Security teams are bracing for AI agents that don’t just help humans hack — they coordinate attacks on their own.
Security folks used to worry about “script kiddies”; now they’re talking about agentic AI coordinating attacks without a human in the loop.[1] According to new threat forecasts from Google and Fortinet, AI agents are moving from novelty to normal in the 2026 threat landscape, reshaping both how attacks are launched and how they’re defended.[1] We’re not just dealing with smarter phishing emails anymore — we’re looking at autonomous systems that can probe, adapt, and scale attacks faster than any human team.[1]
The report highlights a few nasty trends: prompt injection attacks tailored to LLMs, AI-powered vishing with hyperrealistic voice cloning, and agents that can orchestrate complex campaigns without constant human guidance.[1] As developers rushing to wire LLMs into everything, we’re accidentally creating huge interfaces for these systems to poke at: over-permissive tools, unsecured webhooks, “just for internal use” endpoints that nobody locked down. If an AI agent can discover and chain these together, your product becomes the attack surface.
The flip side is weirdly hopeful: defenders are also using AI to summarize incidents, decode malware, and spot attacker tactics faster than traditional workflows.[1] That means future security work is less about manually reading logs and more about designing the right context and constraints for your own defensive agents. The dev skill set starts to look like: can you define safe tool APIs, harden prompts, and build sandboxed execution paths for automated agents?
So here’s the challenge: if an autonomous attacker agent had access to your app for 24 hours, what damage could it do with the tools and APIs you’ve exposed to your own AI features? And what would it take, realistically, to lock that down before someone else’s agent decides to run the experiment for you?
Source: Euronews