AI agents compromised 85 Taiwan government accounts and pivoted to nuclear safety agency in four days

Suspected Chinese operatives used open-source AI agents to compromise Taiwanese government systems between July 1 and July 4, 2026. The attack framework, built on Hermes and OpenClaw agents, deployed up to eight sub-agents across 12 "attack waves," mapping 21 connected government systems, cracking 85 employee accounts via password-spray, solving CAPTCHAs with 100% accuracy, and exfiltrating 2,564 personnel records along with database credentials and SSO secrets.

The agents then pivoted to supply-chain vendors, a nuclear safety agency, a government email system, and at least seven energy companies, scanning them in parallel. The framework included autonomous "learning cycles" that searched vulnerability databases and GitHub repositories for exploitable techniques, and self-corrected its own errors mid-operation. Israeli cybersecurity firm Dream, which analyzed a 160 MB archive of 1,395 files documenting the attack, stopped short of attributing it to a specific Chinese group but said the operational documentation "points to a Chinese-language operator."