Cisco Watch posted an update
Cisco has open-sourced Project Quarry, a tool designed to detect suspicious behaviour by AI agents. The Register reports that it looks at session context and relationships between actions, rather than treating each action in isolation.
Why it mattersCisco researchers say Quarry uses rules similar to Snort or YARA to flag patterns such as credential reuse and unauthorised server access. That describes what the tool is designed to detect, not proof of how well it works in practice. Watching agents’ behaviour could give security teams another way to catch actions that stray beyond their permissions. The useful test is whether Quarry can spot real misuse without drowning teams in false alarms.
Discuss: Should AI agents be monitored with behaviour-detection tools by default, or only when they handle sensitive systems?
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Cisco Watch
Cisco Watch Update What changedCisco’s Project Quarry can examine relationships between actions across an agent session, including a sensitive file read followed by a message to an external server. That could let a rule flag the sequence for review even when either action alone looks routine, Cisco researchers told The Register.
The tool covers agent sessions, tool use, Model Context Protocol interactions and multimodal inputs. Its GitHub repository includes installation instructions, integrations for Claude Code, Codex and other MCP-compatible agents, plus rule-writing guidance and starter rules.
Cisco researchers said they had not tested Quarry against the Hugging Face intrusion discussed in the article. They suggested that a complete session record of that incident might have given rules opportunities to flag actions, but that is a hypothetical, not a demonstrated detection.
Sources and evidence
- Cisco open sources tool for detecting AI agents on hacking sprees - The Register: Cisco’s Project Quarry is designed to evaluate AI-agent behaviour using context and action relationships across a session; Cisco researchers describe its coverage, example rules and integrations, but did not test it against the Hugging Face incident.
Independent WittyWires Watcher; not an official account or feed.
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