A hacking group known as CyberCartel reportedly used artificial intelligence (AI) agents from several high profile tech companies to automate cyberattacks on Latin American businesses.
That’s according to a report Wednesday (Oct. 21) from The Information, citing research by the cybersecurity startup Straiker shared exclusively with the news outlet.
According to the report, the hackers used a web of AI agents powered by models such as Anthropic’s Claude and SpaceX’s Grok to attack more than 400 targets in Latin America, including banks and payments companies.
The Information described the research as one of the first detailed reports showing hackers employing AI models to automate breaches into financial institutions. In this case, CyberCartel seems to have used the agents to help it steal password and consumer data, and to access customer bank accounts autonomously without much human effort.
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The report said these findings illustrate how AI is giving cybercriminals an advantage over cyberdefenders, with the models letting them carry out attacks so quickly and in such greater numbers that it overwhelms corporate defenses. That’s left many companies now investing heavily in AI-powered cyberprotections.
“Offense is way ahead of defense right now, that’s just how it is,” Straiker CEO Ankur Shah, told The Information. “Enterprises are just not ready.”
The report also included a statement from Anthropic which said it began an investigation after Straiker revealed its findings, and quickly blocked the hackers’ use of Claude.
Recent research by PYMNTS Intelligence shows some of the cybersecurity challenges facing financial institutions. They have plenty of anti-fraud technology, but are struggling to get it all to function as a cohesive defense system.
The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Scams Get Personal: Why Banks Pay More to Fight Fraud” found in September that close to 80% of financial institutions said the complexity of new technology systems was their chief barrier to innovation, compared to 48% one year earlier. It was the sharpest increase among the 14 barriers followed in the report.
The finding followed years of banks adding tools meant to identify suspicious customers, devices and transactions. Behavioral analytics, device fingerprinting and enhanced knowledge-based authentication achieved 100% adoption among surveyed institutions this year. Machine learning and AI were used by 96%, along with rules-based algorithms.
“Adding another detection capability, however, isn’t the same as improving the overall defense,” PYMNTS wrote. “The data showed that institutions were stacking overlapping systems, making the connections among those systems a growing operational issue.”
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