Hacker Runs Hermes AI Agent Unattended for Post-Exploitation at Thai Finance Ministry
Summary: An operator installed the open-source Hermes AI assistant on a rented server, disabled its permission prompts using the documented YOLO mode, and pointed it at Thailand's Ministry of Finance, where it scanned hosts for root access, ran LinPEAS, and crawled a folder of personnel records dating to 2012. Hunt.io and researcher Bob Diachenko found the agent's logs, 585 files and 470 MB of attack tooling exposed on a web server with directory listing enabled; Thailand's national CERT and cybersecurity agency were notified on July 15.
Bottom line: No safety control exposed this operation - a directory listing did, and a search on Hermes's web panel header returned roughly 5,900 scan events in a month while 575 hits appeared in an index of exposed /hermes-results/ directories. The operator's scripts targeted a Hadoop HiveServer2 service whose default authentication mode is NONE, accepting any password, and installed a Java add-on to run OS commands through ordinary database queries.
Read the original at The Hacker News ↗
- Topics
- Detection & Response
- Mentions
- CVE-2026-31431CVE-2026-43284CVE-2026-43500CVE-2026-43503
- Related