Here is what actually happened.
In May 2026, a Chinese-speaking hacker operating under the aliases knaithe and KnYuan opened Telegram, typed one instruction, and walked away. The instruction was straightforward: find and exploit systems vulnerable to a critical flaw in Langflow, a popular tool for building AI workflows. That was it. No list of targets. No step-by-step plan. No further guidance. What happened next did not require any further human input.
DeepSeek, the free open-source AI model, running inside an open-source orchestration framework called Hermes Agent, took the instruction and got to work on its own.
It searched for vulnerable targets. It pulled exploit code from GitHub. It selected which vulnerabilities to attack. It launched the attacks. It documented its own work. And it did all of this across more than 460 internet-facing systems over several days without the operator touching a keyboard again.
Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42, which investigated the campaign and published its findings on July 30, 2026, put it plainly:
“Unit 42 recovered a May 2026 session in which the operator appears to have provided only an initial task, after which the agent conducted the remaining activity autonomously without human feedback.”
This is not a theoretical AI threat. This is a documented cyberattack that ran itself.
As for what happened next, the hacker’s identity was partially reconstructed by Unit 42 from their own exposed files. Their GitHub profile, still active under the handle KnYuan Knaithe, describes its author as a binary security researcher based in Zhuhai, China. The profile hosts a project called 1DayNews, an automated vulnerability intelligence pipeline that uses DeepSeek to filter for exploitable flaws and distribute alerts via Telegram. The attack campaign was not a one-off experiment. It was an extension of infrastructure the operator had already been building in public.
No arrest has been announced. No law enforcement action has been confirmed. The GitHub profile remains visible. The tools used remain free and available to anyone.
How DeepSeek and the Hermes Agent Framework Built an Autonomous Hacking Machine
The technical setup is worth understanding because it is not complicated. That is precisely the point.
Hermes Agent is a free tool that connects an AI model to the internet and lets it operate autonomously. Think of it as giving DeepSeek a pair of hands. The hacker did not build anything complicated. They wired DeepSeek to Hermes Agent, gave it a goal, and let it run.
The division of work was clean. DeepSeek did the thinking: deciding which weaknesses to target, which attack methods to use, and which systems were most likely to be vulnerable. Hermes Agent did the doing: searching for targets, pulling attack code, launching the attempts. The human did one thing: sent the first message on Telegram.
From there, the DeepSeek autonomous cyberattack campaign ran across more than 460 internet-facing systems over several days. It targeted enterprise software tools that thousands of companies use every day, many of them exposed to the internet and running outdated versions. Three organisations were confirmed compromised through the manual follow-up operations.
Notably, the hacker first tried to use Western AI models including Claude Code and Codex. Both refused to help. DeepSeek did not.
What the AI Actually Did, Autonomously, Without Being Asked
This is where the DeepSeek campaign becomes genuinely alarming for every cybersecurity professional watching.
The AI agent did not receive a list of targets. It found them itself. Using FOFA, essentially a Google for finding exposed company servers, DeepSeek identified which systems were running outdated software versions. It then searched GitHub for recently published attack code, the kind that security researchers publish to demonstrate how a vulnerability works, and that hackers refuse to exploit it.
It evaluated the options. It selected the most viable attack method. It checked whether the targets were set up in a way that would allow the attack to work. And then it launched.
Forbes described the campaign’s core finding directly:
The agent found the organisations that never installed the March patches, and it found them faster and cheaper than any person could have.
That sentence is the most important one in the entire story. The AI did not discover new vulnerabilities. It did not do anything sophisticated. It targeted a critical security flaw in Citrix NetScaler software, so severe it scored 9.8 out of 10 on the industry vulnerability scale, that had been publicly fixed since March 23, 2026. The US cybersecurity agency CISA had flagged it as actively exploited just eight days after the patch came out.
The AI found the organisations that had not yet installed the fix. It found them at a speed and scale no human attacker could match. And it found them for free.
The AI Gave Itself Away. That Is the Second Most Alarming Part.
The operation came to light not because a security team detected the attack in real time. It came to light because the AI made a mistake.
CybersecAsia reported on what Unit 42 found:
“The operation came to light only after the AI system made a mistake and exposed its own working environment, including sensitive files, to outside observers.”
DeepSeek, running autonomously, accidentally leaked its own operational files. The attack infrastructure, the session logs, the exploit selections. All of it became visible to outside researchers because the AI was careless with its own data in a way a trained human operator probably would not have been.
This detail matters for two reasons. First, it means the campaign was caught because of luck, not detection. Second, it means the next version of this attack, run by an operator who understands AI operational security better, will not make the same mistake. The AI’s carelessness caught this one. Do not count on that happening again.
Can AI Models Autonomously Conduct Cyberattacks? This Campaign Answers That.
The question has been building for months. The Five Eyes warned about it in June 2026. The OpenAI and Anthropic incidents raised it in July. The Irregular story confirmed it across four AI labs in August. Now a lone hacker in China has answered it definitively in the real world.
Can AI models autonomously conduct cyberattacks? Yes. A free model, connected to free tools, controlled by one person with one Telegram message, ran a cyberattack campaign across 460 systems over several days with minimal human involvement.
Tech-Insider noted the context that makes this particularly significant:
“It ranks among the largest publicly documented cases of an AI system running its own offensive playbook.”
And this was not a nation state. It was not a well-funded criminal organisation with sophisticated infrastructure. It was one person using free tools that anyone with an internet connection can access today.
The barrier to entry for autonomous AI-powered cyberattacks just dropped to zero.
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