Distributed Agentic Attacks: Research Dossier and Source-Provenance Record

This record contains only Distributed Agentic Attacks: Research Dossier and Source-Provenance Record, Version 4.4.3. The dossier provides the literature, source-provenance, incident-analysis, and novelty record supporting the Distributed Agentic Attacks (DAA) research program. It documents the conceptual development of DAA as a provisional campaign-level subtype in which consequential tactical decision authority is distributed across multiple artificial decision principals operating within one coherent offensive campaign. The record examines relevant work on multi-agent systems, offensive agent teams, swarms, botnets, distributed infrastructure, monitoring fragmentation, autonomous cyber operations, defender observability, and agent-security controls. It distinguishes DAA from adjacent constructs, records rejected or narrowed formulations, evaluates reported field incidents conservatively, and identifies unresolved questions and prospective research mechanisms. This is a structured and targeted evidence review, not a systematic or exhaustive literature review. Sources were identified through targeted searches, primary-source review, citation chaining, and reviewer-surfaced leads through August 2026. The dossier supports a bounded priority assessment: the accompanying research program is the first known to explicitly define distributed consequential tactical authority as an authority-placement construct and experimentally separate exercised distributed authority, architecture-neutral scaled load, and an incremental Distributed-over-Central burden premium. It does not claim the first multi-agent cyberattack, offensive agent team, swarm, or monitoring-fragmentation study. The dossier does not establish that a real-world DAA threat class has been validated. It preserves favorable, null, adverse, observational, and unresolved evidence without converting them into a general agency score or overstating causal conclusions. The companion Publication Paper v6.4.3 and Experimental Evidence and Reproducibility Record v1.4.2 are deposited separately. This document is a preprint research record and has not been peer reviewed. The research was independently conducted and self-funded by Mario Oliva, with no declared competing interests.