The Tool Desk
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Use your organization’s incident response process for severity, escalation, legal, privacy and communications decisions. NIST SP 800-61 Rev. 3, published in April 2025, places incident response within broader cybersecurity risk management; OWASP’s GenAI Incident Response Guide 1.0, published in July 2025, is also intended for security practitioners generally.
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1. Activate incident response and establish the facts
Assign an incident lead and involve the teams responsible for the agent, identity and access management, connected systems, logging, and affected business operations. Follow existing escalation and evidence-handling procedures. Record what is known, what is suspected, and what remains uncertain.
An unexpected or unsafe action does not by itself prove attacker control. It may reflect malicious input, a control failure, a configuration mistake, ambiguous instructions, model error, or an ordinary software compromise. Treat these as hypotheses to investigate rather than conclusions.
Decide what kind of event you are handling
Determine whether the available evidence indicates a security incident, an unsafe but apparently non-malicious action, a suspected control failure, or an unresolved alert. Keep the classification provisional if facts are incomplete; response actions may still be necessary while attribution remains uncertain.
2. Scope the agent’s effective authority
Map what the agent could do, not just what its user-facing description says it should do. An agent intended to read documents, for example, may use a service identity that can also delete them. Separate read, write, delete, send, execute, administrative, and financial capabilities.
Record the deployment and access path
- Agent name, version, deployment environment, triggering task, and model or provider if known.
- Prompt and policy revisions, enabled tools or extensions, connected data sources, and configuration changes.
- Identity context, delegated credentials, service identities, and the scopes or permissions attached to them.
- Approval controls, limits on autonomy, and any connected agents or workflows the agent can reach.
- Resources it could access, including whether a tool or identity has broader authority than the agent’s intended task requires.
OWASP’s AI Agent Security Cheat Sheet and its LLM06:2025 Excessive Agency guidance describe excessive functionality, permissions, and autonomy as relevant sources of risk. Actual identity delegation and logging details vary by deployment, so verify them in the systems involved.
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3. Preserve records and reconstruct the timeline
Preserve available records and system state under your organization’s evidence-handling procedures before making changes that could destroy useful data. Build a time-ordered account of the event, recording each source, its integrity where known, and any gaps. Do not assume a platform retains every item below.
Review evidence across the agent and connected systems
- User requests and external content the agent received, such as retrieved documents, email, websites, API responses, and tool results.
- Agent outputs and recorded decisions; tool names and parameters; authorization denials; retries or loops; and human approval events.
- Identity-provider, application, cloud, database, email, repository, and network records showing access or changes made using agent or delegated identities.
- Memory or retrieval-store writes, shared-state changes, configuration revisions, and deployment changes.
- Messages between agents and subsequent actions in connected workflows.
Use tool, identity, and downstream-system records to corroborate what happened. A generated explanation or model-provided account is not independently verified evidence of its own actions or the reason for them.
Establish impact and blast radius
Identify data the agent accessed, exposed, changed, or deleted; actions it initiated; identities and resources involved; and other agents or workflows it may have influenced. Check whether any action is still queued or running in a downstream system. Where records are missing, document the uncertainty rather than inferring that an event did or did not occur.
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4. Test plausible causes against evidence
For each hypothesis, state what evidence would support it or make it less likely. NIST’s CSRC glossary defines prompt injection as an attack that exploits the concatenation of untrusted input with a prompt constructed by a higher-trust party, such as an application designer. The untrusted content may reach the agent directly or through retrieved material or a tool response.
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- Direct or indirect prompt injection, including malicious instructions in retrieved content.
- Tool misuse, an over-permissioned integration, credential misuse, or privilege escalation.
- Data exfiltration or access beyond the task’s intended scope.
- Poisoned memory or retrieval content, or malicious configuration or supply-chain changes.
- Unsafe generated code or shell execution, bypassed approval, runaway loops, or cost abuse.
- Cascading actions through other agents, identities, or connected workflows.
- Model error, ambiguous instructions, or a configuration mistake without evidence of malicious control.
