AI Skills as an Emerging Attack Surface in Critical Sectors: Enhanced Capabilities, New Risks

This TrendAI research report warns that AI skills—hybrid, executable knowledge artifacts used by LLM-based agents—create a new, high-value attack surface across critical sectors (financial services, healthcare, industrial, public sector, and technology/media). It describes how exposed skill logic and parameters can enable adversaries to evade detection, manipulate automated responses, and construct digital twins of organizational processes; presents an eight-phase kill chain for AI skill compromise; and provides detection indicators, a multilayered detection architecture, and phase-aligned mitigations and governance principles to reduce risk.