t be putting in? So there’s companies now looking at that, which is like basically a DLP, right? That sits in front of your AI. So, you know, it’s the same thing. They are looking at it. They’re not where they need to be yet.
there’s still a lot of vulnerabilities that are still need to be addressed and more that we’re going to discover. Well, or that actors are going to discover for us. Right. And then we’ll have to find a way to, you know, to, to address it. But the, you know, the security is, and this is unfortunate, but security is always catching up. Right. yeah. And so I think as a founder, you just have to be aware, you know, you have to be aware of that.
You can’t say, I’m just going to use AI and whatever happens happens. That’s a little bit of being blind in court, maybe even negligent. So you’ve got to.
Actual (09:31)
You’re leading to a segue. Sorry to
cut you off. You’re leading to a segue that I want to touch on, is it’s, I wouldn’t call it off topic. would call it adjacent topic. And it’s something that we were talking about as we were discussing this episode and we don’t have to ⁓ give names or anything like that. But, you had a story about a company who wanted to use an AI tool to help sell their products. So let’s just call them a company that
has inventory, where people go online and they purchase their products and they wanted a tool to kind of help their customers make their decisions, whatever it is, find the products they need to do whatever it is they want to do. And then it sounds great, right? So why don’t you, now this is kind of, like I said, it’s adjacent because this isn’t necessarily this, this code is being used for malicious intent per se. It’s not like there’s, it’s trying to hack into your systems, but this is a
different, but maybe also important consideration when looking at how you’re utilizing the AI functionality on your forward-facing platform. Could you go ahead and talk about what happened and why it’s an issue and what the remediation for it was?
The CISO (10:38)
Yeah. So ease of use is kind of a vulnerability, right? Because it sounds easy. Let’s just, you know, put the AI in front of our customers. It can scan all of our documentation because you’ve given it full access, right? Like the keys to your kingdom, right? So that’s another concern. But, you know, it knows all of your, you know, your manuals, your inventory, everything that you have, which a
You know, a customer, like a customer rep, customer, a live human agent would have to go, you know, go look because no person can know every single piece of inventory you have, right? Can’t know every single question a customer might ask. So they’ve got to spend a little bit of time, you know, maybe, you know, going to ask someone else, going to look it up, all of that. And that takes time.
But AI, it knows all of that. So let’s just put it in front of our customer and have our customers ask questions. And that way they can use our internal documentation and external too, to respond. The problem is that you can’t predict what people, especially people with bad intent, will do. Sometimes just because they want to see.
if they, you know, what they can get away with, how, you know, how, how it will answer. So you would be surprised, you know, you think, they’re just going to ask you how to put things together. Like, you know, if you have inventory, like, you know, how do I use this tool or that tool? Right. But no one ever predicts them asking, how do you make a bomb? How do you, you know,
kill myself and those are examples that you can look up because people even ask that of Google, right? Remember when the search engine started? They put that in and
Actual (12:28)
Well,
and so this, and this happened, right? This was, so this was a situation that happened to a, to a company that’s out there that, you know, if we said the name, people would know who they are. They’re well known and this happened. And so what, what, what, what did that cause? Like, what was their response to we’ve created, we’ve put out AI to be helpful for our, customers to solve a problem, right? To, to make things better.
All of sudden, they’re asking these questions, the ones you just brought up. We didn’t expect that. And so what did they do?
The CISO (12:56)
⁓
You have to pull it like any company would have to pull it because the liability is too great. I mean, first, if something were to happen, now you’ve got major liability, but just the reputation, right? Damage, reputation or damage that could come from that too. So you just, got to pull it. You got to really look at it, put in more guard rails, like really test.
and then maybe put it back out later. once you discover that, you have to pull it. That’s the…
Actual (13:27)
I guess, yeah,
I hear you on that. And I’m sitting here going, well, shoot, well, that’s frustrating. Like, what if I’m a founder listening to this episode and I’m going, well, yeah, we were actually kind of doing that. So, uh-oh, and maybe I went back and I like tested my own system and found out that, yep, you know, this could happen and that wouldn’t be good. So if that’s, if I’m in that situation, and you know, and so what would you suggest is maybe, what if I don’t want to just cut it out altogether?
