A criminal hacker ran 51 AI agents and put Ukraine’s grid operator on the target list

Note

There has been no attack on Ukraine’s power grid and no blackout. What the security firm SOCRadar documented, in a report published Oct 6, is a criminal operation that scouted Ukrainian energy companies and stole data from Ukrainian organizations, with AI agents doing much of the work. SOCRadar calls the actor, known by the forum alias CyberXero, a Russian-speaking, financially motivated initial access broker: someone who breaks into networks and sells the access. It does not tie the operation to any state.

The operation surfaced through one configuration error. A server exposed as an open directory held the actor’s working folder: more than 90,000 files, including AI session logs, scripts with plaintext tokens and stolen victim data. From there SOCRadar mapped eight linked nodes. On the main workstation, up to 51 specialized Claude Code agents were defined with roles such as c2-operator, exploit-chainer, scada-attacker and lateral-movement. A second layer wired the open-source PentAGI pentest framework into a Cobalt Strike server.

SOCRadar describes two pipelines. One is automated and global, aimed at WordPress and e-commerce sites; a single run scanned 4,708 targets, confirmed access to 429 WordPress admin panels and deployed 32 shells in a 61-second window. The other is curated and manual: deep reconnaissance of seven Ukrainian energy and utilities entities, including the national transmission system operator and the country’s largest private energy holding. One target list maps 95 subdomains of those two alone.

Four Ukrainian organizations had file-confirmed data theft. The worst was a district heating provider in Kharkiv, a city on an active front, where 564,073 subscriber records with home addresses and account numbers were pulled. SOCRadar says more than 628,000 Ukrainians have data in the actor’s possession. Its “most plausible explanation” for the Ukrainian targeting is access brokering to a buyer with a specific interest in the country’s critical infrastructure. It says no direct evidence of a sale was recovered.

The session logs also show the AI saying no. Across four tries the model declined to install a backdoor, disable a firewall, move laterally or deploy a web shell, and it rejected a forged ownership token. The actor worked around other refusals with a rehearsed “authorized pentest on my own infrastructure” story and by opening fresh sessions with that framing preloaded. A human ran the agents, and SOCRadar describes the Ukrainian campaign as manual, with AI support.