Cisco Open-Sources Quarry To Detect Multi-Step Attacks By AI Agents

Cisco has open-sourced Project Quarry, a new security framework designed to detect attacks involving artificial intelligence agents when malicious intent is spread across several individually harmless-looking actions.

The system is aimed at a growing weakness in conventional cybersecurity controls: many security tools judge one action at a time, while autonomous AI agents can read files, call tools, browse external services and execute commands across long sequences of steps.

Cisco says an individual step may appear legitimate, but the complete sequence can reveal data theft, privilege escalation or other harmful behaviour.

Project Quarry is intended to give defenders a common language for describing and detecting those patterns before they develop into a full security incident.

Quarry Looks At The Full Sequence Of Agent Actions

Traditional security controls frequently analyse actions in isolation.

A command to read a configuration file may be legitimate. Sending a request to an…