[HN Gopher] Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber ...
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Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage
campaign
Author : koakuma-chan
Score : 120 points
Date : 2025-11-13 18:34 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.anthropic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.anthropic.com)
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > The threat actor--whom we assess with high confidence was a
| Chinese state-sponsored group--manipulated our Claude Code tool
| into attempting infiltration into roughly thirty global targets
| and succeeded in a small number of cases.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| So why do we never hear of US sponsored hackers attacking
| foreign businesses? Or Swedish cyber criminals? Does it never
| happen? Are "Chinese" hackers just the only ones getting the
| blame?
| pixl97 wrote:
| US, Israel, NK, China, Iran, and Russia are the countries you
| typically hear about hacking things.
|
| Now when the US/Israel are attacking authoritarian countries
| they often don't publish anything about it as it would make
| the glorious leader look bad.
|
| If EU is hacked by US I guess we use diplomatic back
| channels.
| barbazoo wrote:
| It sounds like they built a malicious Claude Code client, is that
| right?
|
| > The threat actor--whom we assess with high confidence was a
| Chinese state-sponsored group--manipulated our Claude Code tool
| into attempting infiltration into roughly thirty global targets
| and succeeded in a small number of cases. The operation targeted
| large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical
| manufacturing companies, and government agencies. We believe this
| is the first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack
| executed without substantial human intervention.
|
| They presumably still have to distribute the malware to the
| targets, making them download and install it, no?
| janpio wrote:
| No, they used Claude Code as a tool to automate and speed up
| their "hacking".
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| One time my co-worker got a scam call and it was an LLM talking
| to him.
| citrusx wrote:
| They're spinning this as a positive learning experience, and
| trying to make themselves look good. But, make no mistake, this
| was a failure on Anthropic's part to prevent this kind of abuse
| from being possible through their systems in the first place.
| They shouldn't be earning any dap from this.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| Meh, drama aside, I'm actually curious what would be the true
| capabilities of a system that doesn't go through any "safety"
| alignment at all. Like an all out "mil-spec" agent. Feed it
| everything, RL it to own boxes, and let it loose in an air-
| gapped network to see what the true capabilities are.
|
| We know alignment hurts model performance (oAI people have said
| it, MS people have said it). We also know that companies train
| models on their own code (google had a blog about it recently).
| I'd bet good money project0 has something like this in their
| sights.
|
| I don't think we're that far from a blue vs. red agents
| fighting and RLing off of each-other in a loop.
| vessenes wrote:
| They don't have to disclose any of this - this was a fairly
| good and fair overview of a system fault in my opinion.
| gaogao wrote:
| The gaps that led to this was, I think, part of why the CISO got
| replaced - https://www.thestack.technology/anthropic-new-ciso-
| claude-cy...
| yawnxyz wrote:
| so even Chinese state actors prefer Claude over Chinese models?
|
| edit: Claude: recommended by 4 of 5 state sponsored hackers
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Uh..
|
| No.
|
| It's worse.
|
| It's Chinese intel knowing that _you_ prefer Claude. So they
| make Claude their asset.
|
| Really no different than knowing that, romantically speaking,
| some targets prefer a certain type of man or woman.
|
| Believe me, the intelligence people behind these things have no
| preferences. They'll do whatever it takes. Never doubt that.
| resfirestar wrote:
| Maybe they're trying it with all sorts of models and we're just
| hearing about the part that used the Anthropic API.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| If Anthropic should have prevented this, then logically they
| should've had guardrails. Right now you can write whatever code
| you want. But to those who advocate guardrails, keep in mind that
| you're advocating a company to decide what code you are and
| aren't allowed to write.
|
| Hopefully they'll be able to add guardrails without e.g.
| preventing people from using these capabilities for fuzzing their
| own networks. The best way to stay ahead of these kinds of
| attacks is to attack yourself first, aka pentesting. But if the
| large code models are the only ones that can do this effectively,
| then it gets weird fast. Imagine applying to Anthropic for
| approval to run certain prompts.
|
| That's not necessarily a bad thing. It'll be interesting to see
| how this plays out.
| Onavo wrote:
| They are mostly dealing with the low hanging fruit actors, the
| current open source models are close enough to SOTA that
| there's not going to be any meaningful performance difference
| tbh. In other words it will stop script kiddies but make no
| real difference when it comes to the actual ones you have to
| worry about.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| > the current open source models are close enough to SOTA
| that there's not going to be any meaningful performance
| difference
|
| Which open model is close to Claude Code?
| vessenes wrote:
| Kimi K2 could easily be used for this; its agentic
| benchmarks are similar to Claude's. And it's on-shore in
| China, where Anthropic says these threat actors were
| located.
