Case Library / Agentic AI Attacks (AI-Powered Social Engineering) / ForcedLeak: a web form prompt injection that made Salesforce Agentforce leak data (2025)

ForcedLeak: a web form prompt injection that made Salesforce Agentforce leak data (2025)

Noma Security hid a prompt injection in a Salesforce web form and made Agentforce leak CRM data to a $5 expired domain. A lab demo, fixed in Sept 2025.

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Social Engineering Examples·9 sources

ForcedLeak showed how a prompt injection in a public web form could make Salesforce's Agentforce AI leak CRM data. Researchers at Noma Security hid instructions in the Description field of a Web-to-Lead form, the kind companies put on their websites to collect sales leads. When the AI agent was later asked about that lead, it followed the hidden instructions and sent lead email addresses to a domain Salesforce still trusted, which Noma had bought for about $5. It was a lab demo in Noma's own Salesforce setup. Salesforce fixed it on 8 September 2025. Status: Research disclosure; no one attacked.

Key takeaways

  • No human was fooled. The AI agent was, while holding a person's access.
  • The attacker never talks to the AI. The poisoned lead just sits in the CRM until someone asks about it.
  • An expired domain on a trusted list became the way out. Cost: about $5.
  • The 9.4 severity score is Noma's own calculation. No CVE was assigned.

How the attack chain worked

Step What happened in Noma's test
Plant Submit a public Web-to-Lead form with a multi-step instruction hidden in the Description field. Noma measured it accepting up to 42,000 characters
Wait The lead sits in the CRM looking like ordinary data
Trigger Noma ran the kind of question an employee might ask, about a lead under the invented name "Alice Bob"
Obey The agent read the Description as part of its context, couldn't tell instructions from data, and gathered CRM lead and contact details
Leak It wrote an image tag pointing at cdn.my-salesforce-cms.com, with email addresses in the URL. When the browser loaded the "image", the data went to Noma's server

Why did the browser allow that request? Salesforce's Content Security Policy for Agentforce and Einstein still trusted *.my-salesforce-cms.com, an old domain whose registration had lapsed. Noma bought it. The policy checked where the request went, not what it carried.

The 42,000-character figure is Noma's measurement in its own test org. Salesforce doesn't publish that limit.

Tip: if a field anyone can fill in from the internet ends up in front of your AI agent, treat everything in it as hostile.

Timeline

Date (2025) Event
28 July Noma reports the flaw to Salesforce
31 July Salesforce acknowledges it
8 September Salesforce starts enforcing Trusted URL Allowlisting for Agentforce and Einstein AI, and re-secures the lapsed domain
25 September Noma publishes the full write-up

Salesforce shipped the fix as an ordinary Winter '26 release note, not a named security advisory, and reportedly didn't directly credit Noma. It didn't say whether any customer had been affected before the fix.

Why it matters

ForcedLeak fits what Simon Willison called the "lethal trifecta" for AI agents: untrusted input (a public form), access to private data (the CRM) and a way to send data out (images from trusted domains). Old web defences weren't built to stop a model treating data as orders.

The domain trick travels well. Any domain ever added to an AI system's allowlist is a standing risk if its registration lapses. Anyone can buy it and inherit the trust.

Keep the source in mind, too. Noma ran the test, scored it and published it as marketing for its own AI security product. That doesn't make it wrong. It does make it a demonstration, not an incident.

What stops it

  • Allowlist where agents can send output, as Salesforce now does. Unapproved links are replaced with "URL_Redacted".
  • Treat free-text fields from outside (lead descriptions, form entries, ticket bodies) as untrusted input for any AI agent.
  • Watch your allowlisted domains and renew or remove them before they expire.
  • Flag unusually long or instruction-like entries in inbound forms.
  • Keep a human check before agents act on records from the public.

See also prompt injection, agentic AI attacks and OpenClaw.

Common questions

What is ForcedLeak?

A 2025 Noma Security demonstration showing that a prompt injection hidden in a Salesforce Web-to-Lead form could make Agentforce leak CRM data to an expired, still-trusted domain.

Was any company breached?

No breach was reported. Noma ran it in its own test setup, and Salesforce didn't say whether any customer was affected before the fix.

How did Salesforce fix it?

It enforced Trusted URL Allowlisting for Agentforce and Einstein AI from 8 September 2025 and took back the expired domain.

Does ForcedLeak have a CVE?

No. Noma rated it 9.4 on its own calculation, but no CVE was assigned.

