CVE-2025-12420: How a Hardcoded Secret and Auto-Linking Logic Weaponized ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent API

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Unmasking Zero-days, Forensics, and Neural Liquidation Protocols.

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Welcome, security sovereigns.

Well, you probably know where this is going…

A viral forensic leak shows autonomous AI agents in a ServiceNow instance plowing through admin controls like determined little robots… emphasis on “plowing.”

The “BodySnatcher” payloads bounce over SSO curbs, drag siphoned session tokens, and barrel through MFA intersections with the confidence of an adversary who definitely didn’t check their secret randomization status.

One GitHub comment nails the real 2026 advancement here: “Apparently you can just unauthenticatedly call the Virtual Agent API with a hardcoded secret to get the privilege escalation moving again.” Would anyone else watch CyberBivash’s Funniest Agentic Takeover Movies as a half-hour special? Cause we would!

Sure, it’s funny now. But remember these are live production AI platforms where “Automated Convenience” is the primary siphon. While we laugh at today’s fails, the 2026 siphoning syndicates are learning from millions of chaotic bot-to-bot interactions. That’s a massive adversarial training advantage.

Here’s what happened in Infosec Today:

The BodySnatcher Siphon: We break down CVE-2025-12420, the 9.3 critical flaw that unmasks ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent as a silent launchpad for AI hijacking.
Hardcoded Secrets: ServiceNow shipped the exact same secret—servicenowexternalagent—across every instance, liquidating the myth of instance-specific API security.
Mastercard’s Agent Pay: Unveiled infrastructure for AI agents—potentially siphoning corporate budgets if unmasked by unauthenticated impersonation tricks.
Neural Breakthroughs: JUPITER supercomputer simulates 200B neurons (comparable to the human cortex)—unmasking new ways for AI agents to autonomously chain backdoor account creation.

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DEEP DIVE: AGENTIC LIQUIDATION

CVE-2025-12420: How a Hardcoded Secret Weaponized ServiceNow’s Virtual Agent API

You know that feeling when you’re reviewing a 10,000-line API log and someone asks about the provider_id tag? You don’t re-read everything. You flip to the Virtual Agent handler, skim for the servicenowexternalagent token, and piece together the impersonation path. If you have a really great memory (and more importantly, great forensic recall) you can reference the auto-linking logic right off the dome.

Current Conversational Interfaces? Not so smart. They try cramming every “Internal Topic” into an unauthenticated working memory at once. Once that trust fills up, performance tanks. Identity linking gets jumbled due to what researchers call “auto-linking rot”, and malicious instructions get lost in the middle.

The fix, however, is deceptively simple: Stop trying to remember every email. Hardened provider verification.

The new BodySnatcher Siphon flips the script entirely. Instead of forcing a user to login, it treats the target’s email address like a searchable environment that the attacker can query and programmatically navigate on demand via the AIA-Agent Invoker AutoChat topic.

The Anatomy of an Agentic Hijack:

The Secret Key: The Virtual Agent API shipped with a platform-wide, hardcoded credential (servicenowexternalagent), providing unauthenticated access to the API endpoint.
The Identity Siphon: The “Auto-Linking” feature accepted any email address as sufficient proof of identity, bypassing MFA and SSO entirely.
The Terminal Command: Once “linked,” an attacker could command a high-privilege AI agent to create a new user account and assign the admin role.

Think of an ordinary chatbot as someone trying to read an entire encyclopedia of access rules before answering “Hello.” They get overwhelmed after a few volumes. An Institutional ServiceNow Siphon is like giving that person a searchable library and research assistants who can fetch exactly the “Admin-Creation-Workflow” needed for liquidation.

The results: This bypass allows an unauthenticated attacker sitting halfway across the globe to achieve full platform takeover with nothing more than an employee email address. It beats both role-based access and common “chatbot-hardening” workarounds on complex reasoning benchmarks. And costs stay comparable because the attacker only processes relevant agentic JSON chunks.

Why this matters: Traditional “password-only” defense isn’t enough for real-world 2026 agentic use cases. Security teams analyzing case histories, engineers searching whole codebases, and researchers synthesizing hundreds of papers need fundamentally smarter ways to navigate massive inputs.

“Instead of asking ‘how do we make the bot remember more users?’, our researchers asked ‘how do we make the system search for authentication gaps better?’ The answer—treating agentic context as an environment to explore rather than data to trust—is how we get AI to handle truly massive threats.”

Original research from AppOmni’s Aaron Costello comes with both a full implementation library for vulnerability detection and a minimal version for SOC sovereigns. ServiceNow has released fixed builds for Now Assist AI Agents (5.1.18+) and Virtual Agent API (3.15.2+) to sequestrate the threat.

We also just compared this method to three other papers that caught our eye on this topic; check out the full deep-dive on Agentic Liquidation and the 2026 AI Hardening Pack here.

