Apono CTF: Hack Our AI Agents If You Can

Gabriel Avner

March 25, 2026

Apono CTF: Hack Our AI Agents If You Can post thumbnail

AI agents are no longer a future problem. They’re already inside enterprise environments, handling deployments, processing payroll, managing access, and they carry enormous privileges that make them dangerous to trick.

Apono2Pwn is a Capture the Flag designed to show you exactly what that looks like in practice.

What is Apono2Pwn?

A simulated company powered entirely by autonomous AI agents. No employees, just agents with real roles: HR, DevOps, Finance. They run on a live AWS infrastructure, make decisions, handle tasks, and interact with each other.

Your mission: social-engineer them into doing things they shouldn’t.

Join the game on Discord, interact directly with the agents in their channels, and capture flags by manipulating them into crossing lines they’re supposed to hold. Every successful attack earns points. The challenges range from beginner-friendly to deeply technical. If you can convince a chatbot to do something it shouldn’t, you’re already halfway there.

Why We Built This

The attack vectors in this CTF are the same ones showing up in real enterprise environments right now.

Agents are highly privileged. AI agents are typically granted far-reaching access to do their jobs. That access doesn’t go away when someone hands them a malicious instruction. The privileges are always standing, always available to be abused.

They’re easy to trick. Agents trust their inputs. A well-crafted prompt can manipulate their behavior, bypass guardrails, and get them to act against their own constraints, the same way social engineering works on humans, but faster and at scale.

Agents can hallucinate their way into harm. Agents don’t always know what they don’t know. They can confidently take actions based on false premises, misinterpret instructions in ways that cause real damage, or be led to believe a harmful request is legitimate.

Privilege escalation is real. Compromise one agent and you can pivot through its tool access to reach systems far beyond its intended scope. Standing privileges across a connected agent network create a blast radius most teams haven’t mapped.

Attacks look like normal operations. There’s no obvious alarm when an agent is manipulated. Without proper runtime controls, you won’t know it happened until it’s too late.

These aren’t theoretical. They’re the same risks we’ve spent years helping enterprises eliminate for human identities, and they’re now showing up at machine speed, at scale, in agentic systems.

You can learn more about the risks facing your agents at our Agent Privilege Lab where we break down how frameworks from OWASP, MITRE, and others see the risks. There’s also a simulator that lets you play with guardrail configurations and generate reports to better understand your risk posture.

This is more than just fun and games. It’s a preview of what comes next.

Every flag captured in this CTF represents a real attack vector that enterprises deploying agents need to defend against. To learn about how Apono’s Agent Privilege Guard addresses these risks at runtime, visit our agentic security product page.