Persistence: MITRE ATLAS

Adversaries may directly manipulate an AI model to change its behavior or introduce malicious code. Manipulating a model gives the adversary a persistent change in the system. This can include poisoning the model by changing its weights, modifying the model architecture to change its behavior, and embedding malware which may be executed when the model is loaded.

Adversaries may attempt to poison datasets used by an AI model by modifying the underlying data or its labels. This allows the adversary to embed vulnerabilities in AI models trained on the data that may not be easily detectable. Data poisoning attacks may or may not require modifying the labels. The embedded vulnerability is activated at a later time by data samples with an Insert Backdoor Trigger

An adversary may use a carefully crafted LLM Prompt Injection designed to cause the LLM to replicate the prompt as part of its output. This allows the prompt to propagate to other LLMs and persist on the system. The self-replicating prompt is typically paired with other malicious instructions (ex: LLM Jailbreak, LLM Data Leakage).

Adversaries may inject malicious content into data indexed by a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system to contaminate a future thread through RAG-based search results. This may be accomplished by placing manipulated documents in a location the RAG indexes (see Gather RAG-Indexed Targets).

Adversaries may attempt to manipulate the context used by an AI agent's large language model (LLM) to influence the responses it generates or actions it takes. This allows an adversary to persistently change the behavior of the target agent and further their goals.

Adversaries may modify the configuration files for AI agents on a system. This allows malicious changes to persist beyond the life of a single agent and affects any agents that share the configuration.

An adversary may introduce malicious prompts into the victim's system via a public-facing application with the intention of it being ingested by an AI at some point in the future and ultimately having a downstream effect. This may occur when a data source is indexed by a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system, when a rule triggers an action by an AI agent, or when a user utilizes a large language model (LLM) to interact with the malicious content. The malicious prompts may persist on the victim system for an extended period and could affect multiple users and various AI tools within the victim organization.

Adversaries may place malicious content on a victim's system where it can be retrieved by an AI Agent Tool. This may be accomplished by placing documents in a location that will be ingested by a service the AI agent has associated tools for.

Adversaries may achieve persistence by poisoning tools used by AI agents including built-in tools or tools available to the agent via Model Context Protocol (MCP) connections. This involves compromising benign tools already integrated into the agent's environment.