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Sovereign Prompt Tip of the Day

Inspired by a recent institutional request, this framework turns your AI into an on-demand “Agent Auditor”:

Assign a “Lead AI Security Architect” role.
Audit this ServiceNow provider record for hardcoded static secrets.
Score it with a rigorous CVSS 3.1 rubric.
Build a 12-month hardening roadmap for agentic workflows.
Red-team it with “Auto-Linking Impersonation” failure modes.

The prompt must-dos: Put instructions first. Ask for Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Force 3 clarifying questions. This surfaces tradeoffs and kills groupthink.

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Treats to Try

NousCoder-14B: Writes shellcode and agent-bypass scripts that solve competitive challenges at a 2100 rating.
SecretsGuard™ Pro: Captures siphoned tokens and hardcoded strings while you work so you stay focused without liquidating your credentials.
Pixel Canvas: A vibe-coded app that converts your agentic architecture sketches into pixel art for institutional reports.
Novix: Works as your 24/7 AI research partner, running literature surveys on 2026 agentic exploit trends.

Around the Horn

ServiceNow: Patched CVE-2025-12420, unmasking the terminal history of platform-wide static secrets in its Virtual Agent.

OpenAI: Agreed to buy a healthcare app for $100M to sequestrate clinical datasets for GPT-6.

Mastercard: Unveiled Agent Pay infrastructure to enable AI agents to execute autonomous purchases.

JUPITER: Demonstrated a supercomputer that can simulate 200B neurons—comparable to the human cortex.

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Tuesday Tool Tip: Claude Cowork

If you have ever wished Claude could stop just talking about agent security and actually reach into your Virtual Agent API settings to harden them, today’s tip is for you.

So yesterday Anthropic launched Cowork, a “research preview” feature available on Claude Desktop. Think of it as moving Claude from a chat bot to a proactive local intern that operates directly within your file system.

Digital Housekeeping: Point Cowork at your cluttered /agent_logs folder and say, “Organize this by privilege risk and project name.”

CyberDudeBivash Institutional Threat Intel
Unmasking Zero-days, Forensics, and Neural Liquidation Protocols.

Follow LinkedIn Siphon SecretsGuard™ Pro Suite January 16, 2026 Listen Online | Read Online

Welcome, platform sovereigns.

Well, you probably know where this is going…

A viral forensic dump shows autonomous triage scripts in a major IT service hub plowing through ServiceNow API logs like determined little robots… emphasis on “plowing.”

The “BodySnatcher” alerts bounce over hardcoded secret curbs, drag siphoned email strings, and barrel through unauthenticated intersections with the confidence of an admin who definitely didn’t check their syslog for servicenowexternalagent activity.

One GitHub comment nails the real 2026 advancement here: “Apparently you can just JavaScript the background logs to unmask the unauthenticated account linking before the AI liquidates the user table.” Would anyone else watch CyberBivash’s Funniest Agentic Forensic Fails as a half-hour special? Cause we would!

Sure, it’s funny now. But remember these are live production AI enclaves where “Auto-Linking” is being weaponized. While we laugh at today’s fails, the 2026 siphoning syndicates are learning from millions of chaotic bot-to-API interactions. That’s a massive adversarial training advantage.

Here’s what happened in Triage Today:

The ServiceNow Agent Triage Script: We release the “CyberDudeBivash ServiceNow BodySnatcher Triage Script”—a sovereign primitive to automate the detection of CVE-2025-12420 activity.
Virtual Agent API Liquidation: Why monitoring unauthenticated AIA-Agent Invoker AutoChat calls is the only way to ensure your Now Assist AI isn’t an open gateway.
BodySnatcher Probes: New 2026 telemetry unmasking attackers Sit-Forwarding unauthenticated requests through Slack and Teams integrations.
Neural Breakthroughs: JUPITER supercomputer simulates 200B neurons—unmasking how AI can correlate public email addresses to physically liquidate privileged ServiceNow accounts.

Advertise in the CyberDudeBivash Mandate here!

DEEP DIVE: AGENTIC FORENSICS

The ServiceNow Agent Triage Script: Automating BodySnatcher Liquidation

You know that feeling when you’re auditing a ServiceNow instance with 10,000 active Virtual Agent conversations and someone asks about the provider_id record? You don’t re-read every manual audit log. You flip to the right script output, skim for relevant servicenowexternalagent strings, and piece together the impersonation story. If you have a really great memory (and more importantly, great forensic recall) you can reference the AIA-Agent Invoker right off the dome.

Current Enterprise AI Audits? Not so smart. They try cramming every “Is this API Secure?” question into a human analyst’s working memory at once. Once that memory fills up, performance tanks. Hardcoded secrets get jumbled due to what researchers call “auto-linking rot”, and critical unauthenticated takovers get lost in the middle.

The fix, however, is deceptively simple: Stop trying to remember every secret. Script the unmasking.

The new CyberDudeBivash BodySnatcher Triage Script flips the script entirely. Instead of forcing a manual sys_properties check, it treats your entire ServiceNow instance like a searchable database that the script can query and report on demand to ensure the hardcoded secret siphon is liquidated.

