Cyberattacks using AI agents against several of the largest South Korean banks, including Hana Bank, KB Kookmin Bank, and Shinhan Bank, are currently being investigated by South Korean authorities. According to The New York Times, at least 25,000 Shinhan Bank customers had their personal credit information leaked last week, while 99 customers and 20 current or former employees of Kookmin Bank have been affected. 89 Hana Bank customers were also affected by the hacks, which led to their information being stolen.

South Korea’s National Office of Investigation is looking at all three cases, which has also caught the attention of President Lee Jae Myung. The South Korean president said that there were signs that the hackers behind these incidents used AI models, “causing considerable public concern and anxiety,” and that he has instructed his cabinet to confirm the situation and to ensure that the damage from these incidents is minimized. “It’s now become possible to use AI to hack with ease even without specialized skills,” Lee said during the livestreamed cabinet meeting.

AI models are becoming more powerful with every release, and bad actors are taking advantage of them to find weaknesses in secure systems and exploit them. Anthropic reported the first instance of an AI-orchestrated cyberattack in November 2025, which was allegedly orchestrated by a Chinese state-sponsored group. A few months after that, a cybersecurity firm said that Taiwan was targeted by the first-ever end-to-end autonomous cyberattacks by China-linked hackers. Even AI labs that built these AI models aren’t immune from the AI-powered hacks, as security researchers breached OpenAI using Claude and gained access to its internal codebase.

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