Max Corbridge, an ethical hacker and red teamer who is co-founder
and CEO of Secure Agentics, speaks with SE Radio host Amey Ambade
about how AI agents get attacked and what engineers can actually
do to defend them. Drawing on years of offensive security work,
Corbridge frames agents as a new and largely undefended attack
surface: the industry has handed AI systems autonomy and the
ability to act in the real world while carrying forward prompt
injection, a flaw the frontier labs themselves describe as
effectively unsolvable. He likens the moment to the early,
lawless days of the web, when SQL injection was everywhere and
adoption ran far ahead of security.
The conversation builds from first principles as Corbridge
explains what separates an agent from ordinary software and why
three properties make them hard to secure: they are
non-deterministic, their language-model core can be coerced, and
they are increasingly interconnected through MCP servers, other
agents, databases, and email. Turning to the attack surface,
Corbridge lays out his "lethal trifecta" (a vulnerable core,
dense interconnection, and security tooling that has not caught
up) and contrasts the decades of layered defenses protecting an
ordinary email inbox with the thin protection around agents that
take autonomous actions on critical systems.
The heart of the episode is defense. Corbridge orders practices
by leverage: least-privilege access and privilege separation,
sandboxing where feasible, imperfect-but-useful guardrails as one
layer of defense in depth, and human-in-the-loop for irreversible
actions (which he notes is contentious and does not scale). The
discussion closes on detecting a compromised or drifting agent,
the value of watching an agent's chain-of-thought reasoning
alongside its actions, the open-source tooling landscape
(including Corbridge's own project, Adrian), and his central
advice: build security in proactively, define what good agent
behavior looks like up front, and avoid bolting it on after
agents have already spread across the business.
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