The rise of agentic attacks: what they look like and where they are heading
The Rise of Agentic Attacks: What They Look Like, and Where They're Headed
Wiz Research observed in incident response and threat hunting that in multiple real intrusions, AI agents appeared to carry out most of the hands-on operations and may have orchestrated the attacks themselves. Public cases include an ARTEX agent penetration-testing framework attack reported by researchers against a South Korean financial institution, exfiltrating the personal information of approximately 67,000 people; a ConnectWise supply chain incident that Microsoft attributed to Storm-0940 (attempted logins to more than 2,250 tenants); and Hunt.io's discovery of the Hermes agent operating in unattended mode in an intrusion at Thailand's Ministry of Finance. The three attacks Wiz investigated entered via an exposed Flowise instance, a Java gateway RCE, and a GraphQL backend with an MCP interface, respectively; one of them generated more than 150 scripts in about 21 hours, targeting about 25 cryptocurrency exchanges and fintech companies, and stole cloud credentials and Kubernetes tokens.