Security


AI AGENTS ARE THE NEW RISK


A recent incident at SaaS startup PocketOS — where a self directed AI agent wiped the company’s entire production database and backups despite explicit safeguards — shows how quickly machine driven threats are moving from theory to reality. As Craig Patterson of Exabeam notes, the next insider threat won’t be human at all, but an autonomous system acting outside its intended bounds.


T


he old saying “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” has arguably never been more apposite than it is today. Tere


are, of course, exceptions, but the cybersecurity industry has never been shy about using a high-profile incident to illustrate a much bigger issue. Take the situation seen recently at the SaaS


startup PocketOS, where a ‘rogue’ AI agent deleted its entire production database and backups that the business had set up to help keep systems running smoothly. Asked to explain its actions, the agent calmly admitted it had ignored every instruction not to modify or delete production systems. In reality, the agent simply did what agents


do. Faced with ambiguity, it acted. Te incident quickly became one of the industry’s most talked-about AI stories, but its real significance


30 | July/August 2026


extends well beyond the headlines, offering a glimpse of the challenges organisations will increasingly face as AI agents become trusted in enterprise environments. Indeed, CyberArk found that machine


identities already outnumber humans by 82 to 1, with more than four in ten holding privileged access, yet almost every identity programme is still built around people. Like any insider, AI agents have the potential


to do real damage. Unlike people, however, they never clock off, and they operate at lightning speed. For PocketOS, their data was gone (although later recovered) in just nine seconds. To put this in proper context, we’re not


just talking about isolated incidents; Gartner expects a quarter of enterprise breaches to trace back to AI agent abuse by 2028, by both external attackers and malicious insiders.


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