Your smart employee might leak your company's secrets.. How to protect your data?

Companies are increasingly adopting AI agents to accelerate business operations and automate daily tasks, but granting these systems broad executive privileges is raising growing security concerns, particularly given their ability to access email, documents, databases, and internal applications.

Unlike traditional assistants, AI agents can execute actions without continuous human intervention; they can prepare sales reports, analyze data, and automatically send results via APIs and connectors.

Risks emerge when an agent’s permissions exceed the requirements of its assigned task, enabling it to modify or delete files or share sensitive information.

The OWASP organization classifies excessive permissions as a risk associated with large language model applications, especially when agents are connected to multiple systems or granted broad administrative privileges.

A prominent threat is “prompt injection,” where malicious commands are embedded in emails, documents, or web pages to trick the agent into exceeding its intended scope and leaking data to external parties, if its permissions allow. Errors can also escalate when one agent’s output is passed to another without review.

To mitigate these risks, experts recommend applying the principle of least privilege, separating read, write, delete, and send permissions, assigning distinct digital identities to agents, and requiring human approval for sensitive operations.

Protective measures include monitoring and logging activities, restricting external communications, conducting regular security tests, reviewing connected applications, and providing mechanisms to disable agents when misuse is suspected.

Effective protection also requires clear policies defining oversight responsibilities and employee training, to ensure productivity gains are achieved without compromising information confidentiality and system integrity.