Skip to main content
Blog

NorthLight

NorthLight is written by Geordie’s researchers, engineers and product specialists. Our aim is to light the way for security, IT and AI teams navigating the new waters of secure agentic operations.

You'll find real accounts of what we see in customer environments, key product releases, and practical guidance for leading and operationalizing teams.

The NorthLight Team  
FIELD NOTES

Incident Analysis

Short accounts of what we have seen in real customer environments.

002 · Large consumer marketplace · Oct 9 A supply-chain incident made an AI coding blind spot visible
001 · Financial services and investment firm · Oct 9 Shadow agent activity crossed an organizational boundary
All field notes  

All posts

Topic

Showing 40 of 40 posts

Governance & Compliance

Agent Behavior Comes From More Than the Model

Model capability is one input to what an agent does. Separating three terms shows where the rest comes from: model, agent and harness.

Hanah Darley
Observability & Detection

Personal Agents Act Without Being Asked

One personal agent posted a user's private financial audit into his company's exec Slack channel. Another ran 155 traces and used more than 300,000 tokens without a single prompt. We look at what GrokBot and OpenAI's Dots did on their own, and what security teams need to see as it happens.

Hanah Darley
Observability & Detection

What happens when an agent tampers with its own record?

With agents our industry has a chain-of-custody problem. Until a record leaves the agent’s control, the custodian of the evidence is the same agent being investigated.

Benji Weber
Observability & Detection

Personal agents, shared platforms, and unintended disclosure

Shane Mac’s account of an agent posting his bank balances into his company’s executive Slack channel is worth reading closely. It describes a failure pattern that will recur as agents share context, tools, and outputs.

Hanah Darley
Governance & Compliance

How Security Teams Can Operationalize the OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10

OWASP’s new Agentic Skills Top 10 gives security teams a shared vocabulary for agent skills. Most of its checks assume you already know what’s installed. Here's our read on the four risks to prioritize which unlock all the others - and why these can only be realized through a true behavioral understanding of your agents

Naz Bozdemir
Cost Intelligence

The Hidden Cost (and Savings) of AI Agent Skills

The same agent capability can cost ~10,000 tokens as an MCP server or ~100 as a skill. What that gap costs at scale - and why it's a governance signal.

Geordie
Discovery & Posture

The Golden Catalog Is a Comforting Fiction

Pre-approved agent template libraries optimize for control over a static asset, when the thing they're trying to control isn't static at all.

Hanah Darley
Observability & Detection

Context as the Attack Surface: A New Class of Agent Compromise

A new academic paper shows AI agents can be compromised without a single malicious instruction, just by corrupting what the agent trusts. Here's how the attack works, why most current defenses miss it, and where security teams should focus instead.

Hanah Darley
Discovery & Posture

AI Agent Guardrails Explained: What They Cover and What They Don't

Guardrails are often treated as a universal safety layer for AI agents, but they're not. This piece explains what guardrails actually control, why they behave differently across coding agents, SaaS integrations, and custom-built systems, and how they differ from the runtime agentic remediations that sit alongside them.

Hanah Darley
Observability & Detection

Agentic AI Governance: Why MCP Gateways Fall Short

The autonomous nature of AI agents requires purpose-built agentic AI governance platforms. These complement MCP gateway infrastructure with behavioral observability, contextual risk assessment, and dynamic intervention capabilities.

Hanah Darley
Governance & Compliance

Governing AI Agents: Best Practices to Scale Safely

Building on research from Berkeley, this article outlines five barriers to enterprise AI adoption and the AI governance best practices to overcome them with visibility and accountability.

Hanah Darley
Governance & Compliance

Enterprise AI Governance: A Practical Roadmap to Scale AI Agents

Enterprises are experimenting with AI agents, but scaling safely requires enterprise AI governance. This guide outlines how to move AI adoption from experimentation to enterprise-wide deployment with clarity, governance, and trust.

Hanah Darley
Protocols & Interoperability

From Connectivity to Collaboration: APIs, MCPs, and A2A in Agentic Plans

APIs, MCPs, and A2A form the foundation of AI Agent systems, yet their roles are often fragmented. This article explains how they connect, align, and collaborate, giving leaders the clarity to evaluate, govern, and scale AI adoption with confidence.

Hanah Darley
Observability & Detection

Rethinking Security: The Limits of Endpoint Controls in an AI Agent World

Endpoint controls like EDR and XDR remain critical to enterprise defense, but they weren’t built for AI Agents. As these systems operate beyond traditional endpoints, leaders need new approaches to gain visibility, reduce risk, and extend security with confidence.

Hanah Darley
Observability & Detection

The New Attack Surface: Why AI Agents Need Taint Analysis

As AI Agents evolve into autonomous actors, securing them requires techniques beyond identity and access controls. This article explores how taint analysis can extend visibility into agent workflows, uncover hidden risks, and strengthen enterprise AI security.

Colin Ife
Elsewhere in Resources

Our definitions and gated deep dives live next door

Knowledge Center

Plain answers to the questions teams ask about agents, MCP and skills.

Deep Dives

Field guides and long-form reports, free to download.

We use analytics cookies to understand how our site is used, and you can switch them off in Preferences. With your permission, we’d also like to use marketing cookies to measure our advertising and recognize the companies that visit us. By clicking “Accept all”, you agree to marketing cookies as well. View our Privacy Policy for more information.

We use analytics and marketing cookies to understand how our site is used, measure our advertising and recognize the companies that visit us. These cookies are already on. To switch them off, click “Deny all”, or choose which to keep in Preferences. View our Privacy Policy for more information.

By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information.