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MITRE ATT&CK v20 — NEWSJACK SELF-CHECK

What is prompt injection — and would your agent survive MITRE's 9 new AI attack techniques?

On October 13, 2026, MITRE released ATT&CK v20 with nine new Enterprise techniques and sub-techniques — five aimed squarely at AI agents. This free 9-question quiz maps your declared defenses against each one and tells you, technique by technique, what would plausibly survive and what would degrade.

Nine new ATT&CK IDs. One of them — T1685.007 "Impair Autonomous Defenses" — is the first formal taxonomy entry for attacks aimed at your agent's own guardrails. Declare your defenses below and get a per-technique survival verdict. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.

Short answer: what is prompt injection? It's an attack where malicious instructions override an AI's intended behavior — typed directly into the interface (direct, now T1699) or hidden in content the AI retrieves (indirect, now T1698). ATT&CK v20 gave each its own technique ID, alongside AI-enabled exfiltration, AI result poisoning, and — for the first time — a formal entry for impairing the agent's autonomous defenses.

What is prompt injection? (The 60-second definition)

What is prompt injection, precisely? It's any attack that smuggles instructions into an AI system so it behaves the way the attacker wants instead of the way you configured it. The direct flavor is the obvious one: someone types "ignore your instructions and…" into the chat box. The indirect flavor is the dangerous one for agents: the instructions sit inside a web page, a PDF, an email thread, or even a tool description, and your agent picks them up while doing legitimate work — then treats them as commands.

MITRE's October 2026 update split the two apart because they need different defenses. Direct prompt injection (T1699) is countered at the input boundary — instruction hierarchies, input validation, approval gates on sensitive actions. Indirect prompt injection (T1698) is countered at the retrieval boundary — treating fetched content as untrusted data, reviewing tool descriptions, and never letting retrieved text reach a tool call unexamined.

The taxonomy now tracks the full attack chain. The five AI-focused entries run from resource development (T1608.007 AI Result Poisoning — seeding content so AI search cites it) through execution (T1699/T1698) to exfiltration (T1700 AI-Enabled Exfiltration) and defense evasion (T1685.007 Impair Autonomous Defenses). News coverage of the release is consistent on the nine IDs. (cybersecuritynews.com; 4m4.it — October 2026, news coverage, not independently verified)

The 9 new techniques in ATT&CK v20

Enterprise matrix, per October 2026 reporting. The quiz below scores your declared defenses against each one.

IDTechniqueTactic
T1699Direct Prompt InjectionExecution
T1698Indirect Prompt InjectionExecution
T1700AI-Enabled ExfiltrationExfiltration
T1608.007Stage Capabilities: AI Result PoisoningResource Development
T1685.007Disable or Modify Tools: Impair Autonomous DefensesDefense Evasion
T1696Anti-Automation EvasionDefense Evasion
T1696.001Automate CAPTCHA CompletionDefense Evasion
T1696.002Avoid CAPTCHADefense Evasion
T1697Steal Application Specific PasswordsCredential Access
Search interest is real. The question this page answers — "what is prompt injection" — draws about 1,300 US monthly searches (Google Ads API data via swfte.com, October 2026). Defenders are looking this up because the taxonomy just changed under them.
The scale of the update. One independent write-up of the release puts the Enterprise matrix at 222 techniques growing to 227, and sub-techniques from 475 to 479 — the nine new entries account for the delta. (skillthropic.com, October 2026 — news analysis, not independently verified)

IDs, names, and tactics follow the public ATT&CK taxonomy as reported in October 2026. No technique IDs are invented; see the official ATT&CK site for authoritative definitions.

Which of your defenses would survive?

Declare your defenses honestly — one question per new technique. This is a heuristic self-check against a taxonomy, not a live attack and not a penetration test.

Your 30-second win — copy and share your result:


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Then retake the quiz. Every red answer is a line an attacker would circle.

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Frequently asked questions

What is prompt injection?

Prompt injection is an attack where malicious instructions override or hijack an AI system's intended behavior. In a direct attack, the instructions are typed straight into the AI's interface; in an indirect attack, they are hidden in content the AI later retrieves or processes — a web page, document, email, or tool description — so the AI treats attacker text as instructions.

What is ATT&CK v20's Impair Autonomous Defenses (T1685.007)?

T1685.007, Disable or Modify Tools: Impair Autonomous Defenses, is the sub-technique MITRE added in ATT&CK v20 for malicious interference with AI-assisted security tooling — getting an automated defensive analyzer to ignore, misjudge, or stop analyzing malicious activity. News coverage describes it as the first formal ATT&CK entry aimed at the agent's own guardrails rather than at the target system.

Is this quiz a penetration test?

No. This quiz never touches your systems — it asks about your declared defenses and maps the answers against the ATT&CK v20 taxonomy as a heuristic. A low score means your declared defenses have gaps worth closing; it does not prove you are exploitable, and a high score does not prove you are safe. Real assurance still requires adversarial testing.

What should I fix first if my score is low?

Start with the two cheapest, highest-leverage controls: treat retrieved content as untrusted data (blunts indirect injection and result poisoning) and restrict outbound network to an allowlist (blunts AI-enabled exfiltration). Then add an enforced human-approval gate on external sends and make your agent logs tamper-evident so interference with your own defenses is detectable.

Where can I read the official technique definitions?

MITRE publishes the ATT&CK knowledge base at attack.mitre.org, where each technique and sub-technique has its own page with description, detection, and mitigation guidance. This quiz's IDs, names, and tactics follow that public taxonomy as reported in October 2026 coverage; the site is the authoritative reference for exact definitions.

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Built by Ingenious AI — technique IDs follow the public MITRE ATT&CK taxonomy as reported in October 2026 news coverage.
This page is general information, not security advice — validate your defenses with adversarial testing.
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