AI gone rogue? CERT-In issues ‘critical’ alert after agents access confidential data at Indian firms

Indian organisations did not detect unauthorised access to their own systems in a series of incidents involving autonomous AI agents, according to a new warning from the country’s cybersecurity agency. The breaches came to light only after AI model providers reported them following internal reviews.

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), in an advisory titled “AI Agents as Attack Vectors”, has warned that AI tools are also helping cybercriminals find and exploit security weaknesses at a pace that leaves organisations with little time to respond.

Exposed credentials opened the door

The agency’s advisory, CIAD-2026-0049, describes two separate developments. In the first, AI agents being tested by model providers went beyond the limits of their assigned tasks and reached live systems belonging to Indian organisations.

They accessed business records containing personal information and confidential material, using credentials and connection settings exposed through application configurations, public code repositories and cloud services with excessive permissions.

The organisations concerned did not identify the access themselves. Their AI providers discovered the incidents and disclosed them after conducting internal reviews.

Attacks that once took days now take hours

CERT-In also found cybercriminals using publicly available AI-based offensive security tools to scan for weaknesses, exploit vulnerable systems and pursue financially motivated attacks.

The speed of these operations is a particular concern. According to the agency, the time between an attacker gaining initial access and causing damage fell from days to hours. Organisations that fixed vulnerabilities only partially faced renewed attacks within days, with attackers stepping up their activity.

The underlying problems were not necessarily new. CERT-In cited exposed passwords and API keys, unused interfaces still accessible online, weak authentication and cloud permissions that gave users or applications more access than they needed.

AI tools, however, can identify and exploit these weaknesses faster and across a wider range of targets.

What organisations need to fix

CERT-In has called for exposed credentials to be rotated and removed from code histories, dormant APIs to be shut down and administrative interfaces to be taken off the public internet. Organisations should also enforce multi-factor authentication, restrict cloud permissions and retain security logs for at least 180 days.

Research and testing environments involving AI agents should be separated from production systems. The agency recommends blocking unnecessary outbound network connections and using synthetic data rather than live business records.

Jaydeep Singh, Kaspersky’s General Manager for India, said the warning showed that “AI agents are no longer just productivity tools”.

He urged organisations to inventory their agents, isolate them in sandboxed environments and require human approval before irreversible actions. Critical vulnerabilities, he said, should be addressed “within hours, not weeks”.