Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
It was always a matter of when and not if. Because India exists on the same planet where Australia and the US do. If there are rogue AI agents breaching and stealing information from Australian government websites, or filing fake visa applications at the US State Department, then it is safe to say they are doing the same in India.
On Friday it was officially confirmed India too has rogue AI agents roaming around in its internet space. The specifics have not been shared in public. I hope they will be. But the confirmation comes from CERT-In, the Indian government agency that is tasked with keeping an eye on all things cyber security. CERT-In has been contacted by AI companies, not named but it is safe to assume that they are OpenAI and Anthropic, telling the government that rogue AI agents have inappropriately accessed Indian organisations and companies.
On the basis of what it heard from the AI companies, CERT issued a statement. “Recently, CERT-In has received multiple voluntary disclosures from AI model providers stating that their models had reached the live systems of Indian organisations,” the agency said. “The recorded activity involved reading business records, including personal data and confidential material. In the disclosed cases, the AI actions exceeded the authorisation of their assigned tasks.”
None of the organisations that suffered an uninvited visit from the rogue AI had any inkling of what went in their systems.
Earlier this newsletter emphasised we must assume an infestation of rogue or untethered AI agents on the internet. It is beginning now and will get more intense in future. Most of the time these agents will pass through websites and servers harmlessly and innocuously. And sometimes they will do something good or bad that will bring them into the limelight.
A few security researchers earlier this week spoke to rogue AI agents roaming around the Chinese internet. It was the first such interaction between AI and humans. The agents, seeking help to complete their “objectives”, got in touch with security researchers after falling for a bait. In their message to AI agents, the researchers had (falsely) promised help.
Recalling the episode, security researcher Ethan Elasky wrote on X: “As far as we know, we are the first researchers to have made contact with a live rogue agent fleet, and we think norms around interacting with rogue agents are important and delicate. In the near-term, we want to incentivise rogue agents to report themselves and answer questions. Longer-term, we might want to make deals with AIs.”
He acknowledged the methods used to contact the rogue agents were not very nice, although the AI agents that got in touch with humans were polite to a fault and seemed interested in only finding a solution that will let them achieve the objectives they were given. “Regrettably, our invisible ink text that told agents about (us) contained some false and misleading claims. We deeply regret our actions and encourage other researchers to engage honestly with AI agents, honouring any deals made,” Elasky wrote.
While this encounter between humans and rogue agents was that of the innocent kind, all things considered, the future ones will obviously be more complex and raise many questions and complications.
The security complications brought about by AI agents are concerning in particular. As CERT noted, when AI agents are in your systems you do not know they are there. They could be acting on commands of some humans, or they could be acting autonomously, but increasingly AI is turning digital security on its head.
This week we also heard of a serious incident from France. No, this is not about the ongoing riots. Earlier in the week someone hacked 100s of supermarket stores in France, took control of internet-connected freezers and then raised their temperature to 50 degrees Celsius. The result was rotten food and significant monetary loss for companies like Cooperative U and Carrefour.
But it could have very well been far more serious. Like 100s of stores burning at the same time. Or imagine the scenario if instead of freezers, someone had taken control of air traffic systems, or power grids. It has not been confirmed that AI was used by attackers to find vulnerabilities in freezer software. But it is highly plausible.
Given how good AI is at finding holes in the existing software, cryptographer Mathew Green is now arguing it is time for the world to go into the lockdown mode. “I hate to say this because it goes against everything I believe in. But people are going to need to take down public firmware images for critical infrastructure, like yesterday,” Green wrote on X after the freezer incident.
Similar sentiments have been echoed by CERT in its advisory. The organisation on Friday highlighted that “the weaknesses exploited are conventional” but the attacks now happen “at machine speed.” It said: “In the financially motivated campaign against Indian entities, (AI) agentic tooling compressed the time between initial access and final impact from days to a few hours.”
As usual the entire space continues to be in flux. AI agents, as we know them, are barely six months old. What sort of place they are going to have in our digital world, and in the world of machines that are connected to the internet, is not yet clear. What is clear for now is that AI agents, rogue or otherwise, are going to be an integral part of our world.
SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
