Your AI agent’s config is now the payload: How attackers are targeting the developer agent harness

Attackers have shifted from hiding from AI tools to running inside them. By poisoning the config files that govern AI coding assistants, a new worm class achieves silent persistence, evades AI-based scanners, and spreads across an organization's repositories through developers' own tools. Key takeaways AI coding assistant configuration files, such as settings.json hooks, .cursorrules Cursor MDC rules, and similar harness files, are now explicit targets in supply-chain attacks, not collateral dam