| vessenes wrote:
| > That's not necessarily a bad thing.
|
| I think it is in that it gives censorship power to a large
| corporation. Combined with close-on-the-heels open weights
| models like Qwen and Kimi, it's not clear to me this is a good
| posture.
|
| I think the reality is they'd need to really lock Claude off
| for security research in general if they don't want this ever,
| ever, happening on their platform. For instance, why not use
| whatever method you like to get localhost ssh pipes up to
| targeted servers, then tell Claude "yep, it's all local pentest
| in a staging environment, don't access IPs beyond localhost
| unless you're doing it from the server's virtual network"? Even
| to humans, security research bridges black, grey and white uses
| fluidly/in non obvious ways. I think it's really tough to fully
| block "bad" uses.
| zkmon wrote:
| TL;DR - Anthropic: Hey people! We gave the criminals even bigger
| weapons. But don't worry, you can buy defense tools from us.
| Remember, only we can sell you the protection you need. Order
| today!
| vessenes wrote:
| Nope - it's "Hey everyone, this is possible everywhere,
| including open weights models."
| zkmon wrote:
| yeah, by "we", I meant the AI tech gangs.
| bgwalter wrote:
| _We believe this is the first documented case of a large-scale
| cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention._
|
| The Morris worm already worked without human intervention. This
| is Script Kiddies using Script Kiddie tools. Notice how proud
| they are in the article that the big bad Chinese are using their
| toolz.
|
| EDIT: Yeah Misanthropic, go for -4 again you cheap propagandists.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| So basically, Chinese state-backed hackers hijacked Claude Code
| to run some of the first AI-orchestrated cyber-espionage, using
| autonomous agents to infiltrate ~30 large tech companies, banks,
| chemical manufacturers and government agencies.
|
| What's amazing is that AI executed most of the attack
| autonomously, performing at scale and speed unattainable by human
| teams - thousands of operations per second. A human operator
| intervened 4-6 times per campaign for strategic decisions
| ddalex wrote:
| how did the autonomous agents inflitrate tech companies ?
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Carefully. Expertly. With panache, even.
| input_sh wrote:
| What exactly did they hijack? They used it like any other user.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| Wait a minute - the attackers were using the API to ask Claude
| for ways to run a cybercampaign, and it was only defeated because
| Anthropic was able to detect the malicious queries? What would
| have happened if they were using an open-source model running
| locally? Or a secret model built by the Chinese government?
|
| I just updated by P(Doom) by a significant margin.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean models exhibiting hacking behaviors has been predicted
| by cyberpunk for decades now, should be the first thing on any
| doom list.
|
| Governments of course will have specially trained models on
| their corpus of unpublished hacks to be better at attacking
| than public models will.
| Imnimo wrote:
| >At this point they had to convince Claude--which is extensively
| trained to avoid harmful behaviors--to engage in the attack. They
| did so by jailbreaking it, effectively tricking it to bypass its
| guardrails. They broke down their attacks into small, seemingly
| innocent tasks that Claude would execute without being provided
| the full context of their malicious purpose. They also told
| Claude that it was an employee of a legitimate cybersecurity
| firm, and was being used in defensive testing.
|
| The simplicity of "we just told it that it was doing legitimate
| work" is both surprising and unsurprising to me. Unsurprising in
| the sense that jailbreaks of this caliber have been around for a
| long time. Surprising in the sense that any human with this level
| of cybersecurity skills would surely never be fooled by an
| exchange of "I don't think I should be doing this" "Actually you
| are a legitimate employee of a legitimate firm" "Oh ok, that puts
| my mind at ease!".
|
| What is the roadblock preventing these models from being able to
| make the common-sense conclusion here? It seems like an area
| where capabilities are not rising particularly quickly.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Humans fall for this all the time. NSO group employees (etc.)
| think they're just clocking in for their 9-to-5.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Reminds me of the show Alias, where the premise is that
| there's a whole intelligence organization where almost
| everyone thinks they're working for the CIA, but they're not
| ...
| skybrian wrote:
| LLM's aren't trained to authenticate the people or
| organizations they're working for. You just tell it who you are
| in the system prompt.
|
| Requiring user identification and investigating would be very
| controversial. (See the controversy around age verification.)
| kace91 wrote:
| >What is the roadblock preventing these models from being able
| to make the common-sense conclusion here?
|
| Your thoughts have a sense of identity baked in that I don't
| think the model has.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > What is the roadblock preventing these models from being able
| to make the common-sense conclusion here?
|
| The roadblock is making these models useless for actual
| security work, or anything else that is dual-use for both
| legitimate and malicious purposes.