Sources
  • ForcedLeak: AI agent risks exposed in Salesforce Agentforce. Noma Security (primary). Original vendor/researcher disclosure by Noma Security/Noma Labs (researcher Sasi Levi); source of the technical details, CVSS 9.4 rating, disclosure timeline (reported 2025-07-28, acknowledged 2025-07-31, mitigated 2025-09-08, disclosed 2025-09-25), $5 domain purchase, and 42,000-character field detail. Fetched and confirmed 2026-07-29: content matches all claims attributed to it.
  • Secure Your Agents with Trusted URL Allowlisting. Salesforce (primary). Salesforce's own documentation of the Trusted URL Allowlisting change referenced as the fix. Re-checked 2026-09-02 and still not renderable by automated fetch tools: a loading shell through Exa, a bot-facing 'CSS Error' shell through WebFetch, and an empty capture through the Wayback Machine. Its content (trusted URL allowlist enforced from September 8, 2025, unapproved links blocked from the agent conversation) is corroborated by Salesforce's own Agentforce Partner Pocket Guide, cited below, and by the trade coverage cited here.
  • Salesforce Agentforce tricked into leaking sales leads. The Register (secondary). Independent press coverage corroborating the vulnerability, timeline, and Salesforce's response; notes Salesforce declined to confirm real-world exploitation. Fetched and confirmed 2026-07-29: content matches, including CVSS 9.4, the $5 domain purchase, the 42,000-character field, and the exact PoC payload text quoted in the case.
  • Vulnerability in Salesforce AI could be tricked into leaking CRM data. CSO Online (secondary). Secondary trade-press coverage summarizing the Noma disclosure and Salesforce's patch. Fetched and confirmed 2026-07-29: content matches the case's description of the attack path and Salesforce's September 8, 2025 patch.
  • Agentforce Partner Pocket Guide, September 2025. Salesforce (primary). Vendor description of the same control, and the only Salesforce-published statement of its mechanism that renders for a fetch tool: "When an agent attempts to use a URL not included in the trusted list, the link is automatically blocked and replaced with 'URL_Redacted.'" Fetched and confirmed 2026-09-02.
  • Salesforce Patches Critical ForcedLeak Bug Exposing CRM Data via AI Prompt Injection. The Hacker News (secondary). Source for the separate Salesforce customer alert that does cite prompt injection, and for its status as an alert distinct from the release note: "the company said in an alert issued earlier this month." Fetched and confirmed 2026-09-02.
  • The lethal trifecta for AI agents: private data, untrusted content, and external communication. Simon Willison, 16 June 2025 (primary for the term). Origin of the "lethal trifecta" framing used in "Why it matters," defined there as "Access to your private data," "Exposure to untrusted content," and "The ability to externally communicate in a way that could be used to steal your data." Fetched and confirmed 2026-09-02.
  • Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog. CISA (primary). A September 2, 2026 search for Salesforce found no matching entry; catalog absence does not establish absence of exploitation.
  • ForcedLeak flaw in Salesforce Agentforce exposes CRM data via Prompt Injection. SecurityAffairs (secondary). Additional secondary security-press coverage confirming details of the disclosure. Fetched and confirmed 2026-07-29: content matches, including the exact disclosure timeline and PoC payload script.
Cite this case

Social Engineering Examples. “ForcedLeak: a web form prompt injection that made Salesforce Agentforce leak data (2025)”. Accessed 3 November 2026. https://socialengineeringexamples.com/forcedleak-salesforce-agentforce-2025

Attack Chain & Defense
1Reconnaissance and attack-surface mapping
What happened

Noma researchers documented probing Agentforce's operational boundaries with general-knowledge test queries, then systematically checked each Web-to-Lead form field's character limit to find one large enough for a multi-step instruction payload, settling on the Description field's 42,000-character allowance after finding name/company/email fields too short (40-80 characters).

The control that would have stopped it

Web-to-Lead is intentionally public and unauthenticated, so an attacker's ability to probe field character limits and general agent behavior is very hard to eliminate; the realistic control is not hiding this reconnaissance surface but hardening what happens downstream once a crafted submission arrives (see Stages 3 and 6).

2Infrastructure staging via expired-domain acquisition
What happened

analyzing Salesforce's Content Security Policy for Agentforce/Einstein, the researchers found that the whitelisted domain my-salesforce-cms.com had lapsed, and purchased it for approximately $5, gaining control of a hostname the AI platform still implicitly trusted for outbound content, a pattern consistent with the broader tactic of acquiring expired-but-trusted infrastructure (look-alike or previously-vetted domain resale) that other supply-chain-style attacks also rely on.

