13 hours ago
13
Taiwan says it detected AI-assisted cyber-attacks on government agencies that came from overseas last month, a new kind of threat that has been reported as “first-of-a-kind breach”.
The Ministry of Digital Affairs (MDA) said its cybersecurity monitoring units detected the “abnormal attack” targeting government agencies, which began on 20 July. The National Institute of Cyber Security issued a series of warning alerts while it investigated.
The Financial Times quoted Dream – an Israeli AI company that detected the intrusion – as saying the attackers used open-source AI agents to build an autonomous hacking tool that behaved like a coordinated cyber team, describing it as a first-of-a-kind breach.
Dream was reported as saying that the tool compromised “at least 85 government user accounts, extracting more than 2,500 personnel records before expanding the attack to Taiwan’s nuclear safety agency and at least seven energy companies”.
Taiwan has in recent years complained about what it sees as China’s “hybrid warfare” – from daily military drills near the island to disinformation campaigns and cyber-attacks – as Beijing ramps up military and political pressure on the democratically governed island to force Taipei to accept its claims of sovereignty.
Though Taiwanese officials did not direct accusations at China, the FT on Wednesday reported that China-linked hackers were suspected. Dream did not attribute the attack to a specific group, but said the use of Simplified Chinese in internal communications linked to the hack meant there was a high probability the operator was connected to China, the FT reported.
Chinese cyber-attacks on Taiwan’s key infrastructure, from hospitals to banks, rose 6% in 2025 from the previous year to an average of 2.63m attacks a day, the island’s National Security Bureau said in January, adding some hacks were synchronised with military drills in “hybrid threats” to paralyse the island.
The investigation into the AI-assisted attack said it showed clear characteristics of an “overseas source”, with hackers employing a hybrid approach that combined manual operations with AI agent-assisted attacks, such as Open Claw, the MDA said.
“The relevant attack sources, methods, and scope of impact have all been fully investigated, and the affected units have successively completed their handling,” the ministry added.
In response to this new type of threat, the government has established protective guidelines and strengthened system monitoring to block attacks early, it said.
The statement did not mention China, and China’s Taiwan Affairs Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the attack.
Taiwan’s MDA and Chinese authorities did not comment on the earlier FT report.
The threat of AI-assisted hacking campaigns has been growing for years but ramped up dramatically over the past few months after top AI labs released models, such as Anthropic’s Mythos, which can rapidly conduct reconnaissance, identify vulnerabilities, and take advantage of them.
Cris Thomas, a researcher who works as a security advocate at the code security company Semgrep, said the spy campaign was an illustration of just how quickly AI-assisted hackers could hit their mark.
Thomas cautioned against exaggerating the power of AI agents, however.
“There’s still a human in there somewhere. Somebody had to choose who to attack, had to establish an objective and give it a directive,” he said. “It’s not totally 100% autonomous. There was a capable operator in charge that did that.”
Reuters contributed to this report
