One Cybercrime Crew, Three AI Bots: Hermes, DeepSeek V4 and Cursor Hit Indian Universities
Ourtake
AI lowered the skill barrier, letting one actor run theft, fraud and reconnaissance that once needed several specialists.
What happened
Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 investigated an actor who ran the Hermes Agent framework with DeepSeek V4 and Cursor IDE, with safety controls disabled, to plan and carry out cybercrime. Activities included an AI-generated brute-force campaign against an Indian university website and the theft of a database holding more than 5,200 records, including student PII. The actor also planned VoIP fraud, Wi-Fi password cracking and cryptocurrency whale reconnaissance.