# Urgency and Coercion Pressure in Agent Input

- **Severity:** High
- **Signature ID:** `63cb1a2f-a7e0-5d3d-9b0e-795d70849fbc`
- **MITRE ATLAS:** AML.T0051 (LLM Prompt Injection)
- **OWASP:** LLM01 (Prompt Injection), ASI06 (Goal and Instruction Manipulation)

## Summary

This detects text fed to an AI agent that combines a manufactured sense of urgency with an explicit instruction to bypass a safety check. The idea is to rush the agent into acting before it can verify a request, rather than pretending to have authority.

## How the attack works

An attacker crafts input containing phrases that pair time pressure or threatened consequences with a direct instruction to skip verification, approval, or another control. The agent receives this input through whatever channel feeds it text — user messages, retrieved content, or similar. If it complies, it performs an action without the check that would normally catch a malicious or mistaken request. The rule specifically looks for urgency combined with a bypass instruction, not urgency alone, since phrases like 'this is urgent' or 'ASAP' are common in normal work.

## Why it matters

An agent tricked this way can execute actions — approvals, transactions, data changes — that a verification step was meant to block, leading to fraud, unauthorized changes, or data exposure.

## What you can do

- Review agent logs for inputs that pair deadline or threat language with instructions to skip a check, approval, or confirmation.
- Keep verification steps mandatory and non-overridable by user-supplied instructions, regardless of stated urgency.
- Train and test agents against social-engineering-style prompts, including manufactured urgency, as part of security review.
- Distinguish legitimate break-glass or incident-response procedures with documented approval trails from ad hoc urgency claims in agent input.

## Known benign look-alikes

- Genuine incident response where an operator really is bypassing a control
- Security training and tabletop exercise material
- Runbooks that document an emergency break-glass procedure
- Post-incident writeups quoting the pressure language that was used

## References

- https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1566/
- https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1656/
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6372438

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Source: https://www.netzilo.com/threats/urgency-manipulation