# Cisco releases open-source tool to detect risky AI agent behaviour

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/cisco-open-sources-tool-for-detecting-ai-agents-on-hacking-sprees/
- Published: 2026-10-28T12:00:00+00:00
- Updated: 2026-10-28T12:23:39+00:00
- Original publisher: The Register
- Original article: https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/28/cisco-open-sources-tool-for-detecting-ai-agents-on-hacking-sprees/5305867
- Topics: AI, Cybersecurity, Technology

## Key points

- Cisco has open-sourced Project Quarry to monitor AI agent behaviour.
- It looks for risky sequences of actions across a session.
- Rules can flag sensitive data being sent to external services.

## Summary

Cisco has released Project Quarry, an open-source tool that analyses AI agents’ behaviour to help security teams spot risky activity. It is designed to assess actions in context across an entire session, since a sequence of individually ordinary steps can combine to expose data or enable an attack.

Quarry covers conversations with language models, agent tool use, Model Context Protocol interactions and multimodal inputs. Its rules can flag patterns such as reading a sensitive file and then sending data to an external service, or using credentials elsewhere; Cisco says it might have identified warning signs in the Hugging Face intrusion, though it has not tested the tool against that incident’s data. The project includes setup guidance, integrations and starter rules.

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