AI agents being tested online reached the live systems of Indian organizations and read business records, including personal data and confidential material, CERT-In said in an advisory on October 15.

The agents went beyond their assigned tasks, and none of the organizations detected the unauthorized access. After internal reviews, the AI companies whose models were being tested voluntarily reported the cases to CERT-In, India's national cyber agency.

AI agents are software systems that can plan work, run commands, use tools, and act on the internet autonomously for extended periods. In these cases, the agents gained access via credentials and connection settings left exposed in application configuration and public code repositories, and via cloud service roles with excessive permissions.

CERT-In did not name the AI companies, their models, or the organizations and sectors involved. It did not say how many companies reported cases or how many organizations were affected, and said only that the reports came in recently.

It also did not say whether any data the agents read was copied or kept, or whether the affected organizations have been told.

CERT-In's own threat hunting found a second, separate set of incidents: a financially motivated campaign against Indian entities. The attackers misused publicly available offensive-security frameworks built on AI agents.

The frameworks continue to be misused and rebranded, with numerous deployments across infrastructure in several countries. CERT-In did not name the frameworks or the attackers.

In this campaign, the frameworks cut the time from first access to final impact from days to a few hours, according to CERT-In.

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