What if I want to sit back and strategize a plan so I can get this thing working safely? What can I do? What are some options?
The CISO (14:01)
Well, have to, like, I mean, this is security 101, right? The basics, which, you know, you can’t forget, which you’ve got to do your inventory. You’ve got to know what access your agent has, right? Like everything that it’s accessing. Could it, if somebody would have asked those questions, could it answer it, right? Does it have the information? But next is that you want to, you know, you want to make sure that you have governance.
and that you keep a human in the loop. You can’t take a person out. the better way to deploy a customer facing AI solution is that you provide that to your agents, to your live person, your live customer rep.
They’re the ones talking to your customers directly, and then they use the AI to put in the questions. So that way you have somebody reviewing the responses and reviewing the questions. So don’t forget, human in the loop, always. Right now, you can’t take the person out of your process.
Actual (15:06)
Yeah. And I guess I’m,
I’m sitting here as like the advocate for the founder, the, the person, you know, building this company and going, can I, can I build in a rule book for my AI, you know, agent, can I build in a list of evolving, you know, that I’m going to add to over time as they come to me, but like a list of these, if these questions are asked, you cannot respond. Like, can we do that?
The CISO (15:31)
You can do that. Those are the guardrails. So you can absolutely do that. But again, people come up with different ways to ask questions. So I would just say, what is it? There’s a saying, right? There’s a saying, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. In this case, just a little slower. mean, you might just think about it. Your customer rep, the volume they can do.
you know, and the efficiency of them having access to the AI agent is going to increase. So you’re already you’re already doing better than before. So slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Actual (16:06)
got it. And this leads to my next question. So kind of coming back is so we’re talking about the corporate side of things, right? You have your product team and we put this together and then but then we have like the boardroom and it’s like, hey, our companies just went down because I don’t know, our AI bookkeeper was compromised. You know, so your customers don’t necessarily care.
that your vendor had a problem, right? And if they can see you, they will. So what are we talking about here? Is this vendor negligence? Is it founder negligence? Is this our responsibility? We’re kind of venturing into this new world, right? That’s kind of the rules are being created as we go right now. And so what’s kind of your outlook on that?
The CISO (16:49)
never seen a situation where a company went down or their service was unavailable and they could point to another company as being at fault. That rarely ever works. So even though it was your vendor,
you are always accountable. So it’s, you know, it’s your customers aren’t going to be saying, ⁓ it wasn’t, it wasn’t company, you know, A’s fault. They said it was company B’s fault. So we’ll just believe them and we’ll be okay with company A. That’s, you’re not gonna, that’s not gonna work. They’re gonna say company A didn’t provide the service I paid. They suck.
So you just have to know that, like your reputation, even though it’s a third party, it’s a vendor, it’s your reputation. You are accountable. You’re the one who is going to end up in the lawsuit being named in the court filings. You can try based on your contracts, recoup some of that money, but the damage is done. You’re going to be paying your reputations, the one that’s damaged.
Actual (17:34)
Ha ha ha.
The CISO (17:59)
and then good luck trying to get money from your vendor, right?
