A field manual for breaking Model Context Protocol servers. Real vulnerabilities. Real exploits. No corporate noise.
43% of deployed MCP servers have at least one critical vulnerability. This is the playbook someone wishes they had before their first breach. Written from the other side of the keyboard.
MCP is being deployed in production at companies you've heard of. Security teams haven't caught up. The documentation tells you how to set up MCP servers. It doesn't tell you what breaks when someone actually tries. This playbook is six months of field research — breaking my own setups, reading source code, talking to people who got burned.
If you're defensive: you'll know where the holes are before an attacker finds them. If you're offensive: you already know the value of having a map when everyone else is still reading the manual.
MCP tools pass instructions through the model. If you're not careful about what's in the prompt, someone else's text becomes your instructions. This isn't theoretical. I've seen it work on real deployments.
A Wikipedia revision with hidden instructions caused an AI model to follow injected directives when summarizing the page. The attack was in the page text itself — not a config, not a system prompt. Just regular content someone edited.