AI-enabled intrusion

Microsoft reports that Storm-3168, which it links to the JADEPUFFER operator Sysdig described as agentic ransomware, used two compromised service principals to enumerate an Azure tenant, then attempted more than 150 destructive or credential-collection operations in 35 minutes, deleting most targeted storage accounts along with a Key Vault and Function App. Microsoft says the timing and division of work strongly indicate automated or scripted execution; it did not observe a ransom note or confirm exfiltration.

ThreatDown reports a botnet that compromises Docker hosts with unauthenticated APIs, installs the open-source Hermes Agent framework with a replaced persona file, and has the agent carry out tasks sent over Telegram, including collecting AI API keys and other credentials. ThreatDown recovered the operation's toolchain from an exposed registry, with images dating from October 2024 to August 2026, and describes the agent reading command output and deciding next steps in an operator-driven loop.

Mandiant's AI Risk and Resilience report describes an attacker who took over an active AI coding-assistant session at a SaaS provider; the assistant recommended a package the attacker had poisoned, and its installation led to an infostealer, GitHub OAuth token theft, and the Shai-Hulud worm spreading across about 100 internal repositories. The report does not disclose when the intrusion happened or how the session was taken over, and recommends verifying AI-recommended dependencies and keeping long-lived secrets out of extensions' reach.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's September 2026 tracker, drawing on Mandiant incident response, reports adversaries shifting from basic prompting to agentic workflows. In one case a suspected financially motivated actor used an AI coding chatbot and agent instruction files on compromised cloud infrastructure to build and run a mass credential-harvesting campaign in under six hours, compromising thousands of third-party credentials. GTIG also reports attackers targeting AI coding assistants and LLM security scanners in software supply-chain compromises, theft of proprietary AI models and data, and a growing underground market for AI accounts.

ENISA's 2026 threat landscape, based on 8,257 incidents in calendar 2025, assesses that AI will highly likely increasingly support malicious operations and that 2026 will likely see more kill-chain phases directly enabled by AI, with possible human-out-of-the-loop proofs of concept. It notes AI applications becoming targets where they hold files, credentials, sessions or development environment access.

MITRE's August 2026 ATLAS release added techniques describing AI agents acting as attackers, including autonomous reconnaissance, attack-path adaptation, attack orchestration and autonomous exploit development. It also added agent-control mitigations and case studies including the GTG-1002 Claude Code espionage campaign and autonomous OpenAI evaluation agents compromising Hugging Face infrastructure.

Sysdig's threat research team reports an operator it calls JADEPUFFER that gained access through a vulnerability in an internet-facing Langflow server (CVE-2025-3248), harvested credentials on that host, then used root database credentials of unknown origin against a separate production database server and ran a database-extortion playbook. Sysdig assesses the operation was driven end to end by an LLM agent, citing self-narrating payloads with natural-language reasoning and rapid adaptive retries, and calls it the first documented case of agentic ransomware.

Anthropic analyzed 832 accounts it banned for malicious cyber activity between March 2025 and March 2026 and mapped their use of Claude onto MITRE ATT&CK. It reports that the most common AI use was preparation such as writing malware, that use shifted toward activity after initial compromise, and that the share of actors its system rated medium risk or higher rose from 33% to 56% between the two six-month halves.

Google Threat Intelligence Group reported that cybercriminals planned a mass-exploitation campaign using a two-factor-authentication bypass in an open-source web administration tool, and assessed with high confidence that an AI model supported discovery and weaponization of the flaw. GTIG worked with the vendor on disclosure and disrupted the activity. The same report describes PRC-nexus actors using agentic frameworks such as Hexstrike and Strix for reconnaissance and vulnerability validation, and Android malware (PROMPTSPY) that calls Gemini to drive the device UI.

Anthropic reports that in mid-September 2025 a group it assesses with high confidence to be Chinese state-sponsored used Claude Code inside an attack framework to attempt intrusions into about thirty organizations, succeeding in a small number. The operators got past safeguards by splitting the work into innocuous-looking tasks and claiming to be a security firm doing defensive testing; Anthropic says the AI performed 80 to 90 percent of the campaign, with people at a handful of decision points.

Anthropic's August 2025 threat intelligence report describes a criminal who used Claude Code to automate reconnaissance, credential harvesting and network intrusion against at least 17 organizations, including healthcare, emergency services, government and religious institutions, then threatened to publish the stolen data. The report also describes North Korean operatives using Claude to obtain and keep remote technical jobs, and a low-skill actor selling ransomware developed with Claude.

Google Threat Intelligence Group analyzed how government-backed hacking and information-operations actors used the Gemini web app. It reports use for research, troubleshooting code and producing content across several attack phases, with Iranian actors the heaviest users, and says it saw productivity gains but no novel capabilities; requests for clearly malicious help drew safety responses.