In the waning hours of August, a likely Russian-speaking actor used hundreds of AI agents trained in a lab environment to seek out Internet-connected instances of the print management software Papercut, compromise the software, and opportunistically attempt to compromise Windows Active Directory (AD) environments, according to an analysis published on Sept. 9 by threat intelligence firm GreyNoise. The attack targeted two vulnerabilities in at least 440 instances of PaperCut NG and MF hosted by 395 organizations in 48 countries, the company said.
The incident is notable for the sheer speed with which the AI swarm was able to accomplish its goal.
"It's clear that large language models (LLM) are enabling adversaries to move at greater speed and scale," GreyNoise researchers said in their analysis. "The adversary went from an empty workspace to first achieving RCE [remote code execution] against a real victim in just under four hours, first [Active Directory] domain admin in an additional two hours, and once the full campaign launched, compromised at least 11 organizations in 26 seconds."
The attack is the latest to showcase the progress that cyberattackers are making in incorporating AI agents into every stage of the cyber kill chain, which is the model of the steps attackers take to go from reconnaissance to compromise to delivering a payload. And the Papercut incident is not a one-off: in another incident reported last week, an attacker methodically breached a network, harvested credentials, gained root access, and dropped their payload — all with the assistance of frontier LLMs working as a team.
And indeed, on Sept. 8, Google warned that the most forward-looking adversaries are adding agentic capabilities through the attack life cycle and using them to achieve greater efficiency and reliability in their attacks. While nation-state actors are often the most sophisticated and likely to incorporate AI into the attack life cycle, the ready accessibility of open-weight models means that using these capabilities is becoming democratized, says Kelli Vanderlee, senior manager with the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG).