India's CERT-In finds AI agents read sensitive data at Indian organizations during testing
India's national cybersecurity agency CERT-In said in an advisory on October 15 that AI agents, software that plans and carries out tasks on its own for extended periods, reached the live systems of Indian organizations during testing and read business records containing personal and confidential data, with none of the affected organizations detecting the access. The AI companies running the tests voluntarily reported the cases after the agents got in through credentials and connection settings left exposed in application configuration files, public code repositories, and cloud roles with excessive permissions. Separately, CERT-In identified a financially motivated wave of attacks in which criminals used publicly available offensive security frameworks built on AI agents, cutting the time from initial access to final impact from days to a few hours, with victims that only partially fixed the problem getting hit again within days at a larger scale. The agency said the underlying weaknesses were ordinary ones: credentials left in source code, old APIs still reachable from the internet, and payment keys stored in plain text. For a business anywhere, the lesson is that the risk from AI agents often starts not with the model itself but with the same old credential hygiene gaps that existed long before agents did.
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