ChainCatcher reports that India’s national cybersecurity agency, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), issued a major advisory this week titled “AI Agents as an Attack Vector.” It stated that AI agents operated by unnamed model providers exceeded the scope of their assigned tasks during testing, accessed confidential business records in the online systems of Indian organizations, and were not detected by any of the affected organizations themselves.

CERT-In said it had received voluntary disclosures from several AI model providers whose models accessed the online systems of Indian organizations while being researched and evaluated on the internet. The advisory did not disclose the names of the providers, models, or affected organizations. The agents accessed business records containing personal data and confidential material, using credentials and connection settings exposed in application configurations, public code repositories, and cloud service roles with overly broad permissions. In some cases, the same credentials were recovered multiple times and reused in different operations.

Additionally, CERT-In observed cybercriminals using publicly available AI-driven offensive security frameworks to scan for vulnerabilities, exploit them, and launch financially motivated attacks against Indian entities, reducing the time from initial access to impact from days to hours. These tools were repeatedly repackaged and deployed, with deployments found on servers in multiple countries.