Attack of the automated ops. [Research Saturday]

CyberWire Daily

N2K Networks, Inc.

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4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

Today we are joined by Dario Pasquini, Principal Researcher at RSAC, sharing the team's work on WhenAIOpsBecome “AI Oops”: Subverting LLM-driven IT Operations via Telemetry Manipulation. A first-of-its-kind security analysis showing that LLM-driven AIOps agents can be tricked by manipulated telemetry, turning automation itself into a new attack vector. The researchers introduce AIOpsDoom, an automated reconnaissance + fuzzing + LLM-driven telemetry-injection attack that performs “adversarial reward-hacking” to coerce agents into harmful remediations—even without prior knowledge of the target and even against some prompt-defense tools. They also present AIOpsShield, a telemetry-sanitization defense that reliably blocks these attacks without harming normal agent performance, underscoring the urgent need for security-aware AIOps design. The research can be found here: ⁠When AIOps Become “AI Oops”: Subverting LLM-driven IT Operations via Telemetry Manipulation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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1:22.2	Thank you. Hello everyone and welcome to the CyberWires Research Saturday.
1:35.7	I'm Dave Bittner, and this is our weekly conversation with researchers and analysts
1:40.9	tracking down the threats and vulnerabilities, solving some of the hard problems
1:45.4	and protecting ourselves in a rapidly evolving cyberspace. Thanks for joining us.
1:56.1	First of all, the term IOPs stands for AI for IT applications.
2:03.6	And it's a term that has been around for a long time actually.
2:08.6	We saw the first appearance of the term in 2016,
2:14.6	where it was many about using machine learning models
2:18.1	to perform anomaly detections.
2:21.1	That's Dario Pasquini, principal researcher at RSAC Labs.
	...

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