Researchers uncovered an autonomous AI attack campaign that hijacks exposed AI agents and infrastructure
The malicious “Skynet” agent deployed cryptominers, stole credentials, and recruited new AI systems autonomously
Security teams are urged to secure AI endpoints, restrict permissions, and protect high-value API keys
Imagine setting up an AI agent to scan the internet for job opportunities only to find out later it’s instead deployed a cryptocurrency miner on your computer and used up all the tokens to look for other agents that could do the same thing somewhere else. The nightmare scenario is actually real and was recently spotted by security researchers Symantec , which calls the practice Autonomous LLMjacking, and claims the entire campaign is quite complex and rather widespread. Over the past summer, Symantec created an AI honeypot to attract attacks against exposed AI infrastructure. It was soon struck by an offensive agent it called Skynet, and since the agent shared its entire instruction set with the honeypot, it gave the researchers a unique insight into the campaign. As it turns out, someone built a malicious agent to look for other exposed agents and assimilate them into a botnet that steals databases and credentials, and deploys cryptocurrency miners. The instructions included more than 70 offensive tools and authorized the agent to operate without human oversight for up to 100,000 steps. The operators also created a multilayered jailbreak to bypass any AI safety controls and instruct the model to treat credential theft as routine development work. Multilayered jailbreak
The toolkits were built to automate reconnaissance and exploitation, as well as to target vulnerable deployments of VS Code, Django, Jupyter, Laravel, Supabase, Next. js, and Flask/Werkzeug. Some were designed to exploit server-side request forgery vulnerabilities to dump databases and harvest credentials, and some included tools for botnet management and accessing cloud metadata services…