#5
The Hacker News
general
July 31, 2026 at 11:21 UTC
Chinese Hacker Commands DeepSeek via Telegram to Launch Autonomous Attacks
By [email protected] (The Hacker News)
AI Summary
Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks tracked a Chinese-speaking threat actor using aliases 'knaithe' and 'KnYuan' who leveraged DeepSeek AI through the open-source Hermes Agent framework to conduct fully autonomous cyberattacks after a single Telegram instruction. The agent independently identified internet-facing systems and selected public exploits with no further operator input observed. This represents the first documented operational use of an open-source AI agent framework for autonomous exploitation of live targets.
Relevance score: 85.0/100
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