AI-Assisted Threat Actor Compromises 600+ FortiGate Devices in 55 Countries
AI-Assisted Threat Actor Compromises 600+ FortiGate Devices in 55 Countries
https://thehackernews.com/2026/02/ai-assisted-threat-actor-compromises.html
Publish Date: 2026-02-21 09:49:00
Source Domain: thehackernews.com
A Russian-speaking, financially motivated threat actor has been observed taking advantage of commercial generative artificial intelligence (AI) services to compromise over 600 FortiGate devices located in 55 countries.
That’s according to new findings from Amazon Threat Intelligence, which said it observed the activity between January 11 and February 18, 2026.
“No exploitation of FortiGate vulnerabilities was observed—instead, this campaign succeeded by exploiting exposed management ports and weak credentials with single-factor authentication, fundamental security gaps that AI helped an unsophisticated actor exploit at scale,” CJ Moses, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of Amazon Integrated Security, said in a report.
The tech giant described the threat actor as having limited technical capabilities, a constraint they overcame by relying on multiple commercial generative AI tools to implement various phases of the attack cycle, such as tool development, attack planning, and command generation.
While one AI tool served as the primary backbone of the operation, the attackers also relied on a second AI tool as a fallback to assist with pivoting within a specific compromised network. The names of the AI tools were not disclosed.
The threat actor is assessed to be driven by financial gain and not associated with any advanced persistent threat (APT) with state-sponsored resources. As recently highlighted by Google, generative AI tools are being increasingly adopted by threat actors to scale and accelerate their operations, even if they don’t equip them with novel uses of the technology.
If anything, the emergence of AI tools illustrates how capabilities that were once off-limits to novice or technically challenged threat actors are becoming increasingly feasible, further lowering the barrier to entry for cybercrime and enabling them to come up with comprehensive attack methodologies.
“They are likely a financially motivated individual or small group who,…
