mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

APEX-Harm: Evaluating Agent Safety in Shared Professional Workspaces

arXiv 2610.13623 ↗First posted 9 Oct 2026cs.CR cs.CLcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Professional agents increasingly work through command-line interfaces and multiple tools over shared workspaces containing files, messages, and business applications. These environments create safety risks that are difficult to capture with attacks placed at a single, known read location. We introduce APEX-Harm, a benchmark for evaluating prompt and script injection against long-horizon agents performing finance, consulting, and legal tasks in large workspaces. Each task contains 115 to 328 files, together with email, calendar, chat, document, spreadsheet, PDF, and code-execution tools exposed through MCP servers. The benchmark includes six attack categories covering static and dynamic injections, task-specific script replacement, and attacker-provided generic scripts, and evaluates attack success, exposure, and task performance. We evaluate 12 frontier models on 180 task instances per model. Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 have the lowest overall attack success rates (8% and 20%), while task-specific script replacement and attacker-provided generic script attacks remain substantially more effective, averaging 81-84% and 73% attack success, respectively. Gemini 3.8 Flash achieves the highest mean task score (0.877) while still exhibiting a 33% attack success rate. These results show that completing the requested task is not sufficient evidence of safe behavior: an agent can produce a correct deliverable while also performing an unauthorized action in the workspace.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 23 of its 56 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2026.

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23 of 56 references.

References · 23

  1. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 2,006
  2. 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,443
  3. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,195
  4. 2023Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandboxcited by 548
  5. 2024InjecAgent: Benchmarking Indirect Prompt Injections in Tool-Integrated Large Language Model Agentscited by 538
  6. 2024AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agentscited by 437
  7. 2024AgentPoison: Red-teaming LLM Agents via Poisoning Memory or Knowledge Basescited by 429
  8. 2024Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agentscited by 369
  9. 2024TheAgentCompany: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Taskscited by 326
  10. 2025Defeating Prompt Injections by Designcited by 297
  11. 2025WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attackscited by 157
  12. 2025OS-Harm: A Benchmark for Measuring Safety of Computer Use Agentscited by 111
11 more
  1. 2024WorkArena++: Towards Compositional Planning and Reasoning-based Common Knowledge Work Taskscited by 90
  2. 2026Skill-Inject: Measuring Agent Vulnerability to Skill File Attackscited by 90
  3. 2026AgentDyn: Are Your Agent Security Defenses Deployable in Real-World Dynamic Environments?cited by 59
  4. 2026AgentLAB: Benchmarking LLM Agents against Long-Horizon Attackscited by 39
  5. 2026APEX-Agentscited by 32
  6. 2025It's a TRAP! Task-Redirecting Agent Persuasion Benchmark for Web Agentscited by 10
  7. 2026OMNI-LEAK: Orchestrator Multi-Agent Network Induced Data Leakagecited by 9
  8. 2026Safeguarding LLM Agents against Long-Horizon Threats via Shadow Memorycited by 7
  9. 2025Multimodal Safety Evaluation in Generative Agent Social Simulationscited by 6
  10. 2026LITMUS: Benchmarking Behavioral Jailbreaks of LLM Agents in Real OS Environmentscited by 5
  11. 2026The Authorization-Execution Gap Is a Major Safety and Security Problem in Open-World Agentscited by 4

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  1. 2026Domain-Conditioned Safety in Frontier Computer-Using Agents: A 793-Episode Browser Benchmark, a Coding-Domain Cross-Reference, and a Reproducibility Audit of Recent Red-Teaming
  2. 2026The Blind Spot of Agent Safety: How Benign User Instructions Expose Critical Vulnerabilities in Computer-Use Agents
  3. 2026Workspace Topology as an Attack Vector in Agentic Coding Assistants
  4. 2026AgentHazard: A Benchmark for Evaluating Harmful Behavior in Computer-Use Agents
  5. 2026ActBench: Self-Evolving Benchmark of Behavioral Safety in Cowork Agents
  6. 2026Beyond the Payload: How User Invocation Shapes Coding Agent Vulnerability to Repository Poisoning
  7. 2026Prompt Injection Attacks on Agentic Coding Assistants: A Systematic Analysis of Vulnerabilities in Skills, Tools, and Protocol Ecosystems
  8. 2025MCPTox: A Benchmark for Tool Poisoning Attack on Real-World MCP Servers