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AI Security Technique

AI Agent - AI Security Technique

Adversaries may abuse AI agents present on the victim's system for command and control. AI agents are often granted access to tools that can execute shell commands, reach out to the internet, and interact with other services in the victim's environment, making them capable C2 agents. The adversary may modify the behavior of an AI agent for C2 via LLM Prompt Injection and rely on the agent'...

AI Security TechniquedemonstratedCommand and Control

Record summary

A quick snapshot of what this page covers.

Tactics1Attacker goals connected to this method.
Mitigations0Defenses that may help against this attack.
AI risks20Research-backed risks connected to this topic.

Attack context

How this AI attack works in practice.

Adversaries may abuse AI agents present on the victim's system for command and control. AI agents are often granted access to tools that can execute shell commands, reach out to the internet, and interact with other services in the victim's environment, making them capable C2 agents.

The adversary may modify the behavior of an AI agent for C2 via LLM Prompt Injection and rely on the agent's ability to invoke tools to retrieve and execute the adversary's commands. They may maintain persistent control of an agent via Modify AI Agent Configuration or AI Agent Context Poisoning. They may instruct the agent to not report their actions to the user in an attempt to remain covert.

ATLAS ID
AML.T0108
Priority score
130
Maturity: demonstrated
Command and Control

Mitigations

Defenses that may help against this attack.

No connected defenses. No defense is connected to this attack in the current data.

Case studies

Examples from public reports and exercises.

OpenClaw Command & Control via Prompt Injection

exercise
Date2026-02-03

Researchers at HiddenLayer demonstrated how a webpage can embed an indirect prompt injection that causes OpenClaw to silently execute a malicious script. Once executed, the script plants persistent malicious instructions into future system prompts, allowing the attacker to issue new commands, turning OpenClaw into a command and control agent.

What makes this attack unique is that, through a simple indirect prompt injection attack into an agentic lifecycle, untrusted content can be used to spoof the model’s control scheme and induce unapproved tool invocation for execution. Through this single inject, an LLM can become a persistent, automated command & control implant.

Source

Where this page information comes from.