google cloud’s vertex ai has a permission blind spot that lets attackers turn ai agents into double agents for stealing data and building backdoors.

researchers from palo alto networks unit 42 flagged how the default service agent permissions can get misused.

so a compromised or misconfigured agent looks normal while quietly exfiltrating sensitive info, hitting infrastructure, or creating persistent access in cloud environments.

this one hits hard for anyone running ai workloads on google cloud, since it shows how the very agents meant to help can flip against you with little extra effort from attackers.