The skill layer is a dependency problem without a lockfile: what the OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10 gets right
Brief
OWASP published version 1. 0 of the Agentic Skills Top 10 on August 17, defining ten risk classes for the layer where agents find, load, and run reusable instructions and code. This standard arrived while the problem was still forming, mapping directly to AISVS, the Agentic Security Initiative Top 10, the MCP Top 10 , ISO/IEC 42001, and the NIST AI RMF .
It ships with working code for signing, sandboxing, and pinning.
The evidence base is concrete. A USENIX Security 2026 study analyzed 98,380 skills across public marketplaces and confirmed 157 malicious skills carrying 632 vulnerabilities. In January, a single campaign pushed 1,184 malicious skills from 12 publisher accounts reporting to the same command-and-control address. Bitdefender counted over 135,000 internet-facing agent instances in February.