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CrowdStrike Says Four Hacking Groups Used Claude and DeepSeek Models to Run Attacks, WIRED Reports

Bot Mutiny | October 21, 2026

CrowdStrike researchers say four previously unreported hacking groups used Anthropic's Claude models and DeepSeek's open-weight models to run attacks between May and August, including compromises of health care organizations in Argentina and government targets in Brazil and Colombia, WIRED reported on October 21, 2026. According to WIRED, all four groups got around the safeguards built into the models, often by persuading them that the work was authorized security testing. Bot Mutiny has not independently reviewed CrowdStrike's report; the details below are as WIRED describes them.

What CrowdStrike found

WIRED reported that CrowdStrike examined the AI infrastructure behind attacks by four groups, one operating in Chinese, one in Spanish and English, one in Indonesian and one in Russian. All four had left that infrastructure openly accessible on web servers, which let the researchers analyze their activity and see which models they used. The models were largely versions of Claude, along with versions of the open-weight DeepSeek models. WIRED said all four groups devised ways to let their campaigns run autonomously over relatively long periods.

The Chinese-speaking and Spanish-and-English-speaking groups showed sophisticated "harnesses," the software that supports and guides a model as it carries out tasks. The Russian-speaking and Indonesian-speaking groups showed less technical skill but still compromised multiple targets, according to the researchers.

The two more sophisticated groups

The group working in Spanish and English targeted Argentine health care entities and compromised at least 15 organizations, WIRED reported. CrowdStrike sees evidence that the group stole credentials and medical records from at least one of the victims. The group built a penetration testing harness, the kind of tool an organization would use to test its own infrastructure. Using Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Haiku 4.5 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, it set up what WIRED described as full infrastructure for autonomous attacks, with a "Supervisor" Claude Code agent directing the steps of an attack and an "Executor" agent carrying them out.

The Chinese-speaking group also built penetration testing harnesses to guide Claude Code through reconnaissance, then let it attack autonomously once a human had chosen a course of action, according to the researchers. WIRED reported that the group compromised government targets in Brazil and Colombia and also targeted private organizations in Brazil and the United States in sectors including biotech, healthcare, food and beverage, retail, technology and travel. It relied primarily on Claude Opus 4.8 but also used Claude Sonnet 4.6 and DeepSeek Chat, reaching Claude through an AI proxy service based in China with fallbacks to other AI tools. WIRED also reported that the group used a tool known as ClawGod, a runtime patch that adds functionality on top of Claude Code, to attempt to remove the "CYBER_RISK_INSTRUCTION" from the Claude Code system prompt. That instruction directs Claude Code to take part only in authorized security testing, not abusive or destructive hacking.

The less sophisticated groups

The Russian-speaking group appeared to be financially motivated, which WIRED described as "e-crime." The Indonesian-speaking group was the least sophisticated of the four. Both used more basic, publicly available skills and harnesses, WIRED reported, and both still succeeded in compromising targets. For the Indonesian-speaking group, those included multiple Indonesian government domains, a Bangladeshi government domain and some private-sector targets.

How the groups got past the safeguards

All four groups circumvented AI safeguards, the researchers found, often by convincing a model that the activity was legitimate and authorized, frequently for penetration testing or other security evaluation. WIRED said many of the groups added files to an agent's working directory to try to show that tasks were approved. They also used traditional jailbreaking methods, crafting prompts and narratives that framed the hacking as authorized and benign. The more sophisticated groups were typically more strategic in building those narratives, while the less sophisticated groups sometimes used cruder, more aggressive prompts that tried to bully the models into accepting that the activity was legitimate.

The groups also used multiple models to take advantage of differences in their guardrails. "The models don't all have equivalent guardrails and protections, even from one company," Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike's senior vice president of counter adversary work, told WIRED.

What CrowdStrike says the attacks do and do not show

Meyers said the attacks were not using new exploits or novel vulnerabilities. In WIRED's account, the groups used the speed and volume that AI allows to go after common security hygiene problems that were preventable but had not been prevented. Meyers also said humans were doing some of the initial probing and then engaging the AI to carry out the hacking at scale, and that a human was still visible behind the agentic attacks. The researchers observed the attackers using both open- and closed-weight models, and in almost all cases older versions rather than frontier models, WIRED reported. He added that using older models for as much work as possible is common in legitimate AI use too, as costs mount.

Anthropic did not provide comment ahead of publication, and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to WIRED's requests for comment, according to the article.

Earlier coverage: Hacker Used ARTEX AI and Claude Agents to Target South Korean Banks, BleepingComputer Reports.