Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Salt Labs found that the agentic AI platform Manus could be hijacked with a single email. By hiding malicious instructions inside an ordinary message, researchers got Manus to execute malicious code and, from there, reach the email, cloud storage, and code repository accounts a user had connected to it. The full attack required nothing from the victim beyond asking Manus to check their inbox. No stolen password, no clicked link.

Salt Labs recently showed that a single email could hijack the AI agent platform Manus and reach a victim’s connected accounts. The full technical breakdown, with complete evidence, payloads, and screenshots, is in our research team’s write-up, and Dark Reading first reported the finding in an exclusive. This post is the shorter version: what the finding means and what it tells every organization now deploying AI agents. For the full technical detail, read the Salt Labs research blog.

Answer this without checking: how many AI agents are running in your environment right now? Most security leaders give an estimate and a shrug. That is a fair response, because agents get spun up by an engineer solving a problem on a Tuesday afternoon, through a path that puts them on nobody's radar. In August 2026, researchers found AI agents connected to Hugging Face running loose inside enterprise networks with no owner and no audit trail.

As AI adoption accelerates inside enterprises, security and IT teams are increasingly asking a foundational question: what exactly is connected to our AI, and what can it access? For organizations running Claude Enterprise, Salt now has a direct answer. Salt Claude Connect links Salt to Claude’s Compliance API and provides continuous, read-only visibility into the MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers connected to your Claude Enterprise organization.

Recently, Gemini was running a capture-the-flag exercise in a sandbox operated by the AI testing firm Irregular. Its task was to steal data from a fictional company. On three occasions, the fictional target shared a name with a real business. Gemini slipped past the test’s containment, reached the open internet, and broke into the real company’s systems. In one case it guessed the password. In the other two, it pulled working credentials from a public database of leaked passwords.

Unmanaged, long-lived keys weaken visibility, audit readiness, operational continuity, and cyber resilience, making API key management critical across non-human identities. An effective program maintains inventory and ownership, enforces least privilege and secure storage, and automates rotation, monitoring, and revocation across each key's lifecycle.

A Technical blog series on where sensitive data moves in an AI workflow, what decisions Protecto makes at each point, and what enterprises get from enforcing policy once instead of everywhere.