A Reddit post I came across yesterday inspired this post, which will highlight the failure modes of internal AI agents - a major security wake-up call, especially if your organization is deploying generative AI tools that touch internal data. This whole thing didn't start with some big flashy external attack but with a threat detection system flagging suspicious API calls coming from inside the house: an internal system. When security engineers started digging, they found an automated agent had been compromised, and the way in was almost embarrassing - a public-facing customer feedback form. Once the agent was manipulated through that form, it started pulling data patterns from their internal logs. This was not a zero-day exploit. The security team realized the agent wasn't suffering from a bug or some kind of traditional software flaw. It was compromised by basic prompt manipulation. The agent was - and this is key - working exactly as designed. It was following instructions perfectly. It's just that those instructions were now malicious, coming straight from a user input field. That distinction really shows how the traditional security model breaks down with AI. The problem wasn't the AI's logic; it was the boundaries, or lack of boundaries, we put around it. The core failure here was all about governance. The company's entire security plan for all these new AI tools they were rolling out was basically a policy document nobody reads and a manual review process that was painfully slow - 3 to 5 days for every new agent deployment. So while they were taking days to review things, these agents were live in production with zero runtime monitoring, no input validation, no output filtering. Nothing. If I may say, they were relying on hope. And hope, as they say, is not a security strategy. When that hope failed - which it was bound to do - everything descended into what the Redditor called "the scramble." Ideally, when you spot a breach, the instant response is supposed to be a clean three-step process. Speed and containment are everything. First, you hit the kill switch: immediately revoke the compromised agent's access and stop the bleeding. Second, you isolate: quarantine the system so it can't spread. And third, you trace: use your audit logs to figure out the full scope of the damage - what data was accessed, how much got out, and the exact vector. Clean, controlled, methodical. Reading through that thread, it was painfully obvious that without those controls in place, that clean process just melts down. It becomes a total scramble. What does that actually look like? Without a kill switch, you have security teams literally manually shutting down entire system clusters. It's like using a sledgehammer to turn off a light bulb. They may end up breaking other completely unrelated services, causing a ton of collateral damage and unplanned downtime. You trade a security breach for an operational outage. Because there was no proper isolation built in - no micro-segmentation - the teams were just guessing. They were making high-stakes judgment calls on what else might be compromised and what to pull offline. And then you get to the biggest problem of all. Without comprehensive audit logs, they were flying completely blind. They knew that data patterns from logs were leaked, but they couldn't actually say for sure what the full extent of the damage was. They couldn't give a definitive timeline, couldn't say how much data was taken, and they couldn't even guarantee the system was clean afterward. All because the basic instrumentation just wasn't there. The reason this got so messy is that the company was running eight AI tools according to the OP, which brings us to the real systemic problem here: AI tool sprawl. It's a security nightmare, but it happens so naturally. You've got individual teams moving fast, which is what you want. Marketing spins up a chatbot. Engineering deploys an automated code reviewer. Customer success gets an AI for ticket routing. Sales gets an email assistant. They all solve real problems, but they're built in silos, which means you're not managing one AI system - you're suddenly trying to manage eight different AI systems. Eight different models, eight different sets of APIs, eight different data access patterns, and zero unified security posture. So instead of one front door to defend, you've got eight different doors into your most critical data, and each one was installed by a different team that may or may not have been thinking about security. That's why the "policy document nobody reads" approach completely falls apart. These agents aren't in a sandbox. They're accessing the crown jewels: your customer data, internal logs, API keys, production systems. When you have that many entry points without centralized monitoring and controls, a breach isn't an "if" - it's a "when." This is where it gets really important for anyone deploying this tech. If you accept that policies aren't enough and that sprawl is going to happen, you need technical armor. Let's get into the four-part framework to fix this. Foundation: Policy engine plus telemetry Foundation: Policy engine plus telemetry You can't secure what you can't see. Full stop. Telemetry for AI isn't just your standard request logs - you need total visibility. You need to see the entire lifecycle of an agent's action. What data did it access? Which APIs did it call? Who made the original request? And what did the agent actually do in production? Specifically, you need instrumentation that provides spans and traces. Why? Because a traditional log might just show a function was called. A span and trace system follows the intent and context of that call from beginning to end. For AI, you can trace a user's prompt, see how the LLM interpreted it, and then track every single internal API call the LLM decided to make based on that. It lets you follow malicious intent across the entire chain. Standard logging just can't do that. Second: Guardrails - the active defense Second: Guardrails - the active defense You need to actually block the attack. Guardrails are the technical controls you put between the user, the AI, and your internal systems. They're the defensive layers meant to stop a breach before it happens. There are four critical layers: First, input validation, which is specifically designed to catch prompt injection.
Second is output filtering. This one is so critical and so often overlooked. It checks the AI's response before it goes out to make sure it's not leaking sensitive data. So even if the AI gets access to something sensitive, the output filter stops it from sharing it.
Third is rate limiting to spot weird behavior, like a sudden spike in requests.
