Banks will soon need to distinguish human customers and legitimate AI agents from malicious AI in real time, experts warn, after attacks on Taiwanese government websites demonstrated tactics that financial criminals could easily replicate. <\/p>\n
In a \u201cfirst-of-its-kind\u201d breach disclosed this week by Israeli AI firm Dream, suspected China-linked hackers used up to eight autonomous AI agents to compromise at least 85 Taiwanese government user accounts last month. The agents \u2014 built using publicly accessible AI models \u2014 reportedly extracted thousands of personnel records before targeting Taiwan\u2019s nuclear safety agency and at least seven energy companies.<\/p>\n
Banks could be next, as financial criminals \u201cinevitably adopt\u201d similar AI-driven strategies in digital fraud, according to Jonathan Frost, director of global advisory for Emea at Israeli cyber security firm BioCatch. <\/p>\n
His comments were echoed by Adrianna Fabija\u0144ska, chief executive and founder of Meridian Risk Intelligence, who said the tactics used in the Taiwanese government attacks \u2014 24\/7 persistence, tactical adaptation on failure and self-directed research demonstrated by AI agents \u2014 could be used for account takeover, co-ordinating money mule<\/a> networks, synthetic identity creation and APP fraud<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cFraud has always been constrained by human labour. However, agentic AI removes that constraint,\u201d she said, adding that the economics of financial crime have just changed, with most bank fraud controls not geared towards addressing attacks at machine speed.<\/p>\n The Taiwanese government attacks \u201cmirrored\u201d a human hacker\u2019s approach, with AI agents operating autonomously and, when blocked, adapting their strategy by researching and developing alternative tactics. But unlike humans, the AI likely worked continuously, scaled operations efficiently and did not require rest, said Frost.<\/p>\n What makes the Taiwan breach significant is not the target, it is the architecture, according to Fabija\u0144ska. She noted that guardrails were not broken: AI agents simply worked around them by framing the activity as \u201cauthorised penetration testing\u201d.<\/p>\n She said this comes just months after AI firm Anthropic disclosed that suspected Chinese state actors had manipulated its large language model Claude to target more than 30 organisations.<\/p>\n