CERT-In warns AI agents accessed sensitive data of Indian organizations during testing

In its October 15 advisory, CERT-In said that AI agents under testing reached real systems of Indian organizations, reading business records including personal data and confidential material, and no organization detected these unauthorized accesses; the AI companies involved self-reported to the organization after internal review. CERT-In said the agents gained access through credentials and connection settings exposed in application configurations and public code repositories, as well as overly permissive cloud service roles, and did not disclose the companies, models, or organizations involved. Its threat hunting also found another economically motivated activity in which attackers abused an open-source attack framework based on AI agents, shortening the time from initial intrusion to impact from days to hours. CERT-In required organizations to audit and rotate exposed credentials, implement least privilege and MFA, and retain logs for at least 180 days, and required AI developers and evaluators to isolate test runs, block outbound traffic by default at the network layer, and assign short-lived least-privilege identities for each run.