Hacker uses Claude to steal Mexican data

A hacker exploited Anthropic PBC's AI chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican govt agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information, according to cybersecurity researchers.

The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in govt networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security said in research published on Wednesday. The activity started in Dec and continued for roughly a month. In all, 150 GB of Mexican govt data were stolen, including documents related to 195 million taxpayer records as well as voter records, govt employee credentials and civil registry files.

This is a Bloomberg story.