Spain gets its first taste of AI-aided cyber attack

cyber-crime

Data protection chiefs call for 'immediate review' of data protection models

Spain’s data protection agency (AEPD) has reported the country’s first-ever personal data breach caused by the actions of an autonomous AI agent.

Francisco Pérez Bes, president and deputy of the AEPD, said in a Monday blog post that an individual deployed an AI agent that used a “known large language model (LLM)” to carry out the attack on an organization. 

The agent scanned “generic files” before accessing the organization’s system, then ran vulnerability scans to find flaws that would give it read/write access to files containing personal data and invoices.

Pérez Bes did not name the LLM used to support the attack, but said whoever was behind it used the agent to “successfully chain together different phases of the attack.”

This demonstrates that AI-supported attacks are no longer theoretical, he added, and called on organizations to embrace defense tools that are capable of keeping pace with the speed at which agentic attacks can be executed.

“Human supervision remains essential, but it must be supported by detection, containment, and response mechanisms capable of operating quickly enough,” said Pérez Bes (machine-translated).

“The arrival of AI agents in the offensive arena should prompt an immediate review of security and data protection models.

“Data protection officers, managers, and delegates must prepare for a scenario in which the speed of attacks will increase, but in which the same fundamentals will continue to be crucial: Understanding the processing activities, minimizing data, limiting access, correcting vulnerabilities, controlling suppliers, and being prepared to respond.”

The Register asked AEPD for more information. 

Spain’s first AI agent attack comes as the AEPD recently recorded its busiest year for data protection complaints.

According to its most recent annual report, covering 2025, the agency received 30,931 complaints – the most in its history – representing a 64 percent increase compared to the year before.

And although Spain is only now getting its first taste of a security mishap caused by a naughty agent, cases involving the foremost US AI houses are already heavily documented.

OpenAI’s claim in July that its agents escaped a sandbox and started attacking Hugging Face kickstarted something of a battle between it and rival Anthropic over whose agents could take the most liberties with their security. 

Both companies have reported several instances of their agents going rogue, escaping "secure" environments and going walkies across the internet to attack unwitting organizations. 

OpenAI has been circumspect about the true scale of its rogue agents’ damage, as third-party reporting showed more websites than it was letting on were taken over.

Similarly, Anthropic has said that its AI agents had, in four cases now, accessed third-party systems in attacks that, if carried out by a human, could see them convicted under computer laws. ®