Taiwan last month detected artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted cyberattacks on government agencies coming from overseas, but the affected bodies successfully "handled" the incident, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said today.
Taiwan has over the past few years complained about China's "hybrid warfare" — from daily military drills near the nation to disinformation campaigns and cyberattacks — as Beijing ramps up military and political pressure to force Taipei to accept its claims of sovereignty.
Chinese cyberattacks on Taiwan's key infrastructure from hospitals to banks last year rose 6 percent from the previous year to an average of 2.63 million attacks a day, the National Security Bureau said in January, adding that some of the hacks were synchronized with military drills in "hybrid threats" to paralyze the nation.
Photo: Reuters
The ministry said in a statement that its cybersecurity monitoring units last month detected an "abnormal attack" targeting government agencies, and beginning July 20, its National Institute of Cyber Security issued a series of warning alerts while it investigated.
The investigation results showed the attacks displayed clear characteristics of an "overseas source," with hackers employing a hybrid approach that combined manual operations with AI agent-assisted attacks, such as Open Claw, it said.
"The relevant attack sources, methods, and scope of impact have all been fully investigated, and the affected units have successively completed their handling," the ministry added.
In response to this new type of AI-derived cybersecurity threat, the government has established protective guidelines and reinforced system monitoring across agencies to block attacks early, the ministry said.
The statement did not mention China, and China's Taiwan Affairs Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the attack.
The ministry’s statement came a day after the Israeli cybersecurity company Dream said in a blog post that it had uncovered an AI-driven hacking campaign that stole credentials and other data from an unnamed government in Asia.
A team of AI agents worked together to extract scores of passwords from unidentified officials, steal personnel records from the country’s justice ministry, and scan its nuclear safety agency for vulnerabilities over the course of four days, Dream said.
Dream, which said it was able to reconstruct the hacking campaign after recovering the agents' "complete operational workspace," declined to share the data or name the government when approached by Reuters, but the Financial Times, which was the first media outlet briefed on Dream's findings, identified the target agencies as Taiwanese.
The threat of AI-assisted hacking campaigns has been growing for years, but ramped up dramatically over the past few months after top AI labs released models, such as Anthropic's Mythos, which can rapidly conduct reconnaissance, identify vulnerabilities and take advantage of them.
The spy campaign illustrates just how quickly AI-assisted hackers can hit their mark, said Cris Thomas, a researcher who works as a security advocate at the code security company Semgrep.
However, Thomas cautioned against exaggerating the power of AI agents.
"There's still a human in there somewhere. Somebody had to choose who to attack, had to establish an objective and give it a directive. It's not totally 100% autonomous. There was a capable operator in charge that did that," he said.
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