OWASP identifies risks including prompt injection, tool abuse, privilege escalation, data exfiltration, memory poisoning, excessive autonomy, cascading failures, and supply-chain attacks. NIST’s January 2025 agent-hijacking evaluation also discusses scenarios involving code execution, data exfiltration, and phishing. These are useful investigative leads, not proof that any particular incident used one of those methods.
5. Contain the capabilities that could cause further harm
Choose controls based on the active threat, the agent’s effective access, and whether an action can be stopped and verified downstream. A prompt telling the model to stop is not an access control. Prefer enforceable restrictions in the agent platform, identity layer, tool, or downstream system.
Containment actions
- Pause the affected agent or workflow when feasible, especially if harmful actions are ongoing or its scope is unknown.
- Disable the abused tool or integration, or narrow its access to the specific resources needed for safe operation.
- Revoke or rotate implicated credentials and review whether delegated identities remain usable elsewhere.
- Block destinations or downstream actions associated with suspected exfiltration or misuse.
- Suspend memory writes or isolate affected memory and retrieval stores while their contents are reviewed.
- Require independent human approval for sensitive actions before restoring relevant capabilities.
Assess each action for whether it stops ongoing harm, interrupts legitimate operations, leaves credentials usable elsewhere, can be reversed and verified, preserves useful evidence, and closes the same route through another tool or workflow. These are practical decision criteria, not a published scoring system.
Containment can disrupt legitimate work and may not cancel jobs already accepted by downstream systems. Confirm whether queued actions were canceled or completed, and record operational impact and any exceptions. There is no universal kill switch or single containment order that fits every deployment. CISA and partners’ May 2026 guidance emphasizes limiting autonomy, layered defenses, strong identity management, and continuous monitoring.
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6. Remediate the weakness and validate the fix
Address the control failure that made the incident possible, not just the specific content that triggered it. Prioritize changes that reduce actual authority and are enforced outside the model.
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Match remediation to the failure
- Remove unnecessary tools; separate read from write capabilities; and narrow service identities and OAuth scopes.
- Enforce authorization on each downstream request rather than relying only on the agent’s instructions or an upstream check.
- Keep untrusted data distinct from trusted instructions, and isolate and review memory or retrieval content implicated in the incident.
- Bind approvals to the specific action and parameters being approved so a materially changed action requires a new decision.
- Set limits on retries, chain depth, and spend where runaway activity is a concern.
- Improve logging for tool invocations, identity use, approvals, denials, and downstream activity where those records are needed for response.
Test before restoring service
Test the observed abuse case and related failure modes, including prompt override, tool misuse, privilege escalation, exfiltration, memory poisoning, and approval bypass where applicable. Keep evidence of the agent version, tool policy, retrieval configuration, and observed approvals or denials. Restore access and autonomy incrementally, checking that the fix holds and that monitoring can detect relevant activity.
OWASP recommends least functionality and privilege, downstream authorization, human approval for high-impact actions, logging and monitoring, and structured adversarial validation. A prompt filter alone does not establish that the agent’s tools or identities are safely constrained.
7. Close the incident and track residual risk
Document the timeline; affected identities, data, and resources; actions taken; evidence gaps; root cause; business impact; notification decisions; recovery criteria; and residual risks. Use the findings to update threat models, response playbooks, tool permissions, and repeatable security tests. NIST SP 800-61 Rev. 3 frames response as part of ongoing cybersecurity risk management, while CISA and partners’ agentic AI guidance calls for threat modeling, continuous monitoring, and regular security assessments.
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In a specific 2025 CAISI Workspace evaluation against an upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, the strongest baseline attack succeeded in 11% of cases and the strongest newly developed attack in 81%. Those figures describe that controlled evaluation and its attack and system context; they are not estimates of real-world incident frequency, a general compromise probability, or a current cross-model benchmark. CAISI’s technical staff wrote, “Across all three new risk areas, CAISI was frequently able to induce the agent to follow the malicious instructions.” Interpret that statement within the same evaluation context.
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