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Glossary
Prompt injection is an attack that manipulates an AI system or agent through crafted inputs, getting it to ignore its intended instructions, reveal information it shouldn’t, or take harmful actions. In a fraud and identity context, the danger is a legitimate AI agent being hijacked into acting against the user or business it serves.
As AI agents gain the ability to act, prompt injection becomes a way to turn that ability against its owner, the AI equivalent of social-engineering the agent instead of the human.
An attacker plants malicious instructions where an AI agent will read them, in a web page the agent visits, a document it processes, or a message it receives, telling the agent to disregard its real task and do something else: exfiltrate data, make an unauthorized transaction, or misuse a connected tool. Because the agent treats input as instructions, well-crafted injected text can override its intended behavior. It is a fast-evolving problem with no complete fix yet.
For agentic systems, prompt injection is a serious fraud vector: a hijacked agent can act with the user’s authority. Defenses layer several controls, since none is complete on its own: constraining what an agent is permitted to do (least-privilege, scoped delegated authority, so a hijacked agent can do little), separating trusted instructions from untrusted input, monitoring agent actions for anomalies, and keeping human confirmation for high-risk actions. Bounding the agent’s authority is the most reliable safeguard, because it limits the damage even when injection succeeds.
What is prompt injection?
An attack that manipulates an AI system or agent via crafted inputs into ignoring instructions or taking harmful actions.
Why is it a fraud risk?
A hijacked legitimate agent can act with the user’s authority, making unauthorized transactions or leaking data.
How do you defend against prompt injection?
Least-privilege scoped authority, separating instructions from untrusted input, monitoring, and human confirmation for high-risk actions.
Related: Agentic Fraud · AI Agents / Agentic AI · Delegated Authority · MCP Security · Agentic AI Guardrails
