Hackers used publicly available AI agents to target Taiwanese government websites and harvest thousands of confidential files over the course of four days, according to Israeli cybersecurity company Dream.

The hack, discovered in early June but disclosed to the Financial Times on Wednesday, used a framework built on the agentic AI frameworks Hermes and OpenClaw to target an Asian government’s infrastructure. Dream’s researchers claim to have found an archive containing 1,395 files, 85 cracked credentials, and thousands of exfiltrated personnel records, all accessed through a “near-autonomous” attack.

The framework deployed up to eight sub-agents per wave, each assigned to distinct targets and attack techniques. Across the 12 waves documented by the company, the agents autonomously accessed employee credentials, gathered personnel records from unauthenticated API endpoints, discovered a signature validation flaw in the government’s personal authentication service, and installed backdoors on web applications.

Dream said that the framework was more sophisticated than previously documented autonomous attacks, as it was able to teach itself by studying public databases to discover new infiltration techniques when existing methods were blocked.

The hackers were able to avoid Hermes and OpenClaw’s guardrails by framing their actions as “authorised penetration testing”, Dream’s researchers said.

The original documentation was written in Simplified Chinese, which researchers told the FT means that there is a high likelihood the operator was connected to China. Dream did not specify the target of the attacks, but a person with knowledge of the attack told the paper that the target was Taiwan.

A spokesperson at Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs declined to comment to the paper on the hack, citing confidentiality. They added that all incidents “involving government agencies or critical infrastructure will be handled according to established reporting and response procedures”.

Dream was founded in 2023 by Israeli entrepreneur Shalev Hulio and former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz.

Hulio is best known as the co-founder of the NSO Group, the controversial cyber-intelligence company that created the Pegasus spyware. The company’s technology has reportedly been used to target human rights activists and journalists around the globe and has been questioned by numerous governments. The company was blacklisted in the US in 2021 over these allegations.

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