This is a submission for the Hermes Agent Challenge: Write About Hermes Agent Hermes Agent is one of the most capable open-source agentic systems available today. Its ability to plan, use tools, and reason across multi-step tasks makes it genuinely useful for production workloads. But there's a security dimension that the agentic AI community hasn't fully addressed yet: what happens when an agent's memory gets compromised? In this post, I'll walk through why memory poisoning is the most dangerous attack vector for persistent agents like Hermes Agent, and how to defend against it. The Memory Poisoning Threat Model When Hermes Agent executes multi-step tasks, it maintains context — previous tool outputs, intermediate reasoning, and retrieved information. This persistent state is what enables complex workflows. It's also an attack surface. OWASP classified this as ASI06: Memory Poisoning in their Top 10 for Agentic Applications.…