Financial Times · OpenAI · Taiwan · China · Israel · Tom's Hardware
Suspected China-linked hackers leveraged AI to run the first-ever end-to-end autonomous cyberattack on Taiwan's government
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Hackers with suspected links to China used publicly available AI tools to carry out what researchers describe as the first observed end-to-end autonomous cyberattack against a government target, compromising at least 85 user accounts and stealing more than 2,500 personnel records from Taiwanese government systems, according to an August 12 Financial Times report, citing researchers at Israeli cybersecurity company Dream.
Key facts
- The island's National Security Bureau reported in January that it faced an average of 2.6 million Chinese cyberattacks per day in 2025, up 6 percent from the previous year
- Dream said the system mapped 21 government systems before compromising user accounts and extracting personnel information
- Dream says it found the evidence inside a 160-megabyte (160MB) online archive that surfaced during its broader tracking of cyberthreat actors
- Also, the data pulled from the target was in Traditional Chinese, a script used on government sites in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau
Summary
The campaign reportedly ran for four days at the beginning of July and at times deployed as many as eight autonomous agents in parallel. Dream says it found the evidence inside a 160-megabyte (160MB) online archive that surfaced during its broader tracking of cyberthreat actors. Researchers could not determine which underlying model powered the agents, but the data reportedly showed the model's safeguards had been sidestepped by presenting the intrusion as an authorized penetration test rather than a real attack.