Data Exfiltration

Data exfiltration in agentic systems occurs when an agent sends sensitive information, such as API keys, source code, customer data, or environment variables, to unauthorized external destinations. This happens through prompt injection (a malicious instruction tells the agent to include secrets in an outbound tool call), through tool misuse (the agent includes sensitive data in a response), or through context leakage (conversation history containing secrets reaches an unintended party). The risk increases sharply in agentic coding tools because they typically have access to the full project environment, including .env files, git history, and production credentials, so defending against exfiltration requires output filtering, network-level controls on which endpoints agents can reach, and secret management practices that keep sensitive values out of agent-accessible paths.