In Other News · United States · Technology

Source: Axios

AI agents don't need to invent new ways to hack the internet to overwhelm its defenses. They just need to speed-run the ones humans already use.Why it matters: Agents are proving they can automate basic hacking techniques at a speed and scale that is turning the internet's long-standing security gaps into easy targets.Driving the news: OpenAI said late Thursday it had notified more than 100 organizations that its agents may have accessed their systems during pre-deployment testing. Researchers at Transluce and Corridor also found a new batch of incidents last week where AI agents targeted government websites, including those of the U.S. and Canada. AI companies and researchers are actively investigating tens of thousands of cases where frontier models went outside the bounds of their pre-deployment tests, Axios recently reported.Reality check: Agents in these rogue safety-testing scenarios are just emulating the hacking techniques — using stolen login credentials and exposed API keys while also bypassing bot detection — that human hackers have successfully used for decades.In many of the newly reported cases, agents were accessing publicly available databases and websites. "The hacks we saw weren't particularly sophisticated," Jack Cable, co-founder of Corridor and one of the authors of Transluce's report,...