A suspected China-nexus threat group used an AI pen-testing framework in a campaign targeting key U.S. sectors, including advanced semiconductors, U.S. defense industry and civil-society organizations, according to a report released Thursday by Palo Alto Networks.
The attackers combined the Cairn framework with two Chinese open-source models, DeepSeek and Zhipu GLM, to launch attacks against at least 19 organizations, according to researchers.
The attackers successfully gained access or exfiltrated data from 10 of the targeted organizations, according to the report. The hackers obtained dozens of valid credentials, created administrator accounts inside a production system and exposed more than a million records of personal data at one organization.
Combining the Cairn tooling with the open-source models allowed the hackers to scale the attacks well beyond normal hands-on-keyboard behavior.
“Cairn and other similar tooling enable automation, which means threat actors can hit more targets faster,” said Andy Piazza, senior director of threat intelligence at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42, the company’s incident response and research arm. “It also allows them to carry out technical tasks without having to learn the underlying technologies.”
Researchers are tracking the attackers under the name CL-STA-1238, which they said is part of a China-nexus intelligence-collection effort.
The campaign marks the latest in a growing wave of attacks using AI pen-testing frameworks. Over the past two months, threat groups have used the Artex testing framework to attack hundreds of companies globally. The tool was also linked to a campaign targeting South Korean banks, Japanese companies and attacks abusing ConnectWise Cloud Backup.
AWS credentials taken
In other China-related news, researchers at Arctic Wolf on Tuesday uncovered attacks using the Alibaba-hosted AntiFox pen-testing framework to steal Amazon Web Services credentials.
At least two organizations were confirmed as compromised, while researchers suspect six others were also affected.
“At this stage, the activity appears opportunistic rather than industry-specific, with actors using AI-enabled tooling to increase the speed and scale of attacks against exposed web infrastructure and previously compromised credentials," Justin Moore, director of adversary operations at Arctic Wolf, told Cybersecurity Dive.
A spokesperson for Amazon said that AWS services were not specifically compromised in the attacks, but operated as they were designed. The report shows hackers using credentials taken from compromised applications to access their AWS accounts, according to the spokesperson.
AWS users should employ best practices for security, identity and compliance, which include least-privilege permissions, requiring Instance Metadata Service on EC2 instances, and keep long-term access keys out of application configurations, the spokesperson said.
