What Actually Happened

Recent discussions at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit highlighted a critical blind spot in security programs: legacy infrastructure vulnerabilities can compromise AI agents. As organizations rapidly adopt AI, with 71% piloting and 31% deploying AI agents, traditional security measures are falling short. Attackers can exploit unpatched servers, misconfigured permissions, and cached credentials to gain access to AI systems without targeting the AI directly.

The Implementation Reality

For teams managing AI implementations, the risk landscape is shifting. AI agents typically rely on existing infrastructure, including identity providers, cloud storage, and IAM roles, which may harbor outdated security configurations. The vulnerabilities in legacy systems, such as unpatched software or overly privileged access, can create pathways for attackers to exploit AI functionalities indirectly. For example, an unpatched Apache Tomcat server with CVE-2025-24813 can allow attackers to dump credentials and impersonate users, leading to unauthorized access to sensitive data in cloud buckets used by AI agents. The interconnectedness of these systems means that a single misconfiguration can have a cascading effect, compromising the entire AI deployment.

What to Do About It

• Conduct a thorough audit of legacy infrastructure, specifically looking for unpatched software and misconfigured permissions in Active Directory and IAM roles.
• Implement least privilege principles for AI agents, ensuring they have the minimum necessary permissions to function, thereby reducing the attack surface.
• Regularly update and patch all components of the infrastructure, particularly those that interact with AI systems, to mitigate known vulnerabilities.
• Establish a monitoring and alerting system to detect unauthorized access attempts and anomalies in AI agent behavior.
• Integrate security assessments into the AI development lifecycle to ensure new deployments do not inherit existing vulnerabilities.

Source: The Hacker News

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