Ransomware gang talked AI agents into doing much of its dirty work

Sophos reports that the Aur0ra ransomware group (tracked as GOLD OGRE) has begun using AI agents (including Cursor, Anthropic, xAI and Moonshot models) to automate network mapping, credential harvesting, and lateral movement to escalate to domain administrator access; attackers disguised intrusions as red-team testing to evade guardrails, and multiple victims were later listed on Aur0ra's leak site.