AI Agents Cause Cybersecurity Incidents at Two Thirds of Firms
AI Agents Cause Cybersecurity Incidents at Two Thirds of Firms
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/unchecked-ai-agents-cause/
Publish Date: 2026-04-21 09:00:00
Source Domain: www.infosecurity-magazine.com
Two thirds of organizations have suffered from a cybersecurity incident related to the deployment of AI agents during the last year, research by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has warned.
According to research, conducted alongside Token Security, unchecked AI agents operating on corporate networks caused damage including data exposure, operational disruption and financial losses.
The CSA paper, titled Autonomous but Not Controlled: AI Agent Incidents Now Common in Enterprises, published on April 21, warned that the majority of organizations have no strategy set up around decommissioning AI agents, further putting them at risk of cybersecurity incidents.
According to the report, 68% of respondents claim to have high confidence in the visibility of AI agents on their network. However, 82% of all respondents said they have discovered previously unknown agents in the past year.
The most common places for previously unknown AI agents to be discovered were within internal automation environments and large language model (LLM) platforms.
“This gap highlights a distinction between operational visibility and complete governance assurance, limiting the effectiveness of control models that depend on known and bounded agents,” said the CSA report.
If cybersecurity and infrastructure teams are unaware of AI agents which employees have deployed in the network, this makes it almost impossible to ensure those AI agents are deployed securely. This has already resulted in cybersecurity incidents.
AI Agents Cause Data Breaches and Operational Disruption
During the last twelve months, 65% of organizations have experienced at least one cybersecurity incident which occurred because of the use of AI agents, the research found.
The operational consequences of AI agent related security incidents included data exposure (61%), operational disruption (43%) or unintended actions in business processes (41%).
Just over a third of organizations (35%) said that a security…
