HireNinja: Blog

Summary: In the past few days, enterprise agent platforms doubled down on security and control—Microsoft’s new Agent 365 emphasizes registries, permissions, and telemetry—while vendors like Salesforce (Agentforce 360) and OpenAI (AgentKit + evals) push harder into production agent use cases. If you’re scaling agents in 2026, you need a concrete hardening plan—now. This playbook gives you a 30‑day path to reduce the top risks: prompt injection, tool abuse, and data leakage. citeturn1search0turn0search4turn0search0

Who this is for

• Startup founders and product leaders turning pilots into production agents.
• E‑commerce operators adding checkout recovery, support, or SEO agents.
• Engineers and security leaders tasked with governance, observability, and cost control.

Why now

Agent platforms are maturing fast (registries, policy, telemetry), funding is flowing into customer‑facing agents (e.g., Wonderful’s $100M Series A), and boards want near‑term ROI. That mix elevates security and reliability from “nice to have” to “ship‑blocker.” citeturn0search1

What you’ll ship in 30 days

Four weekly milestones you can run in parallel with feature work.

Week 1 — Inventory, identity, and least privilege

1. Stand up an Agent Registry (owner, purpose, tools, data access, environments, secrets, PII tags). Microsoft’s Agent 365 story shows why: you can’t secure what you can’t see. Even if you don’t use Agent 365, the pattern (central registry + access controls + telemetry) applies. citeturn1search0
2. Adopt OAuth 2.1 + scoped tokens for MCP. Enforce PKCE, sender‑constrained tokens (mTLS/DPoP), and scope minimization. Start sessions with read‑only scopes; elevate just‑in‑time with explicit challenges. Reference the MCP security best practices for scope design. citeturn5search0turn5search1
3. Define tool risk tiers (R0 read‑only, R1 write‑in‑app, R2 cross‑system writes, R3 financial/PII). Require human approval for R2–R3. Document the approval path in the registry.
4. Fence secrets: short‑lived credentials from a vault, no plaintext env vars in agent sandboxes; rotate on deployment.
5. Set vendor‑neutral interop goals: prefer platforms supporting A2A interop to avoid lock‑in and maintain cross‑agent policy enforcement. citeturn0search6

Related how‑tos on our blog: AI Agent Control Plane for 2026 and 48‑Hour AI Agent Governance.

Week 2 — Guardrails, sandboxes, and input hygiene

1. Policy‑enforce tool calls: place an authorization proxy in front of MCP servers (e.g., OPA, API gateway) to allow/deny specific tool functions, even if upstream scopes are broad. Align policies with your risk tiers and log every elevation. citeturn4search1
2. Neutralize prompt injection: apply allowlists, strong system prompts, content filtering, and structured input validation; consider model‑agnostic pre‑filters shown to reduce attack success. For web‑navigation agents, test against the WASP benchmark to quantify resilience. citeturn5academia12turn4academia16
3. Browser and file sandboxes: isolate downloads, disable dangerous schemes, and strip active content before parsing. Treat links and HTML as untrusted instructions to an agent.
4. Memory safety: separate long‑term memory stores by environment and tenant; enforce schema‑validated writes. See our Agent Memory plan.

Week 3 — Observe what matters

1. Instrument with OpenTelemetry for GenAI: capture agent spans, model spans, events, and key metrics (latency, token usage, errors, tool outcomes). Use the emerging GenAI semantic conventions so dashboards and alerts are portable across vendors. citeturn3search1turn3search3turn3search0
2. Define Agent SLOs: success rate, handoff rate, time‑to‑first‑token, time‑to‑objective, and cost per successful task. Wire alerts to policy violations (e.g., R2/R3 actions without approval) and injection indicators (sudden tool‑call drift). See our Agent SLOs and Agent FinOps.
3. Hunt for identity fragmentation: unify human and machine identity; kill static secrets; prefer ephemeral, sender‑constrained tokens. This is a top MCP pain point in the wild. citeturn4news14

Week 4 — Red team and go‑live gates

1. Run agent evals before every release: scenario datasets, trace grading, and external‑model scoring to catch regressions. OpenAI’s Agent Evals provides a reproducible baseline you can script into CI. citeturn4search2
2. Simulate real attacks: indirect injections in emails, calendars, product pages; tool‑squatting and rug‑pull scenarios for MCP; objective‑drift under long‑running plans. Use WASP‑style web agent tests to validate browser agents. citeturn4academia16
3. Cut a production‑ready runbook: rollback rules, approval matrix, budget guardrails, observability checks, and vendor‑specific mitigations for platforms like Agentforce 360 and Agent 365. citeturn0search4turn1search0

Design patterns and decisions that pay off

• Start with a control plane (registry + policy + telemetry) so you can adopt platforms without lock‑in. A2A‑compliant ecosystems make cross‑vendor agents safer to coordinate. citeturn0search6
• Prefer structured I/O (schemas over free‑form) to reduce injection surfaces and simplify tracing.
• Gate high‑risk actions with human approval and post‑facto audits; treat agents like interns with narrow, escalating privileges. citeturn5news16

What about new threats?

Research keeps finding weaknesses (e.g., web‑agent injections) and proposing new defenses. Expect your playbook to evolve quarterly; the goal is disciplined iteration, not perfection. citeturn4academia16

Before you ship

• Pass your eval suite (Week 4) with no critical regressions. citeturn4search2
• Verify OTel dashboards cover SLOs, costs, and risky tool calls (R2–R3). citeturn3search1
• Stage‑gate via governance: see our 48‑hour governance checklist.
• For customer‑facing agents, run a focused red‑team sprint using our 48‑hour red‑team guide.

Vendor landscape: what to ask

Whether you’re evaluating Agentforce 360, Agent 365, or AgentKit add‑ons, ask:

1. Do you emit OpenTelemetry GenAI spans, agent spans, and events out‑of‑the‑box? citeturn3search1
2. How do you enforce least privilege across tools (OAuth 2.1 + scopes + approval proxies)? Show policy examples. citeturn5search1
3. Can we run reproducible agent evals in CI? Which failure classes are caught? citeturn4search2
4. Do you support A2A‑style interop for cross‑vendor agent collaboration with shared policy? citeturn0search6

Next: apply it to revenue

Put this plan to work on a real use case. For e‑commerce, see our 24‑Hour Checkout Recovery Agent. For organic growth, build an Agentic SEO Ops stack. For platform choices, run our 2026 RFP checklist.

Call to action: Need a hand instrumenting OTel, locking down MCP, or wiring Agent Evals into CI? Book a working session with HireNinja—ship your baseline in 30 days.