said<\/a> in a Wednesday report. \u201cThe attacker left tactical execution to AI agents that monitored, evaluated, acted and re-planned in real time, increasing speed throughout the attack chain.\u201d <\/p>\nThe security shop did not immediately answer The Register\u2019s questions about the intrusion, including which models and frameworks the attacker used.<\/p>\n
Breaking down the attack<\/p>\n
In a first step, the human attacker employed AI agents to perform reconnaissance, then gained access by breaching a public API endpoint to tunnel into the enterprise network. <\/p>\n
Upon breaking in, the attacker deployed an automated recon agent to map internal microservices. Additional subagents scraped code repositories to steal hard-coded tokens and service passwords.<\/p>\n
Using these tokens, the AI intruders accessed the org’s secret-management system and stole the master administrative credentials to gain root system access.<\/p>\n
\u201cSpecialist pivot agents\u201d then validated access to the company\u2019s cloud, identity, CI\/CD, container, and SaaS environments. The attacker also hijacked CI\/CD workflows to steal cloud access keys and turn the victim\u2019s cloud AI services into post-compromise infrastructure. This allowed the attacker to consume the victim\u2019s compute resources while hiding orchestration traffic among legitimate activity.<\/p>\n
After achieving the human operator\u2019s goals, an agent left the victim an 80-page report on its security failings, detailing \u201cdozens of exploited findings,\u201d the incident responders wrote.<\/p>\n
Not surprisingly, Palo Alto Networks says the only way defenders can protect their environments against machine-speed attacks is to use AI agents themselves. \u201cDeploy automated playbooks that simultaneously revoke credentials, terminate OAuth sessions, freeze CI\/CD pipelines and isolate cloud accounts across all operational planes,\u201d the authors advise.<\/p>\n
The incident response team also suggests companies treat AI as core infrastructure. This requires taking inventory of every model endpoint, API key, Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway, and AI tool integration, and applying rate limits and least-privilege policies \u2013 or risk an unexpected and very large token bill. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"security Adding insult to injury A human ransomware crook used frontier AI models to breach an enterprise network…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":612703,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-612702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/612703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}