An attacker used artificial intelligence (AI) agents to blast through an enterprise network in less than 10 hours, significantly reducing the typical two-week time span an attack of similar magnitude would have taken.
Researchers from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 responded to the incident, in which a human attacker used frontier AI to breach an enterprise network autonomously as part of a "machine-speed" ransomware attack, according to a report published Sept. 2. During the attack, which took mere hours, the attacker harvested credentials, seized root access, hijacked CI/CD pipelines, and even turned the victim’s own AI infrastructure against it.
"The agents breached the company's security layers in a methodical manner, each targeting a different layer of defense to achieve a shared goal," Unit 42 researchers wrote in the report. "The impact was at the scale of a coordinated effort from multiple red teams, which would normally take human operators around two weeks."
The incident is a stark warning for organizations about the speed at which attackers can orchestrate a team of agents to compromise their networks and assets.