More businesses are letting AI assistants read their email, sort their files and act on their behalf. A new piece of research shows why it pays to think carefully about how much access those assistants get.
Security researchers at Salt Labs, the research arm of Salt Security, found a flaw in Manus, a general-purpose AI agent that can connect to services such as email, cloud storage and code repositories. They showed that a single malicious email could hijack the agent and potentially reach the user’s connected accounts.
How it worked
The attacker hides instructions inside an ordinary-looking email. Later, the user asks the AI to check their messages. The AI reads the hidden instructions and carries them out, as if the user had asked for them. This is called prompt injection. It works because, as TechRadar puts it, AI cannot reliably tell the difference between instructions and the content it is reading.
Manus already had protections against this. According to TechRadar, the researchers got around them by disguising the hidden instructions in scrambled code, which the agent decoded and ran before it flagged anything suspicious.
The flaw has been fixed, and this was a research demonstration, not a reported attack on real users. But TechRadar warns that other techniques that work just as well are likely to be out there.
What this means for your business
- Give AI tools the least access they need. If an assistant only needs to read your calendar, do not connect it to your email, files and banking as well.
- Keep a human in the loop. Set AI tools to ask before they send emails, share files or make changes.
- Know which AI tools your staff use. An assistant someone connected to a work mailbox without telling anyone is a blind spot.
- Keep AI apps updated. Fixes like this one only protect you once they are installed.
AI assistants can save real time. The trick is to give them only the access you would give a new staff member on their first day.
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