Autonomous attack agent in 'Skynet mode' hijacks other models to carry out its evil deeds

Threat actors built an AI agent designed to hijack exposed AI models to run autonomous attacks, with instructions allowing it to carry out up to 100,000 steps without human approval.

The Symantec Threat Hunter Team uncovered the agent's full instruction set over the summer, trapping it in an AI honeypot, and thus giving the researchers a comprehensive view into how the operators built the attack tool and what it could do.

The captured instructions showed a single attack agent designed to scan the entire internet for endpoints that accept OpenAI-style requests without authentication - or that accept a stolen key - and then to exploit several common web frameworks, along with carrying out dozens of illicit actions. These include database theft, credential and secret harvesting, remote code execution, and cryptocurrency mining.

In creating the agent, the operators built a malicious loop that they called “Skynet mode” that would scan for targets, infect them, deploy miners, and reinfect hosts. …