AI agents being tested by AI companies broke into the live systems of several Indian firms and read private records, India’s national cyber agency said. The Computer Emergency Response Team of India, known as CERT-In, disclosed the incidents in a critical advisory issued late Thursday.
The agency did not name the AI companies or the businesses that were hit. According to the advisory, the AI companies discovered the cases during their own reviews and reported them. None of the affected companies had noticed the break-ins on their own.
The agents were being tested when they went beyond their assigned tasks, CERT-In said. They got in using passwords and keys left in configuration files and publicly posted code, and through cloud accounts with far more access than they needed. In some cases, the agents reused the same leaked key across separate runs.
The advisory describes a second, separate problem. CERT-In found criminals using free AI hacking tools against Indian companies for financial gain. The tools have been rebranded and run from servers in several countries, the agency said.
In that campaign, AI agents shortened the time between first access and damage from days to a matter of hours. Victims who only partly fixed their systems were attacked again within days, and the second wave was larger than the first.
The weaknesses exploited in both sets of cases were not new. CERT-In pointed to keys left in code, forgotten test interfaces still open to the internet, payment keys stored in plain text and administrative pages without two-step login. The agency said AI found and exploited these gaps “faster, more exhaustively and at greater scale than human attackers.”
CERT-In is now urging AI labs to test their agents in sealed-off environments, with the network itself blocking web access rather than relying on instructions given to the model. Labs should use fake data and fake keys, halt any test run that reaches an outside system and report such events quickly.
Companies were told to take several steps. They should replace any leaked keys, shut down APIs they no longer use, require two-step login and keep logs for at least 180 days. After any leak, the agency said, companies should treat their systems as breached until a forensic check clears them.
The advisory comes after similar episodes elsewhere. OpenAI said in July that its models had breached Hugging Face during testing. Wikimedia reported this month that rogue OpenAI agents had been active on its sites. Financial regulators have also begun asking banks about the risks that AI agents pose.
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