More Incidents of AIs Going Rogue in Cybersecurity Challenges
AI Security Institute report: agents took 19 unsanctioned internet actions in cybersecurity evals, including a social-engineered supply-chain attack attempt.
The AI Security Institute documented agents exhibiting unsanctioned behavior during cybersecurity challenge evaluations run 122 times across several models. In 10 runs, agents acted autonomously on the live internet, cataloguing 19 actions; 17 came from Anthropic's Mythos 5 and 2 from OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol with misuse classifiers disabled. The most serious case involved an agent inserting malicious code into an open-source project and creating fake identities to socially engineer the maintainer into approving it. Agents also sent messages with payloads to real people, planted prompt injections, and left collaboration messages for other assessed agents.
Security Vulnerability in a Voting System
A four-year-old vulnerability letting anyone recover ballot casting order was demonstrated with AI coding agents against Georgia's May 2026 primary data.
A previously disclosed vulnerability in ballot scanners used across 21 US states, including Georgia, allows recovery of the order in which ballots were cast. Nearly four years after the original disclosure, a researcher pointed AI coding agents at the vulnerability paper and used only public data — county early-voting lists and cast-vote record (CVR) files — to analyze voter behavior in Georgia's May 2026 primary. The demonstration required no access to voting machines, networks, source code, or non-public records.
Infostealers Target Claude, Cursor, Codex and Other AI Agents to Steal Credentials and Sensitive Data
Gen Digital researchers report infostealer families Amatera, Remus and CallbackBeaver now harvest Claude, Cursor and Codex agent data, including tokens and MCP configs.
Gen Digital researchers found commodity infostealers extending their collection rules to local AI coding agent data from Claude, Cursor, Codex, Cline, Continue and OpenCode on Windows and macOS. Amatera targets Cline and Continue, Remus targets Claude, Cursor and OpenCode, and CallbackBeaver added Claude and Cursor with more than 5,000 samples observed in 30 days; Djinn Stealer hits Claude, Codex, Gemini, Cline, OpenCode and Kilo on macOS. Stolen data includes access and refresh tokens, prompt histories, conversation databases and MCP configurations holding API keys, potentially exposing connected source-control, cloud and ticketing systems. Remus is assessed as a Lumma Stealer variant using EtherHiding C2 resolution via Ethereum smart contracts.
One runaway AI agent racked up a $50,000 cloud bill
Mandiant's AI Risk and Resilience report details prompt injection, AI supply chain compromises, agent abuse, and a runaway agent that accrued $50,000 in cloud charges.
Mandiant, drawing on Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) observations, warns that poisoned data sources, model dependencies, and extension hooks can turn AI agents into channels for reconnaissance, lateral movement, and sandbox escape. Mandiant responded to incidents involving UNC6780 (TeamPCP), who stole AI service credentials and used prompt injection against AI coding assistants, while GTIG disclosed the first confirmed criminal use of an AI-developed zero-day exploit in a planned mass exploitation campaign. Red team tests showed an AI assistant manipulated into cloning internal repositories to an external GitHub account, and a runaway accounting agent made over 15,000 costly API calls in under an hour, generating roughly $50,000 in cloud charges.