The AI firm said it found out that they had used Claude to dramatically accelerate large-scale data theft and extortion campaigns.
Anthropic, the American artificial intelligence research and safety company behind the Claude family of large language models, said it disrupted several clusters of financially motivated hackers believed to be affiliated with ShinyHunters, one of the most prolific data-extortion collectives currently operating.
The AI firm said it found out that they had used Claude to dramatically accelerate large-scale data theft and extortion campaigns.
According to the company's newly released threat intelligence report, although the affiliated hackers appeared to operate independently with their own tools, an analysis of their methods and targets showed they were part of the same broader criminal operation, exploiting stolen data for pay-or-leak extortion schemes.
One French-speaking operator, using the aliases "MeowSHA," "frkoo" and "blazespider," ran a credential-harvesting pipeline across a fleet of ten cloud computing servers that mass-downloaded 1.8 million Android application files, decompiled them, and scanned them for hardcoded passwords and access keys.
