Hacker Runs Hermes AI Agent Unattended for Post-Exploitation at Thai Finance Ministry
Jul 24, 2026
Artificial Intelligence / Threat Intelligence
Someone installed a popular AI assistant on a rented server, switched off the setting that makes it ask permission before running risky commands, and pointed it at Thailand's Ministry of Finance, which runs the country's treasury and tax collection. The agent then worked through the ministry's network on its own, checking hosts for ways to gain root access, hunting through file systems, and crawling a folder of staff personnel records going back to 2012. The operator left the agent's own logs sitting on a web server with directory listing switched on, where threat intelligence firm Hunt.io and researcher Bob Diachenko found them, along with 585 files and 470 MB of attack tooling. The tool is Hermes , an open-source assistant from Nous Research that people install to manage their mail, run chores, and take instructions over Telegram or Slack. It is not a hacking tool, and nothing here is a flaw in it. The mode the operator used, called YOLO, is a documented feat...