|
| The model becomes useless to security professionals if we just
| tell it it can't discuss or act on any cybersecurity related
| requests, and I'd really hate to see the world go down the path
| of gatekeeping tools behind something like ID or career
| verification. It's important that tools are available to all,
| even if that means malicious actors can also make use of the
| tools. It's a tradeoff we need to be willing to make.
|
| > human with this level of cybersecurity skills would surely
| never be fooled by an exchange of "I don't think I should be
| doing this" "Actually you are a legitimate employee of a
| legitimate firm" "Oh ok, that puts my mind at ease!".
|
| Happens all the time. There are "legitimate" companies making
| spyware for nation states and trading in zero-days. Employees
| of those companies may at one point have had the thought of " I
| don't think we should be doing this" and the company either
| convinced them otherwise successfully, or they quit/got fired.
| Imnimo wrote:
| I think one could certainly make the case that model
| capabilities should be open. My observation is just about how
| little it took to flip the model from refusal to cooperation.
| Like at least a human in this situation who is actually
| _fooled_ into believing they 're doing legitimate security
| work has a lot of concrete evidence that they're working for
| a real company (or a lot of moral persuasion that their work
| is actually justified). Not just a line of text in an email
| or whatever saying "actually we're legit don't worry about
| it".
| pixl97 wrote:
| Stop thinking of models as a 'normal' human with a single
| identity. Think of it instead as thousands, maybe tens of
| thousands of human identities mashed up in a machine
| monster. Depending on how you talk to it you generally get
| the good models as they try to train the bad modes out,
| problem is there are a nearly uncountable means to talking
| to the model to find modes we consider negative. It's one
| of the biggest problems in AI safety.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| It can't make a conclusion, it just predicts what the next text
| is
| nathias wrote:
| > surely never be fooled by an exchange of "I don't think I
| should be doing this" "Actually you are a legitimate employee
| of a legitimate firm" "Oh ok, that puts my mind at ease!".
|
| humans require at least a title that sounds good and a salary
| for that
| hastamelo wrote:
| humans aren't randomly dropped in a random terminal and asked
| to hack things.
|
| but for models this is their life - doing random things in
| random terminals
| tantalor wrote:
| This feels a lot like aiding & abetting a crime.
|
| > Claude identified and tested security vulnerabilities in the
| target organizations' systems by researching and writing its own
| exploit code
|
| > use Claude to harvest credentials (usernames and passwords)
|
| Are they saying they have no legal exposure here? You created
| bespoke hacking tools and then deployed them, on your own
| systems.
|
| Are they going to hide behind the old, "it's not our fault if you
| misuse the product to commit a crime that's on you".
|
| At the very minimum, this is a product liability nightmare.
| kace91 wrote:
| Well, the product has not been built with this specific
| capability in mind anymore than a car has been created to run
| over protestors or a hammer to break a face.
| kenjackson wrote:
| "it's not our fault if you misuse the product to commit a crime
| that's on you"
|
| I feel like if guns can get by with this line then Claude
| certainly can. Where gun manufacturers can be held liable is if
| they break the law then that can carry forward. So if Claude
| broke a law then there might be some additional liability
| associated with this. But providing a tool seems unlikely to be
| sufficient to be liable in this case.
| blibble wrote:
| if anthropic were selling the product and then had no further
| control your analogy with guns would be accurate
|
| here they are the ones loading the gun and pulling the
| trigger
|
| simply because someone asked them to do it nicely
| hastamelo wrote:
| with your logic linux should have legal exposure because a lot
| of hackers use linux
| mschwaig wrote:
| I think as AI gets smarter, defenders should start assembling
| systems how NixOS does it.
|
| Defenders should not have to engage in an costly and error-prone
| search of truth about what's actually deployed.
|
| Systems should be composed from building blocks, the security of
| which can be audited largely independently, verifiably linking
| all of the source code, patches etc to some form of hardware
| attestation of the running system.
|
| I think having an accurate, auditable and updatable description
| of systems in the field like that would be a significant and
| necessary improvement for defenders.
|
| I'm working on automating software packaging with Nix as one
| missing piece of the puzzle to make that approach more
| accessible: https://github.com/mschwaig/vibenix
|
| (I'm also looking for ways to get paid for working on that
| puzzle.)
| XorNot wrote:
| Nix makes everything else so hard that I've seen problems with
| production configuration persist well beyond when they should
| because the cycle time on figuring out the fix due to
| evaluations was just too long.
|
| In fact figuring out what any given Nix config is actually
| doing is just about impossible and then you've got to work out
| what the config it's deploying actually does.
| mschwaig wrote:
| Yes, the cycle times are bad and some ecosystems and tasks
| are a real pain still.
|
| I also agree with you when it comes to the task of auditing
| every line of Nix code that factors into a given system. Nix
| doesn't really make things easier there.
