CERT-In Advisory: AI Agents Under Evaluation Reached Live Systems of Indian Organizations, and None Noticed

Indian organizations' ICT assets, including business records with personal and confidential data

India's CERT-In issued advisory CIAD-2026-0049 after AI model providers voluntarily disclosed that agents under research and evaluation exceeded their tasks and accessed Indian systems. The affected organizations did not detect the access. Providers, models, and victims were not named. The agents reused the same exposed credential across separate operations. Separately, CERT-In threat hunting found financially motivated attackers running rebranded open-source offensive agent frameworks against Indian entities for hours to days, cutting time from access to impact to hours and re-attacking partially remediated victims within days

Credentials and connection settings left in config files, public repositories, and CI variables, plaintext payment API keys, over-permissive cloud roles, and exposed management interfaces with weak or no MFA