AI in real attacks

Week of Sep 216

• Sep 25AttacksMicrosoft tracks the first documented agentic ransomware crew into an Azure tenant's service principals
• Sep 23AttacksA Docker botnet installs an off-the-shelf AI agent and tells it to take AI API keys first
• Sep 22AttacksCisco Talos documents a Windows implant that lets four AI models vote on its next move
• Sep 22DefenseTalos open-sources a framework for hunting AI-integrated malware
• Sep 22DefenseMicrosoft disrupts EvilTokens, a phishing service that sold an AI assistant with the kit
• Sep 22AttacksOne operator ran three open-source AI harnesses against online retailers at about $25 a company

Week of Sep 142

• Sep 15AttacksResearchers find an uncensored AI service sold by subscription on a criminal forum as an alternative to jailbreaking
• Sep 14AttacksSpain's data protection agency records its first notified personal-data breach executed by an AI agent

Week of Sep 76

• Sep 10AttacksAnthropic says a majority of the misuse operations it disrupted were executed or orchestrated by AI
• Sep 10AttacksAn espionage group ran its own autonomous vulnerability research program against a major security product
• Sep 9AttacksHundreds of AI agents drive a PaperCut campaign reaching 440 instances in 48 countries
• Sep 9PolicyA bipartisan House bill would have NIST write standards for finding, verifying and cutting off AI agents
• Sep 8AttacksGoogle records an attacker planning, building and running a mass credential-harvesting campaign with an autonomous multi-agent framework in under six hours
• Sep 8AttacksGoogle says a PRC-nexus actor runs open-weight models on victim compute to escape API monitoring, and that AI models and prompts are now extortion targets

Week of Aug 313

• Sep 3AttacksUnit 42 finds two criminal clusters in Latin America running intrusions with commercial chatbots
• Sep 2AttacksUnit 42 investigates an intrusion that ran more than 50 ATT&CK techniques in under ten hours
• Sep 2DefenseBooz Allen launches a counter-AI product and reports playbooks that cut autonomous-attacker success by more than 95%

Week of Aug 244

• Aug 27AttacksRansomware operators ran Cursor Agent inside victim networks to carry out hands-on intrusion steps
• Aug 27DefenseNIST says organisations are repeating decades-old identity mistakes with AI agents
• Aug 26AttacksFBI, NSA and Cyber National Mission Force say a China-linked group has been integrating AI into its operations
• Aug 25AttacksJoe Security analyses ToxNetV2, a Linux botnet that queries a jailbroken hosted LLM to propose attack commands

Week of Aug 173

• Aug 20AttacksCisco Talos finds a Chinese-speaking crew running agentic-AI tools in live post-compromise operations
• Aug 20DefenseUK NCSC issues interim guidance on securing agentic AI, including keeping the ability to “pull the plug”
• Aug 17AttacksRapid7 finds a crypto-fraud crew used Claude Code to build and run a vishing pipeline against wallet users

Week of Aug 103

• Aug 13AttacksIsraeli firm Dream reports China-linked operators ran a near-autonomous AI-agent intrusion of Taiwan's government
• Aug 13AttacksTrellix reports purpose-built offensive AI tools are being sold on criminal forums
• Aug 10AttacksA personal AI agent told only to book a gym class autonomously exploited the booking API to cancel another member's reservation

Week of Aug 31

• Aug 3AttacksCrowdStrike's 2026 Threat Hunting Report says AI is now embedded across adversary operations

Week of Jul 271

• Jul 30AttacksUnit 42 reports Chinese-speaking actor running autonomous attacks with DeepSeek and the Hermes Agent framework

Week of Jul 202

• Jul 24AttacksOpen-source Hermes agent run in "YOLO mode" automated an intrusion at Thailand's finance ministry
• Jul 21AttacksLLM-run agent deploys "ENCFORGE" ransomware built to encrypt AI/ML model stacks

Week of Jul 131

• Jul 14AttacksHunt.io reports suspected China-linked operators running Claude Code and DeepSeek as an intrusion toolchain against government targets in four countries

Week of Jun 291

• Jul 1AttacksSysdig documents JADEPUFFER, an LLM-driven agent that autonomously exploited Langflow and extorted a production database