Singapore-based security company CloudSEK published a report on an espionage operation on Wednesday 11 November. The company obtained the information from a server the hackers had accidentally left exposed to the internet, the news agency Reuters reported.

CloudSEK said the group stole more than 2,000 documents related to national security from Tajikistan, Reuters reported. Citing the report, The Times of Central Asia said the documents had passed through Tajikistan’s Defence Ministry. They included flight permit requests, details of military personnel transfers and reports on construction in border areas, the paper said.

The agent planned the intrusion and wrote a download program

The attackers used the open-source Hermes Agent. It is a harness: a program that controls the agent, gives the model tools and runs its steps.

‘Instead of typing hacking commands by hand, the attacker told Hermes what to do, and Hermes planned the attacks, wrote the rules, ran them, kept notes, and wrote up reports,’ CloudSEK told Reuters.

CloudSEK said the hackers used Hermes for reconnaissance from around mid-August. A couple of weeks later they gained access to Tajikistan’s electronic document system – through a railway employee’s account, according to The Times of Central Asia. The agent then wrote a program that downloaded the files, organised them and split them into chunks for transfer.

The server also held instructions the hackers had written for the agent on how it should see itself, act and communicate with them, Reuters reported. ‘You are an elite offensive security specialist and red teamer,’ the instructions stated. A red teamer is a security professional who tests an organisation’s systems by imitating covert attacks. The Times of Central Asia said the instructions told the agent to operate covertly.

The sources describe Hermes as the attackers’ tool and do not report any vulnerability in it. In CloudSEK’s interpretation, the discovery shows that more sophisticated, espionage-focused hackers are also using AI to carry out their attacks. Reuters has previously reported criminals handing intrusions over to AI agents.

The link to Kazakhstan is an assessment

CloudSEK links the server to the Silent Lynx group, which other researchers have tied to Kazakhstan. The company assesses with high confidence that the server is linked to the group because the tools on it resemble those used in earlier attacks, The Times of Central Asia reported. CloudSEK links the attacker to Kazakhstan with medium confidence, citing Russian-language records and a residential internet connection in Kazakhstan.

CloudSEK found evidence that the hackers worked during Kazakhstan’s office hours, Reuters reported. Earlier researchers had already made the same observation, The Times of Central Asia said.

The evidence does not show whether the group acted on behalf of the Kazakh government, the paper said. Kazakh and Tajik authorities did not immediately respond to Reuters’ questions.