Taiwan Government Targeted in AI Assisted Cyberattack

Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs announced on Thursday that government agencies were targeted in an AI driven hacking campaign last month. The ministry stated that cybersecurity monitoring units detected the abnormal attack in July and that the affected bodies successfully handled the incident. According to the ministry, the attacks showed clear characteristics of an overseas source and used a hybrid approach combining manual operations with AI agent assisted tools such as Open Claw. While the Taiwanese government did not explicitly name China in its statement, the National Security Bureau previously reported a rise in Chinese cyberattacks on the island's key infrastructure in January.

Research from the Israeli cybersecurity firm Dream provided further technical details on the operation. Dream reported that AI agents compromised 85 government user accounts and extracted over 2,500 personnel records between July 1 and July 4. The firm noted that the attack targeted a nuclear safety agency, the justice ministry, government IT supply chain vendors, and at least seven energy companies. The framework reportedly used open source Hermes and OpenClaw AI agents to map government ecosystems and solve CAPTCHAs with 100 percent accuracy. Dream stated that while they did not formally attribute the attack to a specific group, the operational documentation points to a Chinese language operator.

Security experts have noted that this event illustrates the increasing speed of AI assisted reconnaissance. However, Cris Thomas, a researcher at Semgrep, cautioned that the attack was not fully autonomous because a human operator was required to establish the objectives and directives. The Taiwanese government has since established protective guidelines and strengthened system monitoring to block similar threats in the future.