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Prompt injection ranks No. 1 with OWASP and No. 12 in the incident record. The attack itself is invisible to a scan.
A CISO misinterpreting a low CVE count and deprioritizing prompt injection is making a mistake. Prompt injection has consistently held the top spot on the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications for three years. However, a recent analysis of real-world incidents ranked it twelfth. This discrepancy arises because prompt injection attacks operate undetected by traditional vulnerability scanners. The study, while exploratory, highlights a significant disagreement between expert judgment and the observed incident record. Experts rank prompt injection high due to its vast attack surface, while incident data reflects successful breaches. Prompt injection's stealthy nature, embedding malicious instructions within seemingly benign content, makes it invisible to standard security tools. Effective defenses require adversarial testing and architectural limitations on agent capabilities rather than relying on post-incident analysis. This proactive approach is crucial, as prompt injection is likened to a fundamental law of LLM systems. The current defenses are not foolproof, and designing systems with the assumption of prompt injection occurring is paramount. The challenge lies in accurately interpreting incident data, which is inherently backward-looking. Misinformation also presents a significant disagreement between expert opinion and incident records. Newer threats like persistent memory poisoning and MCP tool interface exploitation have corresponding CVEs, but their impact may not be reflected in low advisory counts. The OWASP GenAI LLM Top 10 2026 edition now incorporates incident data, though the weighting remains a point of discussion. The authors acknowledge limitations in their own methodology, including a small expert respondent pool and classifier variability. Ultimately, the disagreement between expert consensus and incident data underscores the evolving and complex nature of LLM security.