The modern attack chain: Rethinking Google Workspace security in the age of AI

The modern attack chain: Rethinking Google Workspace security in the age of AI Over the past two months, I’ve written about the Vercel breach and the Composio breach separately. Both offer lessons to learn on their own. But reading them together, I keep coming back to the same observation: these aren’t isolated incidents. They’re the same attack, run twice, against different targets, where email was not the entry point into the workspace. And once you see the pattern clearly, it changes what you think you need to defend.

It also raises an uncomfortable question that I’ve been sitting with. The pattern I’m describing, where an OAuth grant is used to access an account, read sensitive data from email and Drive, and use that access to move past the workspace, doesn’t only describe what attackers do. It increasingly describes what AI agents do, by design, every day.