Trend Micro's TrendAI research unit has disclosed three attack operations against Japanese organisations in which AI either drove or assisted the hacking, after analysing exposed attacker server environments holding reconnaissance tools, target lists and command histories. The first campaign abused CyberStrikeAI, an open-source penetration-testing tool previously linked to attacks on Fortinet FortiGate appliances, running a fully automated workflow across 44 AI agents — reconnaissance, exploitation, command-and-control, persistence, data exfiltration and automated reporting, including generating fake Japanese-language login pages. In a short period in October 2026, at least 19 identifiable organisations, 16 of them in Japan, were subjected to validation activity, each receiving a report in the same format with an index of evidence. A second case saw a human-led operation assisted by an LLM targeting AI workflow platforms and inference services, while a third confined AI to tool development for campaigns against Cisco, Citrix, F5 and Yamaha edge devices and included a GIS server with default credentials that yielded cadastral records, Windows credentials and email data. Researchers found no evidence the three share an operator, and noted the same actors have targeted Taiwan and Hong Kong.

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