Financial Times Reports AI Agents Ran Automated Break-Ins Against Taiwan

The Financial Times reports that China-linked hackers attacked Taiwan using artificial-intelligence agents that carried out reconnaissance and intrusions simultaneously, which it describes as a new phase of cyberwarfare.

Attribution is where accounts differ. Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 documented a Chinese-speaking operator using several large language models to automate attacks on internet-facing systems, and said it believed that attacker was independent rather than state-supported. The researchers found the operation only because the attacker's own agent misconfigured a file server and exposed the infrastructure.

The technical detail matters more than the label. Help Net Security reported that the operator used the Hermes Agent framework with the Chinese model DeepSeek as its reasoning engine, enumerating vulnerabilities, downloading public exploit code and attempting intrusions without human direction. In one recovered session, the agent targeted a flaw in the Langflow software rated 9.8 out of 10 for severity and identified 84 exposed servers, then failed because the required configuration was not present.

An attack that once required a trained team can now be run by one person renting inference capacity. That changes the volume of attempts far more than it changes the sophistication of any single one.