Copilot Studio agent security: Top 10 risks you can detect and prevent

According to Microsoft Defender Security Research Team, organisations adopting Copilot Studio agents are seeing threat actors exploit misconfigured AI workflows, with mis-sharing, unsafe orchestration, and weak authentication creating new identity and data‑access paths that traditional controls don’t monitor.

The article outlines ten common misconfigurations that drive risk, from agents shared with the entire organisation to unauthenticated access, risky HTTP request configurations, and the potential for email‑based data exfiltration. It also highlights issues such as dormant or orphaned agents, use of author authentication, hard‑coded credentials, and MCP tools or generative orchestration without proper instructions, all of which can enable privilege escalation or data leakage.

A practical mitigation playbook follows, emphasising reducing exposure, enforcing strong authentication and least privilege, hardening orchestration, and lifecycle governance to close gaps before they’re exploited. The piece showcases how Defender Advanced Hunting queries can surface these risks and guides readers toward concrete steps to detect and prevent them. This security guidance is designed to help organisations move from awareness to action, tightening controls around agent configuration and ownership.