And fourth, sanitization layers to strip out malicious code or commands from the user's input. First, input validation, which is specifically designed to catch prompt injection. Second is output filtering. This one is so critical and so often overlooked. It checks the AI's response before it goes out to make sure it's not leaking sensitive data. So even if the AI gets access to something sensitive, the output filter stops it from sharing it. Third is rate limiting to spot weird behavior, like a sudden spike in requests. And fourth, sanitization layers to strip out malicious code or commands from the user's input. Circling back to output filtering for a second: ideally, it's a separate, dedicated mechanism. It could be another smaller AI model or a very strict policy engine that acts as a final gatekeeper. It analyzes what the main agent wants to send back and checks it against patterns for things like API keys, personally identifiable information, or internal log structures. It stops the agent from becoming a chatty data leak. Third: Anomaly detection Third: Anomaly detection This is about using all that telemetry to figure out what's normal. You build a baseline for each of your agents. You know, "this agent normally only talks to the customer ticket API" or "this agent has never tried to access the HR database." Anomaly detection is vital, but it can also be noisy - lots of false positives. The recommendation is to start with the agents touching your most sensitive data. Eventually, it needs to be everywhere because the attack won't always come from where you expect. The beauty of this system is that it alerts you the moment something deviates. So that customer feedback agent whose normal is maybe 50 simple requests an hour - if it suddenly tries to make hundreds of database calls, that's your instant red flag. You shift from passively logging events to proactively monitoring behavior. Fourth: Context-aware access control Fourth: Context-aware access control This is the principle of least privilege, but really engineered for automation. The access isn't just based on the agent's ID; it's based on the context of what it's trying to do in that moment. Permissions have to be super granular. For example, this agent can read customer feedback, but only when it's responding to a specific inquiry. And under no circumstances can it ever access internal development logs. AI agents are dynamic - their needs change based on the conversation. If an agent doesn't need to read the CEO's email to do its job, it simply does not get that permission. Full stop. The system has to enforce that boundary on the fly. So that framework - telemetry, guardrails, anomaly detection, and context-aware access - is the big picture fix. But narrowing it down, here are the specific technical controls that would have stopped or at least contained this exact breach: Number one: Granular permissions Number one: Granular permissions This goes right to the heart of this specific failure. Why did a customer feedback agent have read access to internal developer logs? It makes no sense. If it had been properly siloed with only the permissions it absolutely needed, the attack would have been dead on arrival. The prompt injection would have failed because the agent would hit an "access denied" wall. Second: Behavioral limits Second: Behavioral limits Even when an agent has access, you still put boundaries on it. This is about moving beyond the simple yes/no of access. It's about setting hard limits like "you can only make 10 log queries per conversation" or "you can't access logs that are more than a week old." Even if a malicious prompt gets through, these limits throttle the damage and give you another chance to detect the problem. Third: Audit everything Third: Audit everything This is foundational and non-negotiable. You need full, non-stop traceability: user question to API call to data access. When the breach was discovered, the team shouldn't have been guessing. They should have been able to pull up a complete, high-fidelity log of every single action that agent took. Fourth: Real-time monitoring Fourth: Real-time monitoring The suspicious API calls were flagged eventually, but not nearly fast enough. Real-time monitoring tied into that anomaly detection mentioned earlier should catch those calls the second they happen. An agent starts acting weird - you get an alert in seconds, not hours. You can intervene before a significant amount of data walks out the door. Finally: The kill switch Finally: The kill switch This is absolutely essential for AI operations. We're not talking about scrambling to shut down a server. You need a button - a documented, tested, single switch that instantly revokes that one specific agent's credentials without taking down everything else with it. It turns a total catastrophe into a contained, manageable incident. The takeaway The takeaway The takeaway we can't ignore is that the attack wasn't even sophisticated. This was casual, basic prompt manipulation, which means the attack surface that these incredibly powerful AI agents create is just wide open in countless companies right now, vulnerable to the lowest-effort attacks. That connects directly to what comes next. If these basic attacks are working today, the worst is yet to come. The access these agents have is only growing. They're being connected to financial systems, to core customer databases, to production infrastructure. The stakes are getting exponentially higher. A breach of a feedback agent leaking log patterns is one thing, but the next failure could be an agent with access to your financial transaction systems or all of your customer PII. The time for just hoping a policy document will cover you is completely over. Conclusion Conclusion The era of policy docs and hope is done. If you have AI agents talking to users or touching internal systems, you have to move to technical controls. That means runtime monitoring, automated guardrails, and a real, tested incident response plan - all built in from day one. AI agents are amazing tools. They're incredible force multipliers. But they're also a brand-new type of attack vector. The vulnerability is that they do exactly what we train them to do, even when they're being manipulated. They follow instructions. So the key question for anyone trying to innovate safely is this: Have you actually engineered them - technically - to know when to say no?

This story contains new, firsthand information uncovered by the writer.

The is an opinion piece based on the author’s POV and does not necessarily reflect the views of HackerNoon.

When "Just Following Guidelines" Isn't Enough

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