Cisco open sources tool for detecting AI agents on hacking sprees

Cisco has open sourced a behavior detection engine that watches AI agents, to help security teams prevent rogue agents from going off the rails like they did with the Hugging Face hack – or worse.

It’s called Project Quarry, and it aims to provide a “shared language” for evaluating agent behavior, along the lines of what Snort, which Cisco also maintains, did for detecting malicious network traffic and what YARA did for rule-based malware identification.

Most detection tools rely on specific interactions with an AI model or agent. Did it attempt prompt injection? Or did the agent call an attack tool?

“But what is missing is the entire context under which something may occur,” Amy Chang, head of AI threat and security research at Cisco, said in an exclusive interview with The Register.

She likened this to credit card fraud detection. Without context, individual transactions such as a small test charge or a single purchase in a location far away …