AI Agents Are Becoming Privilege Escalation Paths

"These agents can orchestrate workflows across multiple systems, for example: An HR Agent that provisions or deprovisions accounts across IAM, SaaS apps, VPNs, and cloud platforms based on HR system updates. A Change Management Agent that validates a change request, updates configuration in production systems, logs approvals in ServiceNow, and updates documentation in Confluence. A Customer Support Agent that retrieves customer context from CRM, checks account status in billing systems, triggers fixes in backend services, and updates the support ticket."

"To deliver value at scale, organizational AI agents are designed to serve many users and roles. They are granted broader access permissions, compared to individual users, in order to access the tools and data required to operate efficiently. The availability of these agents has unlocked real productivity gains: faster triage, reduced manual effort, and streamlined operations. But these early wins come with a hidden cost. As AI agents become more powerful and more deeply integrated, they also become access intermediaries."

Organizational AI agents have evolved from personal productivity tools into shared, organization-wide components that automate and orchestrate actions across multiple systems. Typical implementations include HR, change management, and customer support agents that interact with IAM, SaaS, cloud platforms, ServiceNow, Confluence, CRM, billing systems, and backend services. These agents are designed to serve many users and roles and are granted broader access permissions than individual users to operate efficiently. The broader permissions enable productivity gains such as faster triage and reduced manual effort. However, the agents often act as access intermediaries, obscuring who accessed what and under which authority, thereby introducing overlooked access and accountability risks.

Read at The Hacker News