Netwrix Innovation Week: Intro to AIHound

AIHound is a scanner that runs on your machine and finds the API keys, OAuth tokens, and other credentials your AI assistants leave behind. It was based on research I did, which showed me how common that is. Across about 35 different tools I looked at, every one of them left a clear text credential on the user’s machine. And that wasn’t an outlier: Trend Micro’s analysis of more than 19,000 MCP servers found that 48% recommend storing secrets in .env files or plaintext JSON configurations.

Clear text makes a credential easy to take, because an attacker, or an infostealer, only has to copy one from a well-known location. From there they can authenticate as you from another system and act with whatever access you had. You can’t secure a credential you don’t know is there, so AIHound finds them and helps you clean them up.

For Netwrix Innovation Week, I recorded a short introduction to AIHound, and in it I cover why I built it, how it works, and what I suggest you’d do first thing Monday. I also run it live, so you can see what a scan looks like.

Explore every Innovation Week conversation to hear Netwrix and industry experts discuss data and identity security.

AI assistants leave credentials where attackers already look

Popular AI assistants often leave a configuration file with at least one clear text credential in it, and sometimes a refresh token alongside the access token. Those files often get less protection than they should, and MCP configurations raise the stakes because a single file can hold keys to several servers at once.

One scan shows where you stand and what to fix first

AIHound scores each finding by criticality, so you can see at a glance where you stand. It never shows the credential values it finds, so running a scan doesn’t create a new exposure. It also works with your AI assistant and can watch for new credentials as they appear.

Try AIHound

The download is a small binary that takes a couple of minutes, and AIHound comes as a Go executable and in Python. One command gets you started, and a scan takes seconds.

Download AIHound