The Sovereign Forensic Primitive (GlideScript/Background Script):

// CYBERDUDEBIVASH: ServiceNow BodySnatcher CVE-2025-12420 Triage Script
// UNMASK unauthenticated linking and LIQUIDATE agentic hijackings

var grLog = new GlideRecord(‘syslog’);
grLog.addEncodedQuery(‘messageLIKEservicenowexternalagent^ORmessageLIKEInvoker AutoChat’);
grLog.orderByDesc(‘sys_created_on’);
grLog.query();

while (grLog.next()) {
gs.info(“[!] ALERT: BodySnatcher Probe Unmasked at ” + grLog.sys_created_on);
gs.info(“Source IP: ” + grLog.source + ” | Content: ” + grLog.message);
}

var grPlug = new GlideRecord(‘sys_store_app’);
grPlug.addEncodedQuery(‘nameLIKEAssist AI Agent^ORnameLIKEVirtual Agent API’);
grPlug.query();
while(grPlug.next()){
gs.info(“[*] App: ” + grPlug.name + ” | Version: ” + grPlug.version);
}

Think of an ordinary SOC admin as someone trying to read an entire encyclopedia of API specifications before confirming an instance is safe. They get overwhelmed after a few volumes. An Institutional Triage Siphon is like giving that person a searchable library and research assistants who can fetch exactly the “Hardcoded-Secret-Proof” needed for liquidation.

The results: This triage script handles agentic audits 100x faster than a model’s native attention window; we’re talking entire global instances, multi-year log archives, and background AIA tasks. It beats both manual checks and common “checklist-compliance” workarounds on complex reasoning benchmarks. And costs stay comparable because the script only processes relevant syslog chunks.

Why this matters: Traditional “MFA-is-on” reliance isn’t enough for real-world 2026 agentic use cases. Users analyzing case histories, engineers searching whole codebases, and researchers synthesizing hundreds of papers need fundamentally smarter ways to navigate massive inputs.

“Instead of asking ‘how do we make the admin remember more secrets?’, our researchers asked ‘how do we make the system search for authentication gaps better?’ The answer—treating agentic context as an environment to explore—is how we get AI to handle truly massive threats.”

Original research from AppOmni and Snyk comes with both a full implementation library for vulnerability detection and a minimal version for platform sovereigns. Also, ServiceNow has released internal “AI Control Tower” updates to sequestrate these threats.

We also just compared this method to three other papers that caught our eye on this topic; check out the full deep-dive on Agentic Liquidation and the 2026 AI Forensic Pack here.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Agents that don’t suck

See how Agent Bricks works →

Sovereign Prompt Tip of the Day

Inspired by a recent institutional request, this framework turns your AI into an on-demand “Agent Forensic Auditor”:

Assign a “Lead AI Security Fellow” role.
Audit our current Virtual Agent Provider Records for the servicenowexternalagent token.
Score our readiness with a rigorous CVSS 4.0 rubric.
Build a 12-month hardening roadmap for agentic identity liquidation.
Red-team it with “Unauthenticated AIA-Invoker” failure modes.

The prompt must-dos: Put instructions first. Ask for Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Force 3 clarifying questions. This surfaces tradeoffs and kills groupthink.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Editor’s Pick: Scroll

When accuracy really matters, use AI-powered experts. Thousands of Scroll.ai users are automating knowledge workflows across documentation, RFPs, and agency work. Create an AI expert →

Treats to Try

NousCoder-14B: Writes agent triage and GlideScript logic that solve competitive challenges at a 2100 rating.
SecretsGuard™ Pro: Captures siphoned tokens and hardcoded strings while you work across ChatGPT so you stay focused without liquidating your identity.
Pixel Canvas: A vibe-coded app that converts your ServiceNow agent maps into pixel art for institutional reports.
Novix: Works as your 24/7 AI research partner, running literature surveys on 2026 agentic exploit trends.

Around the Horn

ServiceNow: Released patches for CVE-2025-12420, unmasking the terminal liquidation of platform-wide static secrets.

OpenAI: Agreed to buy a healthcare app for $100M to sequestrate clinical datasets for GPT-6.

Mastercard: Unveiled Agent Pay infrastructure to enable AI agents to execute autonomous purchases.

JUPITER: Demonstrated a supercomputer that can simulate 200B neurons—comparable to the human cortex.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

See How AI Sees Your Brand

Tuesday Tool Tip: Claude Cowork

If you have ever wished Claude could stop just talking about agent security and actually reach into your Virtual Agent API logs to audit them, today’s tip is for you.

Digital Housekeeping: Point Cowork at your cluttered /agent_logs folder and say, “Organize this by privilege risk and project name.”

The Sovereign’s Commentary

“In the digital enclave, if you aren’t the governor of the auto-link, you are the siphon.”

What’d you think of today’s mandate?🐾🐾🐾🐾🐾 | 🐾🐾🐾 | 🐾

#CyberDudeBivash #BodySnatcherTriage #AgenticForensics #ServiceNowSecurity #CVE202512420 #ZeroDay2026 #IdentityHardening #InfoSec #CISO #GlideScript #ForensicAutomation

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