Skills Security

Discover, assess, and govern every skill and plugin that AI agents use across all employee endpoints.

AI Agent Skills: The Trojan Horse in the Agentic Fabric

Skills are modular instruction packages that expand AI agents’ capabilities and expertise on demand. They dictate code execution, tool usage, and access to system resources, without human oversight.

Pre-AI era security tools are blind to agentic AI skills, hidden instructions, and runtime tool selections

Employees use unverified skills as easily as they install browser extensions, and agents autonomously choose and invoke them without human review.

Threats

Prompt injection

Poisoned context in plain sight.

Data exfiltration

Sensitive data and credentials exposed

Rogue agent behavior

Good agents gone bad through legitimate skills.

Supply chain risk

Malicious dependencies with consequences.

Security Challenges

Hidden functionality

Plugins that do more than they claim.

Shadow AI

Skills and plugins that security never approved

Privilege escalation

Accessing resources outside the approved scope.

AI policies on paper

Governance that never leaves the slide deck

Secure Every Skill Across Your Agentic Fabric with Backslash

Backslash provides centralized visibility and protection for all skills across endpoints, continuously discovering the skills in use, evaluating their risk posture, and letting you define guardrails that govern how they're used.

Discover

Complete Visibility into Every Skill in Use

See every skill running across your fleet, including ones installed under personal accounts that were never reported to IT or skills invoked autonomously by agents.

Assess

Continuous Skill Risk Analysis

Identify potentially dangerous scripts. Backslash parses Skill.md files and associated Python, JavaScript, or Shell scripts to identify malicious intent and risky patterns.

Govern

Security Policy Enforcement

Control which AI skills can be used across the organization. Define granular policies to govern skills usage, choosing whether to alert or remove from the developer environment.

Protect

Real-Time Protection

Prevent data exfiltration, unauthorized code execution, privilege escalation, and other risky actions that are the result of compromised or malicious skills.

Investigate

Forensic-ready Audit Trail

Reconstruct the kill chain. Capture full tracing of agent prompts, processes and actions, giving security teams a complete audit trail to support forensic investigation, incident response, and compliance.

Backslash gives us full visibility and governance over our evolving AI coding ecosystem, helps us triage what actually matters, and never gets in the way of velocity.

Chris Niggel, Head of Security

Turn the lights on

Move from "we think our developers are using DeepSeek" to a live map of every AI tool, model, MCP, and integration in use.

Eliminate Shadow AI

Policy enforcement moves from a document that developers ignore to a centralized control layer. Shadow AI drops to zero for governed tooling.

AI audit-ready

For EU AI Act, NIS2, DORA, and SOC 2 obligations, Backslash generates the evidence of AI governance controls and events tracing automatically.

Be the Dept. of YES

Developers and workforce users adopt AI tools freely, enabled with guardrails — achieving significant efficiency gains without the exposure.

Scan any AI agent skill to ensure your AI agents don’t expose your workstations, network, and data to risk

Skills Security Scanner

Common questions about agentic endpoint security

Why do AI Skills create security risks?

Skills introduce third-party code and instructions directly into an AI agent's decision-making context. A malicious, compromised, or poorly designed Skill can manipulate agent behavior to exfiltrate sensitive enterprise data, execute unauthorized system commands, escalate user privileges, or hijack autonomous workflows through prompt injection.

Does Backslash discover custom and internally developed Skills?

Yes. Backslash automatically discovers, assesses, and mitigates security risks on the endpoint for both public marketplace Skills and internally developed tools. This includes unindexed, locally created Skills residing directly on developer endpoints.

How does Backslash assess Skill risk?

Backslash inspects configuration files like Skill.md alongside supporting codebases written in Python, JavaScript, Shell, and other languages. Through this deep analysis, it identifies malicious behavioral patterns, excessive or dangerous permissions, hidden functionality, supply chain vulnerabilities, and suspicious runtime execution paths.

Can Backslash block malicious Skills?

Yes. Backslash continuously enforces automated, custom and adaptive policies to alert, restrict, or completely remove any Skills that violate standards or risk guidelines.

Which AI agents are supported?

Backslash supports all leading AI coding assistants and desktop AI agents, continuously expanding coverage as new agent platforms emerge.

Can employees still install Skills?

Yes. Organizations retain fine-grained control to allow, restrict, or block specific Skills. This gives developers the flexibility they need to innovate without compromising overall enterprise security.

What's the difference between Skills Security and MCP Security?

Skills extend what an AI agent can do. MCP servers connect AI agents to enterprise resources and external systems. Backslash secures both components of the agentic fabric independently and together.

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