Hacking the Agents: The Red Team Playbook for Breaking Autonomous AI
What happens when AI stops being just a tool-and starts acting on its own?
Agentic AI is transforming software, cybersecurity, automation, and digital decision-making. But with autonomy comes a new class of risk: AI systems that can use tools, access data, retain memory, communicate with other agents, and take actions with limited human supervision.
Hacking the Agents takes readers inside this emerging attack surface and explores how autonomous AI systems can be tested, attacked, manipulated, and defended.
This book goes beyond traditional prompt injection and examines the real security challenges of modern AI agents, including:
Prompt injection and goal hijacking
Agent memory poisoning
Tool and API abuse
MCP server attacks
RAG and knowledge-base manipulation
AI identity and permission risks
Multi-agent trust exploitation
Autonomous coding-agent attacks
Sensitive data exfiltration
Rogue-agent behavior and containment
AI red teaming methodologies
Practical security testing strategies
Written for cybersecurity professionals, red teamers, penetration testers, AI engineers, security architects, researchers, and technical leaders, this book bridges the gap between offensive security and the rapidly evolving world of autonomous AI.
Rather than treating AI security as a purely theoretical discipline, it focuses on attacker thinking, real-world attack paths, defensive controls, and practical ways organizations can evaluate the security of their own agentic systems.
As enterprises increasingly deploy AI agents across development, operations, customer service, cybersecurity, finance, and business automation, understanding how these systems fail-and how attackers may exploit them-will become an essential security skill.
The next major attack surface is not just the application. It is the agent controlling it.
If you want to understand where AI security is heading next, this book is your entry point into the world of Agentic AI Red Teaming.
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