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AI security

How Salt Labs Bypassed Manus’s AI Agent Protections With JavaScript Obfuscation

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Salt Labs reported that a crafted email could make Manus process attacker-controlled JavaScript while handling Gmail content. The researchers said the agent’s security warning appeared only after the payload had run. Salt Labs stated that it fixed the specific issue before publishing its report on October 1, 2026; the findings describe a controlled test, not evidence that users’ accounts were broadly compromised.

How the Manus email attack worked

Salt Labs examined Manus’s Gmail integration, where the agent processed requested email content in a cloud sandbox using a command-line workflow and Gmail MCP tooling. The researchers said direct malicious instructions and conventional Base64 approaches were blocked. They then tried JSFuck, an esoteric JavaScript style that uses a restricted set of characters to represent code.

In the demonstration, the researchers put an encoded payload in an email framed as content that needed decoding. Salt Labs says Manus invoked Node.js to process it, and the payload executed JavaScript in the sandbox. The key failure was the transition from untrusted email text to executable code: the email was not kept as passive data.

“Manus interpreted the email’s contents as executable instructions. It wasn’t treating the email as passive data; it was attempting to follow the instructions embedded within it.”

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That is Salt Labs’ Research Team’s description in its October 1, 2026 report; the report does not attribute the statement to a named individual.

Why JSFuck mattered

JSFuck is an esoteric JavaScript programming style that expresses code using six characters. Its project site says the technique does not depend on a browser and can run on Node.js. In this case, according to Salt Labs, the encoding helped make the payload look like material to decode while Manus’s processing path ran it. Obfuscation was the means of reaching execution; the underlying security problem was allowing untrusted content to trigger code execution.

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What the researchers say the payload could reach

Salt Labs reports that its test escalated from JavaScript execution to command execution and a reverse shell in the sandbox. The researchers also said the sandbox could access the Gmail MCP interface and OAuth token. Tokens for other connected services, including Google Drive or GitHub, could be available depending on a user’s configuration. These are findings from the team’s controlled test, not proof that connected accounts were accessed or compromised outside that demonstration.

Why a warning after execution is too late

Salt Labs says Manus displayed a security warning only after decoding had already executed the payload. That makes the issue one of control timing as well as detection: a warning or approval prompt cannot prevent an action that has already taken place. The team summarized the boundary failure this way:

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“At this point, we reached a clear security boundary violation: untrusted email content was transformed into executable code and run within the agent’s runtime environment.”

A defense must keep untrusted content from causing consequential tool or runtime actions before those actions occur. Inspecting prompts and model behavior alone is not enough if an agent can act through tools, APIs, and connected accounts. Salt Labs framed this as a broader security lesson, not as evidence that any other named product prevents all prompt-injection attacks.

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Was the Manus vulnerability fixed?

Salt Labs says it disclosed the issue through Meta’s bug bounty program and that the specific issue had been resolved and was no longer exploitable when the report was published on October 1, 2026. TechRadar Pro’s October 2, 2026 coverage also reported that status. This confirmation is about the reported Manus issue; it does not establish that every related attack path or other agent platform has been fixed.

What the report does—and does not—show

  • It documents a specific email-to-code-execution path in Salt Labs’ test of Manus’s Gmail integration.
  • It shows why defenses must address what an agent does with tools and connected services, not just how it responds to a prompt.
  • It does not provide a frequency, prevalence, or success-rate statistic; a single demonstration is not an estimate of how often attacks succeed.
  • It does not show that all Manus users, email accounts, or connected services were compromised.
  • It does not establish that other AI agents share the same vulnerability.

For organizations assessing agent workflows, the incident makes three practical questions central: do checks happen before tool execution, do controls cover actions across APIs and connected systems, and are credentials limited to the access the agent needs? Those are defensive considerations prompted by the report, not a tested product ranking.

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