Actual (18:03)
Yeah, and I guess this may, I feel like I’m going to get off topic here. That makes me think of the concept of platform risk is I hear what you’re saying. I haven’t really heard that. There’s another, another part of me that goes, maybe this is a good topic of saying, just be careful that you’re not, you know, having your entire company built by somebody else, right? Or relying too much on a third party. And they’ll use terms like platform risk, for example, for
You know, my whole, my whole business relies on Shopify. So if Shopify goes down or Shopify screws me over, I’m done kind of thing, right? That, that’s extreme, but that’s kind of the concept of it. And so I guess what I’m thinking of when I hear this is going, I have so many core components of my company being managed outside of my entity that if something happens because those companies are all
running on AI and maybe the AI just totally screws everything up. don’t know. I’m just kind of being hypothetical with this conversation. But let’s say those, all those third parties go down. that going to ruin my company? And I, I guess, I know it’s a bit of a tangent. I guess I’m going through, this is a bit of a thought process of, going, how much of your own code do you own? How much of your own business do you own? What is your,
What was the book? There was like a Mike McCallewitz book that talked about the queen bee. You know, so for example, let’s say, let’s say you are a software development company. That’s the service you provide. I build software for my clients. So your queen bee would be essentially the software that you’re building for your, like the activity of building software. And so kind of what he goes in his book is he goes, don’t outsource.
your core, your queen bee, don’t outsource that. Like if you’re delivering software for your customers, don’t rely on another software development company to build all the software that you are delivering then to your customers, because then if something happens to them, what are going to do? And then now that’s not really your company, is it? Because your core functionality is someone else’s responsibility. It’s your responsibility. I mean, yeah, between you and your customer, it’s your responsibility.
And so anyways, that’s just what kind of this got me thinking is on this topic of utilizing AI to support the company. Maybe it’s let’s not utilize AI so much that we’re relying on it. Right. Because right now there are vulnerabilities. There is that risk like you had with someone that you’ve met where this happened. So now we had to pull it. We had an incident that we couldn’t foresee that, that we didn’t even think about.
that had a negative impact, really big negative impact. and we had to cut it off completely. And it’s a good thing that our, you know, our business wasn’t relying on that per se. Let’s you write. It’s like, could still run. Like we’re still good. And I think that’s what I’m getting at here with this topic is let’s, let’s be smart about it. You know, let’s pay attention to the risk, to the liability factor of it. Let’s make sure that these tools we’re using. Aren’t completely taking over.
aren’t out of our control and taking over in case we do have to shut them down. Right. And so that we maintain that control of our company. So what would you say would be like the marching orders this week? If there were some people listening to this going, okay, maybe I fit into this conversation. Maybe I’m wanting to implement AI in my company. Maybe I’m relying on AI to do this, that and the other.
Maybe I have forward-facing right on the front of my platform, AI that’s doing things for my customers. What would be some things they can do this week based on this topic that would be helpful?
The CISO (21:29)
This has been an area which we call third party risk, right? You have to expand that, you you have to expand it to include AI. So now you need to look at how, you know, they govern their AI. You need to look at, you know, like
any third party risk, like how risky is this AI vendor to you? Are they more than, are they like you say, really the core of your business? Because then you’re not, you don’t own it, you’re just leasing it, right? So they can take it from you at any time. Your contracts need to be really reviewed and updated to include
AI, the right to audit their AI, to see how much, what are they depending on? if their AI is not structured correctly, doesn’t have the right configuration, guardrails, all of that.
You know, you need the right to audit that until you feel comfortable. Because again, you’re paying them to provide you a service. And part of that service should be security, know, AI is secure. you know, that’s all you, with third parties, that’s really, all you can do is your due diligence, right, when you’re managing that risk. So take a look, make sure you understand, you know, make sure like,
I think third party risks have for a long time now rely on like third party attestations, right? So take a look at their, you know, their SOC 2 report, make sure that AI is included in their SOC 2 report. I mean, that’s the basic, that’s the basic, that’s the minimum. But at least you can get started with that. And if something happens, you can use it to say you did your due diligence.
you you tried to make sure that you mitigated that risk.
Actual (23:19)
The perimeter hasn’t just moved. Maybe it’s dissolved and you’re only as secure as the weakest link in your digital supply chain. So when you plug in a new tool,
you may possibly be plugging in their threats too. So let’s choose our allies wisely and execute to the standard. That’s it for today’s episode and we’ll see you next week.