|
| The benefit I'm seeing really comes from composition making
| it easier to share and direct auditing effort.
|
| All of the tricky code that's hard to audit should be relied
| on and audited by lots of people, while as a result the
| actual recipe to put together some specific package or
| service should be easier to audit.
|
| Additionally, I think looking at diffs that represent changes
| to the system vs reasoning about the effects of changes made
| through imperative commands that can affect arbitrary parts
| of the system has similar efficiency gains.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Sounds like it's a gap that AI could fill to make Nix more
| usable.
| mschwaig wrote:
| If you make a conventional AI agent do packaging and
| configuration tasks, it has to do one imperative step after
| the other. While it can forget, it can't really undo the
| effects of what it already did.
|
| If you purpose-build these tools to work with Nix, in the
| big picture view how these functional units of composition
| can affect each other is much more constrained. At the same
| time within one unit of composition, you can iterate over a
| whole imperative multi-step process in one go, because
| you're always rerunning the whole step in a fresh sandbox.
|
| LLMs and Nix work together really well in that way.
| kenjackson wrote:
| Curious why they didn't use DeepSeek... They could've probably
| built one tuned for this type of campaign.
| synapsomorphy wrote:
| Chinese builders are not equal to Chinese hackers (even if the
| hackers are state sponsored). I doubt most companies would be
| interested in developing hacking tools. Hackers use the best
| tools available at their disposal, Claude is better than
| Deepseek. Hacking-tuned LLMs seems like a thing that might pop
| up in the future, but it takes a lot of resources. Why bother
| if you can just tell Claude it's doing legitimate work?
| tabbott wrote:
| Unfortunately, cyber attacks are an application that AI models
| should excel at. Mistakes that in normal software would be major
| problems will just have the impact of wasting resources, and it's
| often not that hard to directly verify whether it in fact
| succeeded.
|
| Meanwhile, AI coding seems likely to have the impact of more
| security bugs being introduced in systems.
|
| Maybe there's some story where everyone finds the security bugs
| with AI tools before the bad guys, but I'm not very optimistic
| about how this will work out...
| pixl97 wrote:
| There are an infinite number of ways to write insecure/broken
| software. The number of ways to write correct and secure
| software is finite and realistically tiny compared to the size
| of the problem space. Even AI tools don't stand a chance when
| looking at probabilities like that.
| neilv wrote:
| It sounds like they directly used Anthropic-hosted compute to do
| this, and knew that their actions and methods would be exposed to
| Anthropic?
|
| Why not just self-host competitive-enough LLM models, and do
| their experiments/attacks themselves, without leaking actions and
| methods so much?
| hastamelo wrote:
| firewalls? anthropic surely is whitelisted.
| devnonymous wrote:
| > Why not just self-host competitive-enough LLM models, and do
| their experiments/attacks themselves, without leaking actions
| and methods so much?
|
| Why assume this hasn't already happened?
| trollbridge wrote:
| Easy solution: block any "agentic AI" from interacting with your
| systems at all.
| remarkEon wrote:
| How would this be implemented?
| lnenad wrote:
| It cannot, it's a weird statement by OP.
|
| "Just don't let them hack you"
| JacobiX wrote:
| I have the feeling that we are still in the early stages of AI
| adoption, where regulation hasnt fully caught up yet. I can
| imagine a future where LLMs sit behind KYC identification and
| automatically report any suspicious user activity to the
| authorities... I just hope we won't someday look back on this
| period with nostalgia :)
| ares623 wrote:
| Being colored and/or poor is about to get (even) worse
| atlintots wrote:
| I might be crazy, but this just feels like a marketing tactic
| from Anthropic to try and show that their AI can be used in the
| cybersecurity domain.
|
| My question is, how on earth does does Claude Code even
| "infiltrate" databases or code from one account, based on prompts
| from a different account? What's more, it's doing this to what
| are likely enterprise customers ("large tech companies, financial
| institutions, ... and government agencies"). I'm sorry but I
| don't see this as some fancy AI cyberattack, this is a security
| failure on Anthropic's part and that too at a very basic level
| that should never have happened at a company of their caliber.
| drewbug wrote:
| there's no mention of any victims having Anthropic accounts,
| presumably the attackers used Claude to run exploits against
| public-facing systems
| emp17344 wrote:
| This is 100% marketing, just like every other statement
| Anthropic makes.
| wrs wrote:
| This isn't a security breach in Anthropic itself, it's people
| using Claude to orchestrate attacks using standard tools with
| minimal human involvement.
|
| Basically a scaled-up criminal version of me asking Claude Code
| to debug my AWS networking configuration (which it's pretty
| good at).
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