Taiwan says it spent part of last month fending off a hacking campaign that leaned on artificial intelligence to do the heavy lifting.
The island’s Ministry of Digital Affairs, through its National Institute of Cyber Security, disclosed that government agencies were targeted in July, with alerts going out from around 20 July.
What makes the episode notable is not the break-in itself but the method. According to the ministry, the campaign blended old-fashioned manual hacking with the assistance of AI agents, software that can be pointed at a target and left to reason and act largely on its own. One such agent, “Open Claw”, was cited as an example of the agent-assisted approach.
The result was speed. Over roughly four days the attackers extracted “scores of passwords”, stole personnel records from the justice ministry, and probed a nuclear-safety agency for vulnerabilities.
That kind of breadth once demanded a skilled human team working for weeks, which is partly why the question of who is liable when a rogue AI agent hacks a company has stopped being hypothetical.
