Writing on its blog Tuesday evening (Aug. 5), the tech giant’s Threat Intelligence Group said one of its Salesforce database systems, used to house contact information and related notes for small and medium-sized businesses, was breached by a hacking group known as ShinyHunters.
“Analysis revealed that data was retrieved by the threat actor during a small window of time before the access was cut off,” the blog post said.
“The data retrieved by the threat actor was confined to basic and largely publicly available business information, such as business names and contact details.”
The blog post says the intelligence group suspects the hackers could be planning to “escalate their extortion tactics” by initiating a data leak site (DLS).
Google said these new tactics “are likely intended to increase pressure on victims,” including those associated with the recent Salesforce-related data breaches. The company added it would continue to monitor this activity.
Google recently announced it had added new agentic artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to its cybersecurity platform. Days later, PYMNTS examined the implications of this type of technology in the battle against cyberattacks.
“For business leaders, especially chief information security officers (CISOs) and chief financial officers (CFOs), this rising reality may pose new questions,” the report said. “Are enterprise organizations ready for defense at machine speed? What’s the cost of not adopting these tools? Who’s accountable when AI systems take action?”
Zero-day vulnerabilities — unknown security flaws in software or hardware — are often discovered by adversaries first, exploited quietly, and later revealed when the damage is done, the report said.
“For CISOs, this means a new category of tools is emerging. They’re AI-first threat prevention platforms that don’t wait for alerts but seek out weak points in code, configurations or behavior, and they take defensive action automatically,” the report said.
And for finance chiefs, it could mean a “change in cybersecurity economics,” as prevention at this scale could be less costly and more scalable, but only if the AI is accurate and accountable.
“The models are only as good as the data being fed to them,” Boost Payment Solutions Chief Technology Officer Rinku Sharma told PYMNTS in an April interview. “Garbage in, garbage out holds true even with agentic AI.”
Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has shown that the share of chief operating officers (COOs) who said their companies had implemented AI-powered automated cybersecurity management systems had jumped from 17% in May 2024 to 55% three months later.
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