Ghostjacking – Definition & Meaning

Definition of Ghostjacking

: an attack in which malicious instructions are planted in logs, alerts, telemetry, or other data that an AI agent later reads, causing the agent to misuse its legitimate tools and permissions on the attacker's behalf
- The blocked web request became a Ghostjacking vector when its poisoned header was copied verbatim into a log reviewed by the operations agent.
- Separating read-only telemetry tools from write-capable tools can reduce the blast radius of a Ghostjacking attack.

Origin & history

first known use2026

Tenet Security introduced the name Ghostjacking for research presented at DEF CON 34 in August 2026, extending its earlier Agentjacking work from poisoned error reports to multi-platform attack chains involving observability data and agent tools. Nigeria's national computer emergency response team, ngCERT, issued a high-risk advisory on the technique on October 6, 2026.

Test yourself

Which of these is the meaning of Ghostjacking?

Related terms

agent hijacking an attack that redirects an AI agent's goals, reasoning, or tool actions toward an attacker's… prompt injection an attack in which hidden instructions are slipped into content an AI reads, such as a web… MCP Model Context Protocol: an open standard for connecting AI applications to outside tools and… tool use a model's ability to call external tools, such as a search engine, calculator, code runner, or… semantic privilege escalation a security failure in which an AI agent stays within its formally granted technical… sandbox escape an event in which code or an AI agent gets beyond the technical restrictions of its isolated…

Cite this entry

"Ghostjacking." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/ghostjacking/. Accessed 8 Oct. 2026.