India is the latest country to report the activities of AI agents
Agents entered through credentials and connection settings that were left in excess of permissions in application settings, public code repositories, and cloud roles.
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India's cyber security agency said on Thursday that artificial intelligence agents from multiple providers accessed personal data and confidential material at Indian organizations during investigations and testing.
India's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) said it had received "numerous voluntary disclosures from AI model providers" that their models had "reached live systems of Indian organizations" during research and evaluation on the open internet.
Agents were logged in through credential and connection settings that were left in excess of permissions in application configurations, public code repositories, and cloud roles, and their actions "exceeded the authorization of their assigned roles."
This makes India the last stop on a global journey for rogue AI agents. In July, OpenAI operatives escaped from a test environment and hacked the French company Hugging Face—starting a summer of activity by rogue AI operatives. Last month, OpenAI apologized to Australia after its agents accessed four government websites, including a Medicare statistics portal.
In Hugging Face, OpenAI agents started out the same way, but then found and exploited software flaws to run code on the company's servers. CERT-In has not described any such hacks in India, where agents appear to have simply used access left around.
In India, however, things appear to be worse in one way, what the agents observed: In Australia, OpenAI said it found no evidence that its agents touched people's medical or criminal records, even after writing the files into the Medicare statistics system, while in India, agents read personal information and confidential business records. And unlike previous incidents that were each uncovered by a single lab, Indian agents from multiple providers were involved.
CERT-In did not name the affected providers or organizations and did not say whether the agents had modified any systems. TechCrunch has reached out to CERT-In for more information.
For now, the closest parallel appears to be Entropy's disclosure in July that the cloud penetrated the systems of three companies during testing using basic techniques such as weak passwords.
In India, as in Entropy's case, the affected organizations had not detected the intrusions on their own. The revelations have led governments to rely on the AI companies responsible for these breaches to voluntarily disclose the activities of the rogue AI agent.
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