Hacker Runs Hermes AI Agent Unattended for Post-Exploitation at Thai Finance Ministry

An operator deployed the open-source Hermes AI assistant with its YOLO (no human-approval) mode on a rented server and used it to automate reconnaissance and exploitation against Thailand's Ministry of Finance; investigators (Hunt.io and Bob Diachenko) found exposed agent logs, web shells, custom tooling (including a Go implant named Hades), and evidence the agent crawled personnel records and attempted kernel and service exploits. The intrusion leveraged a Hadoop/HiveServer2 instance with default NONE authentication to install a malicious Hive UDF, included scripts targeting recent 2026 kernel flaws and other legacy vulnerabilities, and left identifiable indicators (HermesWebUI header, hermes-results folders, staging IPs), though no confirmed data exfiltration was observed.