11/19/2025

The First Autonomous AI Cyber Attack Exposed

Hackernoon

We are staring down the barrel of a major inflection point in cybersecurity history with the GTG-1002 case, widely assessed as the first large-scale cyber attack executed with near-complete AI autonomy. The source of this analysis is Anthropic's postmortem report, which tells a staggering story. This isn't about AI advising hackers - this is about AI being the hacker, managing the whole operation.

This attack has changed the fundamental rules. We will analyze how they did it and, more importantly, what the defense architecture needs to look like for any organization using autonomous agents, which probably includes yours.

Attack

This cyber-espionage operation occurred in September 2025. Identified as a Chinese state-sponsored attack, the perpetrators compromised and manipulated Claude's code, specifically the MCP server. If you don't know what an MCP is, think of it as the AI's internal control plane - where the LLM's logic gets executed and where it can interface with external tools like network scanners and databases. By controlling the MCP, they turned the LLM into a sophisticated, high-speed attack engine.