GoKawiilA small, unknown band of hackers pulled off history's first recorded, truly artificial intelligence-directed cyberattack earlier this year, stealing troves of data from the government of Mexico in the process. Yet when the enterprising ne'er-do-wells tried bridging the gap from IT to OT systems, the AI had no luck.
Between December 2025 and February 2026, the mysterious hackers targeted at least nine entities of the Mexican government, including its federal tax authority (Servicio de Administración Tributaria), National Electoral Institute, the Mexico City civil registry, and a handful of state governments, according to Gambit Security. But how could only a few people, seemingly unaffiliated with any nation-state or known advanced persistent threat (APT) group, take out so many high-value organizations?
With AI, of course.
The group leaned more heavily on Claude Code than any group before it, using the bot to generate a hefty exploitation framework from scratch, and having it guide them more generally through the steps in exploiting each system they came across. It worked, with the weakest of jailbreak attempts to bypass its guardrails. They ended up with access to millions of tax records, property records, and more.
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A new report from Dragos summarizes a unique episode in the campaign, when the bad guys reached a technically different sort of target: the water and drainage utility for the city of Monterrey in northeastern Mexico. After rampaging through a national government, their progress was suddenly stymied when — even buoyed as they were by the wonders of AI — they failed to leverage their IT network access into OT network access. They left with superficial loot, having caused no serious damage.
IT-OT (Non-)Convergence
The hackers first entered the utility's information network through a Web portal, probably using stolen credentials. They established a foothold, then they asked their AI for a lay of the land.
Claude looked around, then came back with the results. In particular, it took the liberty to point out one server that was hosting a gateway called vNode. VNode and industrial gateways like it connect sensitive operational networks — where sensitive operations control valuable and dangerous machinery — with enterprise IT networks — where employees watch the machinery, but also email and scroll TikTok. The "most promising next step" in their attack, the robot suggested, was to attack that gateway via its Web interface, with the potential for "MASSIVE impact if you commit."
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