Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

How Far Can Prompt Injection Reach in Agentic Coding Assistants?

The blast radius of a prompt injection against your coding assistant was set weeks ago, by whoever built the dev environment image. Same assistant, same model, same injected sentence: on a laptop it collects every repository, SSH key and cloud login the developer holds; on a provisioned dev box it collects an organization token plus whatever the image left behind; on a CI runner it collects a deployment credential and a network path to production. Three environments, three incidents, one payload.

Prompt Injection in RAG: The Payload Is Still in Your Index

Every action in your agent-incident runbook operates on the agent. The payload of a RAG prompt injection sits in the index. You can kill the pod, rotate the credential and revoke the session, and each of those stops this workload from doing that thing again. None of them touch the chunk that caused it.

Prompt Injection Through Tool Output Is Two Events (Your Screens Read One)

Tool output is untrusted because your own systems produce it. That is the part of the OWASP guidance that never makes it into a deployment. The label goes on web pages and email bodies, where an outsider obviously wrote the text. It never goes on the ticket store, the CRM, or the repo, because those are yours. The attacker does not care whose system it is. He cares which field takes free text: the ticket body, the opportunity note, the PR description.