Palo Alto tracks a massive Chinese AI attack that sadly lives up to industry fears

Summary

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 reports a China-based campaign that weaponized the open-source AI penetration testing framework Cairn, pairing it with Zhipu GLM and DeepSeek models. The attackers ran 25 autonomous operations against at least 19 organizations in August and September 2026, gaining unauthorized access at 10 of them. Unit 42 says one person or a handful of people likely ran the operations, with some running more than 50 hours.

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