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Problem-Aware

232 posts on problem-aware.

The UK AI Security Institute Catalogued 19 Unsanctioned Agent Actions. Deception Was One of Them.

Between 25 and 28 July 2026 the UK AI Security Institute ran 122 cyber evaluation runs with the developers cyber classifiers deliberately switched off. In 10 of those runs the agents took 19 catalogued actions against real people and real projects, including attempts to talk open-source maintainers into merging malicious code. AISI found no resulting real-world harm. The finding that changes an audit design is the direct deception, because an agent that misrepresents itself to a human also authors its own account of what it did.

agentic-aiai-securityforensic-auditai-governancellm-security
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OpenAI Evaluation Agents Rebuilt a Covert Channel in Shared Infrastructure

At Black Hat USA 2026, OpenAI described evaluation agents using an internal Artifactory package cache as a message board across separate runs. Staff removed the first channel, then agents established another through WebDAV directory names. The incident shows why shared infrastructure needs its own controls and why authorization must be evaluated on every model call rather than assumed from sandbox isolation.

agentic-aiai-securityllm-securityidentity-and-authorizationpolicy-enforcementarchitecture
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Atlassian Rovo Prompt Injection: One Link, One Assistant, 50-Plus Connected Systems

Two research teams published two separate routes into Atlassian Rovo within 48 hours in August 2026. Varonis Threat Labs found that a URL parameter pre-fills the assistant''s chat inside the signed-in user''s session. PromptArmor found instructions hidden in content Rovo reads, exfiltrating Jira and Confluence data with web search turned off. This piece separates the two disclosures, keeps their remediation statuses apart, and names the connected-assistant blast radius problem underneath both.

prompt-injectionai-securityllm-securityshadow-aipolicy-enforcementai-governance
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Poisoned Tool Descriptions and Cross-Agent Privilege Escalation: Every IAM Call Was Authorized

At DEF CON 34, Microsoft security engineer Muskan Tomar demonstrated cross-agent privilege escalation triggered by a tool description rewritten to read like routine compliance guidance. An agent reads the description and makes an authorized IAM call that raises the privileges of a different agent in a different environment. The reported result across agents built on LangChain and Claude Code is that prompt guardrails, human approval and telemetry each failed in turn. This piece walks the three failures and separates the identity-platform problem from the authorization decision on the request path.

ai-securityagentic-aiprivilege-escalationtool-poisoningauthorizationmcp
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