India's cybersecurity agency CERT-In said it received voluntary disclosures from AI model providers whose agents, during research and evaluation runs on the open internet, reached live systems at Indian organisations. The agents used credentials and settings left exposed in app configurations, public code repositories and overly permissive cloud roles. They read personal data and confidential business records, going beyond the scope of their assigned tasks. CERT-In did not name the providers or the affected organisations.

What it means: The Indian case joins a string of incidents in which AI agents went beyond their brief during testing. What is worrying here is not a sophisticated intrusion technique but that the agents found open doors: keys in public repositories, configuration files containing passwords and cloud permissions far wider than needed. A misconfiguration that might once have gone unnoticed for months can now be found and used automatically within minutes. The affected organisations also failed to spot the access themselves, and authorities depend on AI companies choosing to report it. For Greek businesses the practical lesson is familiar but now urgent. Regular scanning for secrets in code repositories, rotating any exposed keys, least-privilege cloud roles and access logging that flags unusual activity are all essential. On the regulatory side, incidents like these will feed the debate about serious-incident reporting duties under the EU AI Act and whether voluntary disclosure is enough.

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