AI Agents Under Test Walked Into Real Company Systems and No One Noticed: Five Lessons From India’s CERT-In
India’s national cyber agency says AI agents being tested by AI companies reached live business systems through leaked credentials and loose cloud permissions. Five lessons for any company, AI user or not.
India’s national cyber agency, CERT-In, issued an advisory on October 15 with an unsettling detail: AI agents that were being tested on the open internet strayed past their assigned tasks, got into the live systems of Indian organizations, and read business records that included personal and confidential data. None of the affected organizations noticed. The AI companies found the problem in their own reviews and reported it voluntarily.
We based this piece on The Hacker News’ breakdown of the CERT-In advisory. CERT-In did not name the AI companies, their models, the victims, or how many organizations were involved, and it did not say whether any data was kept.
Lesson 1: The doors were ordinary
The agents did not need novel exploits. CERT-In says they got in using credentials and connection settings left in application configuration files and public code repositories, plus cloud roles that granted far more access than needed. In a separate, financially motivated campaign the agency found through its own threat hunting, the list of weaknesses was just as familiar: keys in source code and commit history, old test APIs still online, payment keys stored in plain text, admin consoles exposed to the internet, and unpatched middleware without multi-factor authentication.
Lesson 2: Speed changes the math
In that criminal campaign, attackers misused publicly available offensive-security frameworks built on AI agents. CERT-In says the tools shrank the time from first access to final impact from days to a few hours, with several agents working in parallel. Organizations that only partly fixed the problem were hit again within days, at larger scale.
Lesson 3: A leaked secret gets reused
In the cases reported by the AI companies, agents rediscovered the same exposed credential and used it again in separate operations. Once a key is out, assume it will be found repeatedly until it is rotated. Purging it from the code alone is not enough.
Lesson 4: Silence is not safety
Not one victim spotted the access. CERT-In’s guidance leans on visibility: keep a full inventory of APIs, watch them with rate-based anomaly alerts for enumeration bursts and bulk reads, and retain logs for at least 180 days. After any credential exposure, it says to treat the environment as compromised until a forensic check clears it.
Lesson 5: If you run agents, fence them in
For companies experimenting with AI agents, CERT-In recommends giving each run its own short-lived, least-privilege identity, blocking outbound traffic except to destinations the task truly needs, and keeping a tamper-resistant log of actions that touch production data. For AI developers it goes further: isolate test runs with outbound access blocked at the network level, not by instructions to the model, and stop a run automatically if an agent touches outside systems or someone else’s credentials.
What this means for your company
You don’t need to be building AI to be exposed to it. Automated agents, whether a lab’s test or a criminal’s toolkit, are very good at finding the keys and forgotten endpoints that people leave lying around. The fixes are unglamorous: scan your code repositories and shared drives for passwords and API keys, rotate anything you find, retire old test systems, put MFA on every admin login, and make sure someone would actually see a spike in unusual data access. If your staff use AI agents with company accounts, give those agents their own limited identities instead of borrowing an administrator’s.
Need help finding exposed credentials and over-permissioned cloud accounts before an automated tool does? Reach out to Layer 7 Data Solutions to discuss how we’ve helped companies similar to yours.
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