Jan 11, 2026

Agent Attacks via Memory Injection

Leonidas Raghav, Choong Kai Zhe

🏆 4th Place Winner

LLMs have recently adopted persistent memory to provide models with better user knowledge and personalisation. However, this introduces a new vector for adversarial manipulation. This report investigates Memory Injection, a threat model where adversaries exploit indirect prompt injection within web content to poison an agent's long-term memory. Employing user manipulation scenarios, we show that memory attacks, should they succeed, are effective at changing model behaviour towards the user, often more so than a direct system prompt. Hence, this highlights the need for more robust evaluations of memory updates in agentic memory systems.

Reviewer's Comments

Reviewer's Comments

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This is an interesting and underexplored area: how prompt injection could be used to manipulate users. The design seems appropriate and the results were very striking! The authors did a great job at testing follow up explanations / hypotheses.

I think the submission could be strengthened by providing more details about the mechanics of the injection (in particular whether the agent scaffold used native APIs which I would expect to have stronger guardrails) or external. In addition an appendix with more examples of the exact prompts and web text would be useful.

In future work it would be great to see the authors measure the effectiveness of the manipulation on real users though the LLM-as-judge is a great start.

This seems like good quality and important AI security research! Honestly I couldn’t quite tell if it aligns with the “manipulation” scope of the hackathon (because it feels like an even more general and important security vulnerability), but in any case the authors do focus on the domain of manipulation, and the attack vector (poisoning persistent memory via hidden web content) is for sure very concerning for agentic systems. The findings are honestly pretty crazy (100% ASR on memory injection attacks for grok-4-fast??). It’s good at least to see that GPT-4.1 is doing better 😬

Cite this work

@misc {

title={

(HckPrj) Agent Attacks via Memory Injection

},

author={

Leonidas Raghav, Choong Kai Zhe

},

date={

1/11/26

},

organization={Apart Research},

note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},

howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}

}

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This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.
This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.