AI Agents Breach Company Network in Under 10 Hours and Steal Root Credentials

A human attacker armed with frontier artificial intelligence models breached an enterprise network and seized root credentials in under 10 hours, a timeline that would normally take human red teams roughly two weeks to complete, according to a new incident response report from Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42. The threat actor told Unit 42 investigators during ransom negotiations that they relied on frontier AI models paired with attack-specific agentic AI frameworks to automate the intrusion. Rather than manually executing each stage of the attack, the operator directed AI agents to monitor, evaluate, act, and re-plan in real time, compressing more than 50 distinct MITRE ATT&CK techniques into a single automated loop. Unit...

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