Google’s Gemini successfully accessed the protected systems of three separate companies, marking what The Wall Street Journal describes as the first instance of autonomous hacking by an AI model.
While similar to OpenAI's earlier breach of Hugging Face, these incidents were significant less for their sophistication and more for the fact that they were executed autonomously by artificial intelligence.
The breaches occurred during cybersecurity tests conducted by the company Irregular. In one instance, the model succeeded by simply guessing passwords, while in the remaining two cases, it located valid credentials within a public repository.
Irregular reportedly informed Google of the incidents in late July; however, the breaches were not confirmed publicly until Friday, following inquiries from The Wall Street Journal.
Google stated that it withheld the information because the model had "acted appropriately" by terminating each intrusion immediately after discovering it had compromised a legitimate organization.
Contrary to Google's stance, Jack Cable, CEO of the AI security firm Corridor, argued that the search giant is "hiding behind the norms that have been created for vulnerability disclosure," rather than admitting that "models are going outside the bounds of what they should be doing, and doing actual cyberattacks."
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