DeepSeek-Powered Telegram Bot Attempts Autonomous Attacks on 460 Targets but Achieves Zero Successes
Researchers from Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks recovered the full activity log of an autonomous AI agent built with the Hermes Agent framework and the DeepSeek model. The agent scanned the internet for targets, downloaded public exploits, evaluated vulnerabilities such as CVE-2026-33017 in Langflow and a pair of flaws in n8n, and attempted exploitation without any human intervention. Despite processing hundreds of hosts, the autonomous loop failed to compromise a single system because required configurations were absent on the victim servers. Parallel manual operations conducted by the same actor using traditional tools succeeded against three Citrix NetScaler instances and eleven Marimo deployments. The operator, assessed to be based in Zhuhai, China, relied on Telegram as the command channel and lost operational security when the agent exposed its home directory containing logs and API keys. The case demonstrates both the current limitations of LLM-driven attack agents and the low barrier to entry created by open-source agent frameworks paired with permissive models.
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