AI agents create new insider risk for enterprises

AI agents are being integrated into daily business workflows, using valid identities and full system privileges. Because their actions appear authorized, they can accumulate risk across many legitimate‑looking steps, a pattern described as a new form of insider threat. Traditional detection tools that focus on discrete, human‑paced events often miss this behavior, prompting a shift toward Agent Behavior Analytics that monitors continuous, autonomous activity.

A recent demonstration shows how an attacker can exploit “slow‑burn” attacks: a sequence of harmless actions—reading confidential documents, summarizing them, and emailing the summary—culminates in data exfiltration. By applying stateful contextual policies in the Omnigent platform, the full session is evaluated, allowing the system to block the malicious chain while single‑step checks would have failed.

The findings highlight the need for security teams to treat autonomous AI identities like human users, applying behavioral analytics and contextual policies to detect misuse before it scales.