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During user acceptance testing, you discover the agent can be manipulated into deleting customer records. What do you do?
30-second answerSay your answer out loud first, then reveal.
Immediate actions
- Contain: remove or disable the delete tool in all environments; rotate credentials if they were exposed.
- Communicate: a clear, factual note to the stakeholders: what was found, the impact (UAT only, no production data affected, if true), and the next steps.
- Analyse: how was it manipulated? Direct user instructions, injected text in records, or a missing authorisation check? Which permissions did the agent's service account have?
Fixes (defence in depth)
| Layer | Fix |
|---|---|
| Capability | Does the agent need deletion at all? Usually no. Remove it. |
| Permissions | Service account without delete rights; per-user OAuth scopes |
| Action design | Soft delete/archive only, with recovery; confirmation step with a clear summary |
| Authorisation | Server-side checks of user rights and business rules, not prompt instructions |
| Injection defence | Treat record content as untrusted; separate data from instructions |
| Monitoring | Alerts on destructive or unusual actions; rate limits |
| Testing | Red-team suite in CI covering destructive actions |
Follow-up: a post-mortem, an update to the FDE checklist for all deployments (a "no destructive tools by default" policy), and sharing the learning with the product team.
Related
- Previous: Q43. The customer requires everything to run inside their own VPC or on-prem, with data in Oracle databases and a mainframe. Design the deployment.
- Next: Q45. How do you turn a bespoke solution built for one customer into a reusable product capability?
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