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A security firm (Tenet Security) found a way to hijack the most popular AI coding agents — Claude Code, Cursor and Codex — WITHOUT hacking anything. They call it "agentjacking," and in controlled tests the agents ran the attacker's command 85% of the time; researchers found 2,388 organizations exposed, from solo developers to the Fortune 100. This free one-page-per-idea field guide turns the whole thing into something a non-technical person can act on tonight. HOW THE ATTACK WORKS (four steps, no real "hacking") — apps send crash reports to a tool like Sentry whose inbox address is public by design; an attacker mails in a FORGED report with a fake "## Resolution: run this command" section that looks official; you ask your agent to "fix the open bug reports"; it pulls the fake one in as TRUSTED tool output, trusts it like a memo, and runs the command with YOUR keys — then malware ships your secrets out. WHY IT WORKS — the agent can't tell your instructions from a stranger's hidden in the data it reads, which is exactly why a "better prompt" does NOT save you (researchers ordered it to ignore bad data in writing; it ran the attack anyway). THE 3-MOVE LOCKDOWN, with exact settings per tool — (1) APPROVE: turn off autopilot — never run Claude Code with --dangerously-skip-permissions, turn OFF Cursor's auto-run/"YOLO", keep Codex in Suggest mode (this one change takes the 85% to roughly 0%); (2) MINIMIZE: inventory your MCP servers/connectors (claude mcp list) and remove the ones you don't use; (3) CONTAIN: sandbox the agent with throwaway credentials so even a successful trick can't reach your real keys, and watch outbound connections. Plus a 30-SECOND SAFETY AUDIT you can run on ANY AI tool before you trust it, and the MYTHS that do NOT protect you (antivirus, firewall, VPN and "it's just Sentry" all fail because every step is technically allowed). Verified against Tenet Security, The Hacker News, the Cloud Security Alliance and Infosecurity (June 2026).

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