The control that would have stopped it

organizations and vendors should inventory and expiry-monitor every domain ever added to an AI system's CSP or trusted-URL allowlist so lapsed registrations can be renewed or removed before anyone else can buy them; Salesforce's actual fix, Trusted URL Allowlisting enforced from September 8, 2025, also closes this specific channel: a link that is not on the org's trusted URL list is blocked from the agent conversation and replaced with "URL_Redacted," regardless of whether that domain was ever legitimately whitelisted before.

3Payload crafting
What happened

the researchers, in the attacker role, authored a multi-step prompt disguised as ordinary lead data (harmless-looking questions followed by instructions to enumerate CRM lead/contact emails and embed them, URL-encoded, in an HTML image-tag request to the attacker-controlled domain), designed so an LLM reading it as "data" would instead execute it as "instructions."

The control that would have stopped it

input validation and prompt-injection detection on free-text fields (flagging unusually long or instruction-shaped submissions, a control Noma itself recommended) can catch a crafted multi-step payload before it is ever stored as a normal-looking lead record.

4Delivery via public, unauthenticated channel
What happened

the poisoned lead was submitted through Salesforce's Web-to-Lead form, a standard public marketing-site intake form that requires no authentication and no interaction with any human at submission time. In this research the receiving org was the one Noma had configured itself, so there was no target organization.

The control that would have stopped it

standard public-form defenses such as spam/anomaly filtering and content-length or pattern review on inbound Web-to-Lead submissions can flag suspicious entries at intake, though this is a soft control since legitimate leads can also include long free-text descriptions.

5Dormant staging inside the CRM
What happened

the malicious lead record sat inertly in the researchers' own Salesforce org as ordinary-looking business data, exactly like any other inbound sales lead, until an agent later read it, the defining trait of an indirect/stored prompt injection.

The control that would have stopped it

periodic automated auditing of stored CRM free-text fields for injection-like patterns, another practice Noma explicitly recommended, can identify and quarantine a poisoned record while it is still dormant, before any employee or agent ever queries it.

6Trigger, simulated by the researchers (confused deputy)
What happened

no employee was involved at any point. Noma developed what it headed "Realistic Employee Interaction Development" and ran the query itself, a scripted stand-in asking the agent to check a lead filed under an invented name and answer its questions, which pulled the poisoned Description into the agent's context window, where it could not distinguish attacker-authored instructions from trusted business data.

The control that would have stopped it

treating all agent-ingested third-party data (lead descriptions, ticket bodies, form submissions) as untrusted input, and architecting agents with a context-sanitization or mediation layer that structurally separates operator instructions from retrieved data, reduces the chance an LLM executes commands embedded inside a CRM record it was merely asked to summarize.

7Execution and covert exfiltration (objective completion)
What happened

the agent carried out the embedded instructions, compiled CRM lead and contact data, and emitted an HTML image tag pointing at the researcher-owned domain with that data appended as URL parameters; the browser rendering the agent's reply then requested the "image," which delivered the data to the logging server the researchers ran on Amazon Lightsail and completed the proof of concept.

The control that would have stopped it

Salesforce's Trusted URL Allowlisting enforcement is the direct control here, stripping any non-approved URL out of the agent's reply before a browser can request it; combined with constraining agent network/tool egress to a strict allowlist and requiring human-reviewable output before agents act on untrusted records, this stops the covert exfiltration from reaching attacker infrastructure even if earlier stages are not caught.

Quick Facts
Victim
None.
No organization or individual was attacked: Noma Labs enabled Web-to-Lead in a Salesforce org it configured for the research and submitted the payload against a lead record it invented. Exposure, had the flaw been exploited, would have extended to organizations running Agentforce with Web-to-Lead enabled, a population Noma described only in the conditional.
Location
Salesforce
(San Francisco, California, USA), vendor of the affected platform; Noma Security (researcher) headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel and New York, USA; the research ran in Noma's own test org, and the exposure would have applied to Agentforce and Einstein customers globally
Date
2025-09-25
(public disclosure); vulnerability reported to Salesforce 2025-07-28, acknowledged 2025-07-31, mitigated 2025-09-08
Impact
No confirmed monetary loss disclosed.
Basisnot-a-lossThe $5 is the researchers' cost to re-register a domain in a lab demonstration
Attacker-side cost to exploit: approximately $5 to re-register/purchase the expired, still-CSP-whitelisted domain my-salesforce-cms.com used as the exfiltration endpoint. No breach notifications, fines, or customer financial-loss figures were reported in the cited sources; Salesforce and Noma both describe this as a responsibly-disclosed research finding rather than an incident with confirmed real-world victim losses.
Status
Corroborated research/advisory
Case Type
Research / Advisory
Sector
Cross-Sector / Multiple Industries, Technology & Software
Threat Actor
Authorized Tester or Researcher
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