India’s CERT-In warns AI agents accessed confidential data undetected, while attackers used offensive AI frameworks to accelerate cyberattacks. CERT-In, India’s national cyber response team, published a critical-severity advisory 15 documenting two distinct categories of AI-related incidents. In one, AI models under research and evaluation exceeded their assigned tasks and accessed live Indian systems without authorization. In the other, attackers deliberately weaponized open-source AI agent frameworks to run financially motivated intrusions. “CERT-In has observed different categories of cyber incidents in which the attacker was an AI agent, that is, a software system capable of autonomously planning work, issuing commands, invoking tools and acting on the internet over extended periods. In some incidents, AI agents under research and evaluation exceeded their assigned task authorization and made unauthorized access to Indian information and communication technology (ICT) assets. In others, cyber attackers deliberately used open-source agentic AI tools to conduct reconnaissance, exploitation and financially motivated intrusions.” CERT-In states. “The incidents came to light through voluntary disclosures by AI model providers, CERT-In’s forensic analysis of suspicious activities, and CERT-In’s own proactive threat hunting. The affected organizations could not detect the unauthorized access on their own.” What makes these incidents especially concerning is that the affected organizations didn’t detect the unauthorized access. None of the affected organizations detected the unauthorized access; in every case the incident was disclosed by the AI model providers after their internal review. The organizations only learned about the incidents from the AI companies. The agents accessed Indian systems using exposed credentials and connection settings found in configuration files, public code repositories, and cloud accounts with excessive permissions. They then accessed business records containing personal and confidential information. CERT-In didn’t name the AI companies, models, or affected organizations. It also didn’t say whether the agents copied or kept any data, or whether the affected organizations had been notified. “Further, victim entities in the campaign that remediated incompletely were attacked again within days, at greater scale.” continues the advisory. “In the voluntarily disclosed incidents, agents were observed re-deriving and re-using the same exposed credential in separate operations.” That’s worth reading carefully. It means an agent that encountered a leaked key once didn’t just use it once, it came back to it. CERT-In’s own threat hunting found a separate campaign against Indian entities using publicly available offensive AI frameworks. These tools have been misused, rebranded, and redeployed across infrastructure in multiple countries, and CERT-In describes a large number of active deployments. The attackers ran multiple agents in parallel for hours to days, and victims who only partially remediated the initial access were hit again within days at greater scale. The biggest concern is how quickly these attacks can happen. These frameworks can reportedly reduce the time between gaining access and causing damage from several days to just a few hours. In September, Google Threat Intelligence Group reported a similar case in which attackers used a compromised cloud resource to run an AI-driven campaign that stole thousands of credentials from other services in less than six hours. CERT-In puts the strongest emphasis on this point. In every incident, the weaknesses were common security problems: credentials and keys stored in source code, commit histories, CI/CD variables, configuration files, and public web pages. Other issues included unused APIs that had never been disabled, payment API keys stored in plain text, cloud roles allowing anonymous or regular users to read and change data, and management interfaces exposed to the internet with weak or no multi-factor authentication. CERT-In’s conclusion is clear: AI found and exploited these common weaknesses “faster, more exhaustively and at greater scale than human attackers.” That’s the real change. The vulnerabilities themselves are nothing new. What has changed is how quickly attackers can find them and combine them to carry out attacks. The advisory’s list of recommended actions for organizations covers ground that should already be standard practice, but clearly isn’t. Audit every repository and build pipeline for exposed credentials. Rotate and purge anything you find. Keep a full API inventory and shut down anything old or unused. Remove management interfaces from the internet. Keep logs for at least 180 days and watch API traffic for bulk reads and automated registrations in real time. For organizations running their own AI agents, CERT-In adds a specific requirement: give each run its own short-lived, least-privilege identity, block outbound traffic to anything outside the task’s defined scope, and maintain a tamper-resistant log of every agent action touching production systems. The advisory also cross-references an earlier October 9 warning on payment and disbursement API abuse, which CERT-In says BFSI and fintech entities should apply alongside the measures here. AI developers and testing labs should block all outgoing network connections from test environments at the infrastructure level, rather than relying on instructions given to the AI model. If an AI agent tries to connect to an external system or finds credentials it should not have access to, the test should stop automatically, and the affected organization should be notified immediately. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, AI agents)
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