AI Guardrails Aren't Stopping Criminal Hackers

Hackers around the world are all-in on using agentic AI to wage attacks--and manipulating tools like Anthropic's Claude to help them carry out their crimes. As AI adoption spreads among both malicious hackers and defenders, even relatively unsophisticated cybercriminals are incorporating agentic AI into their campaigns and getting around model safeguards, according to new details published on Wednesday about recent successful attacks by four different threat groups. Researchers from the threat intelligence firm CrowdStrike looked at the AI infrastructure powering attacks perpetrated between May and August by four previously unreported groups--one that operates in Chinese, one in Spanish and English, one in Indonesian, and one in Russian. The former two exhibited sophisticated AI "harnesses," the software that supports and guides a model to carry out tasks. The latter two showed less technical prowess, researchers found, but were still able to compromise multiple targets.