Agentic Governance: Why It Matters Now

What Happened

AI agents are increasingly being used to automate tasks like managing calendars, summarizing messages, and updating databases. Because these agents use legitimate employee credentials, traditional security tools cannot easily tell when they are tricked into doing something harmful, like leaking data or deleting files. This article explains that companies need to carefully track every AI agent, limit exactly what they are allowed to do, and require human approval for risky actions. To stay secure, organizations should treat AI agents with the same level of caution and oversight as human employees.

Key Takeaways

• AI agents operate inside the trust boundary with delegated authority, rendering traditional perimeter security ineffective against their misuse.
• Agents are highly vulnerable to prompt injection, where malicious instructions hidden in ordinary content can hijack their workflows.
• Effective agentic governance requires strict controls over identity, authority, action (approval gates), and evidence (comprehensive logging).
• Organizations must treat AI agents as security principals, requiring formal registration, ownership, and lifecycle management.
• Relying solely on input filtering is insufficient; security must focus on action governance and restricting what an agent can do with hostile content.

Affected Systems

• AI Agents
• SaaS Platforms
• Identity Providers
• Automation Platforms
• API Gateways

Attack Chain

Attackers exploit AI agents not through traditional code vulnerabilities, but by manipulating the information the agents consume. By embedding hidden instructions (prompt injection) into ordinary content like emails, tickets, or Slack messages, attackers can hijack the agent's workflow. The agent then executes unauthorized actions—such as exfiltrating data or modifying records—at machine speed using its delegated, legitimate credentials, often bypassing traditional security monitoring.

Detection Availability

• YARA Rules: No
• Sigma Rules: No
• Snort/Suricata Rules: No
• KQL Queries: No
• Splunk SPL Queries: No
• EQL Queries: No
• Other Detection Logic: No

The article discusses conceptual governance and architectural controls rather than providing specific detection rules or queries.

Detection Engineering Assessment

EDR Visibility: Low — Agents typically operate via API calls in SaaS or cloud environments, which EDR tools deployed on traditional endpoints do not monitor. Network Visibility: Medium — Network tools can see API traffic, but since the traffic is authenticated and uses legitimate endpoints, distinguishing malicious agent actions from benign ones is difficult without application-layer context. Detection Difficulty: Hard — Malicious actions performed by compromised agents appear as authenticated, authorized operations using legitimate credentials, making them indistinguishable from normal behavior without deep contextual logging.

Required Log Sources

• Application Audit Logs
• Identity Provider (IdP) Logs
• API Gateway Logs
• SaaS Activity Logs

Hunting Hypotheses

Control Gaps

• Lack of agent inventory and visibility into shadow IT
• Over-permissive delegated credentials for automated workflows
• Absence of human-in-the-loop approval gates for high-risk API actions
• Incomplete narrative logging for multi-step agent workflows

Key Behavioral Indicators

• Unusual volume of API calls from a single token
• Agent accounts accessing data outside their normal scope
• Chained agent-to-agent invocations resulting in sensitive data access

False Positive Assessment

• Low

Recommendations

Immediate Mitigation

• Verify against your organization's incident response runbook and team escalation paths before acting.
• Conduct an immediate inventory of all AI agents, copilots, and automated workflows operating within your SaaS and developer environments.
• Consider disabling any undocumented or unowned AI agents until a formal business sponsor is identified.

Infrastructure Hardening

• Evaluate implementing granular, action-level permissions for AI agents rather than relying on broad credential access.
• Consider establishing approval gates (human-in-the-loop) for high-risk agent actions such as fund transfers, bulk data deletions, or external communications.
• Ensure comprehensive logging is enabled to capture the full narrative of an agent's workflow, from the initial prompt to the final API execution.

User Protection

• Treat AI agents as security principals, applying the same onboarding, role-based access control, and offboarding procedures as human employees.
• Assume agents will process hostile content and restrict their capabilities based on the principle of least privilege, rather than relying solely on input filtering.

Security Awareness

• Educate development and business teams on the risks of 'shadow AI' and the importance of registering all automated workflows.
• Train personnel on the concept of prompt injection and how malicious instructions can be embedded in seemingly benign documents or messages.

MITRE ATT&CK Mapping

• T1078 - Valid Accounts
• T1566 - Phishing