Cybercrime group weaponises agentic AI in regional web-server raids
UAT-10147, a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group, has begun using semi-autonomous agentic AI to run raids on exposed web servers across Southeast Asia and four other continents, Cisco Talos said in a technical report released on Wednesday.
Source: Cisco Talos Intelligence · August 20, 2026 at 5:27 PM · AI-assisted report
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KUALA LUMPUR, 21 AUGUST 2026 —
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UAT-10147, a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group, has begun using semi-autonomous agentic AI to run raids on exposed web servers across Southeast Asia and four other continents, Cisco Talos said in a technical report released on Wednesday.
Market Impact
The operator first appeared in early 2026 and has already infected servers in Brazil, Bolivia, China, Canada and Vietnam, according to Talos’ telemetry. Victims include government agencies, universities, media outlets, technology firms and gaming companies.
Talos identified a target list of roughly 170,000 URLs harvested by the group, split into 17 files of 10,000 entries each. The file names use the letter “w” as a nod to the Chinese character “萬,” which means ten thousand, the researchers noted.
Command-and-control traffic led Talos to an open directory at IP 139.180.197[.]150, where the actor stores reconnaissance notes, batch scripts, privilege-escalation tools and backdoors. The site’s directory listings show the group favours Metasploit Framework to weaponise known one-day vulnerabilities such as CVE-2022-27925 in Zimbra Collaboration Suite and CVE-2021-29441 in the Nacos framework.
Once the actor gains remote code execution, it drops a multi-stage batch script—often named back.txt or back.bat—that fetches the QuasarRAT payload disguised as svchosts.exe, a privilege-escalation tool renamed prcc1.rar, and a secondary script called bai.bat. The toolkit installs web shells on Linux servers and uses EfsPotato to elevate privileges on Windows, then edits the registry to exclude malware folders from Windows Defender scans.
Persistence is set via a scheduled task labelled “Google Chrome Start” that runs the backdoor every login with SYSTEM rights.
Malaysian businesses should note that the campaign’s reconnaissance phase includes scanning for exposed IIS and Apache Tomcat servers, which are common in local hosting providers, Talos said. While no Malaysian IP addresses were listed in the open directory, the group’s tooling now automates reconnaissance and payload generation, lowering the barrier for follow-on attacks against regional targets.
Talos assesses with moderate-to-high confidence that UAT-10147 represents a shift from AI-assisted scripting to semi-autonomous offensive orchestration, giving it the speed to exploit fresh vulnerabilities within hours of disclosure.
Related: Google