Security in AI agents has become a strategic priority for companies implementing autonomous workflows in critical sectors such as finance, legal, customer service, and operations.
With the increasing use of generative artificial intelligence and agents that perform tasks without human supervision, ensuring data security, legal compliance, and the integrity of decisions has become vital.

What is security in AI agents?
Security in AI agents is the set of best practices, technologies, and policies designed to protect autonomous agents against failures, cyberattacks, and misuse of sensitive information.
This includes measures such as prompt validation, call authentication, dynamic access control, log monitoring, and auditing of automated decisions.
This concern is especially relevant in highly regulated business environments, such as banks, insurance companies, and technology companies, where integration with APIs Internal and legacy systems require a more rigorous level of governance.
AI security versus AI protection
Although the terms "AI security" and "AI protection" are often used synonymously, they represent different and complementary concepts.
THE AI security It relates to how we build, monitor, and align models so that their results conform to human values, avoiding unintended or unwanted consequences.
Already the AI protection This refers to defending these systems against external threats, such as cyberattacks, data leaks, and unauthorized access.
Understanding this distinction is crucial for professionals who manage workflows with autonomous agents in corporate environments.
AI security is connected to the ethical and technical alignment of the agent with the organization's objectives, while AI protection relies on access policies, encryption, network segmentation, and cybersecurity practices.
These two layers — internal security (alignment, explainability, robustness) and external protection (firewalls, tokens, audits) — should be viewed as interdependent parts of a resilient enterprise AI architecture.
Most common risks for independent agents
Among the main risk vectors are prompt injection attacks, where malicious commands are disguised as input devices in input fields, redirecting the behavior of the agents.
According to OWASP LLM Top 10, Prompt injection is currently one of the most exploited vulnerabilities in generative AI applications.
Another critical risk is the leakage of sensitive data during interactions with agents that lack proper encryption or sandboxing, especially in workflows involving internal documents or integrations with ERP systems.

How to apply security to workflows with AI agents.
The first layer of protection involves creating a model of AI governance, as proposed by NIST AI Risk Management Framework, which organizes risks into categories such as reputational damage, loss of operational control, and privacy violations.
In practice, there are several ways to mitigate threats. One of the most effective resources is the adoption of a Zero Trust architecture, as exemplified by... Cisco, in which each action of the agent needs to be verified by context, identity, and permission.
Tools like watsonx.governance and Azure AI Security Layers They have implemented solutions to allow these agents to operate with their own digital identity, creating "identity cards" with OAuth2 authentication and traceable logs.
Recommended tools and frameworks
At No Code Start Up, we recommend using platforms such as:
- N8N Course, This course teaches you how to configure safe executions in automations with error handling and conditional triggers.
- Agents Course with OpenAI, focusing on multi-agent architectures integrated with security best practices.
- AI Agent and Automation Manager Training, which teaches how to audit and monitor workflows with a corporate focus.

Real-life cases of attacks and lessons learned.
The rapid growth in the use of AI agents in the corporate environment has been accompanied by a new wave of attacks and security breaches.
Below are real-world examples that illustrate the practical challenges and lessons learned:
EchoLeak: zero-click in Microsoft 365 Copilot (Jun 2025)
Researchers from Aim Security They identified the vulnerability. EchoLeak, an attack of prompt injection Indirectly, it requires zero user interaction: a simple email containing hidden instructions is all that's needed for Copilot to reveal or send confidential data to an external domain.
The problem was classified as “"LLM Scope Violation"” Because it caused the agent to overstep their boundaries of trust, silently exfiltrating internal files.
Prompt Mines in Salesforce Einstein: CRM corruption (Aug 2025)
The Zenity Labs team demonstrated how “Prompt Mines”"—Malicious pieces of text injected into CRM records can force Einstein to perform privileged actions, such as updating or deleting customer data, without clicking anything.".
The attack bypassed the Trust Layer Salesforce's findings demonstrated that even environments with RAG controls can be compromised if the agent reads corrupted content.
Vulnerabilities in ChatGPT plugins: data leak and account takeover (March 2024)
Salt Security discovered Three flaws in the ChatGPT plugins.One is in OpenAI itself involving OAuth, another is in the AskTheCode plugin (GitHub), and a third is in the Charts by Kesem AI plugin.
All of them allowed an attacker to install a malicious plugin on victims' profiles and capture messages or tokens, exposing credentials and private repositories.
The “Sydney” incident on Bing Chat (Feb 2023)
A Stanford student proved that it was possible to persuade the Bing Chat to “ignore previous instructions” and reveal their system prompt, internal guidelines and even the codename "Sydney".
This attack of prompt injection The direct study demonstrated how simple commands in natural language can bypass safeguards and leak confidential policies.
AI security measures
To address the growing security challenges in AI agents, leading companies and IT teams have adopted practical measures covering everything from governance to cybersecurity.
Below are some of the most relevant approaches:
Detection and mitigation of algorithmic bias.
AI algorithms can reflect or amplify existing biases in the data they are trained on. Identifying and neutralizing these biases is essential to avoid discriminatory decisions.
Techniques such as data audits, diverse training sets, and cross-validations help mitigate negative impacts on agent operations.
Robustness testing and validation
Before deploying an agent into production, it is crucial to ensure that it responds appropriately to extreme situations, malicious inputs, or operational noise.
This is done through adversarial testing, stress analysis, and failure simulations to assess how the model behaves under pressure.
Explainable AI (XAI)
Explainability is a key factor in trust. It allows humans to understand the criteria used by the agent to make decisions.
XAI tools help visualize weights, analyze the importance of variables, and generate reports that can be interpreted by non-experts, increasing the transparency of workflows.
Ethical AI Frameworks
Several organizations have developed guidelines and governance frameworks to ensure that AI systems respect values such as fairness, justice, accountability, and privacy.
These frameworks are especially useful for defining ethical boundaries for the autonomy of agents.
Human supervision
Even with a high degree of automation, human presence is still essential in critical cycles.
Human oversight allows for intervention in controversial decisions, review of ambiguous results, and interruption of processes when anomalous patterns are detected. This model is known as human-in-the-loop.
Security protocols
Multifactor authentication, encryption, environment segregation, context-based access control, and detailed logging are examples of technical measures that increase the resilience of systems.
These practices also facilitate audits and reduce the attack surface of agents.
Industry-wide collaboration
AI security is a field that demands collective effort. Participating in technical communities, inter-company forums, and initiatives such as the OWASP LLM Top 10 or the NIST AI RMF accelerates the dissemination of best practices and strengthens the ecosystem as a whole.

Trends for the future of AI security
It is expected that the new versions of the LGPD guidelines and ISO 42001 (IA) will include specific recommendations for independent agents.
In addition, suppliers such as AWS Bedrock They are releasing SDKs with built-in protections against indirect attacks.
The emergence of specialized hubs, such as the project Lakera Prompt Security, This also indicates a clear maturing of the security ecosystem towards generative AI, with a focus on increasingly complex agents.

Where does the competitive advantage lie?
The company that implements security in AI agents from the start gains more than just protection: it gains... scalable trust.
The agents become high-value assets, auditable, compliant with legislation, and ready to operate in regulated environments.
By combining frameworks such as the one from OWASP, With NIST controls and the know-how of platforms like those offered by No Code Start Up, it's possible to build secure and productive autonomous workflows.
The future belongs not to those who automate fastest, but to those who automate responsibly, with traceability and operational intelligence.
Security in AI agents is the cornerstone of this new phase of digital transformation — and those who master these pillars have a real competitive advantage.
If you want to lead this movement with technical expertise and strategic vision, learn more about... AI Agent and Automation Manager Training.





















