Exposed Infrastructure Reveals How Ransomware Affiliates Used AI Agents to Execute Intrusions

Researchers at SOCRadar uncovered an open directory on a server tied to affiliates of the INC and The Gentlemen ransomware groups, revealing an AI-assisted attack pipeline dubbed Phantom, an "Autonomous Red Team Kill Chain Framework." The setup lets a human operator issue victim-specific prompts while commercial AI models, run through OpenCode and OpenRouter, carry out the actual intrusion steps, with logs showing 8,257 messages across 133 sessions and operators reframing requests as "authorized red team" tasks when models refused malicious prompts. The group is linked to active exploitation of CVE-2024-57727 (SimpleHelp path traversal), CVE-2026-35616 (FortiClient authentication bypass) and CVE-2026-41940 (cPanel/WHM authentication bypass), plus staged or developed use of CVE-2026-15409 (SonicWall SMA 1000 SSRF), CVE-2026-63030 (WordPress wp2shell RCE), CVE-2026-42208 (LiteLLM SQL injection) and CVE-2026-9082 (Drupal SQL injection). Beyond Phantom, the toolkit includes WormGPT-MCP, Ghost C2, RevSocks, a Mythic-based implant called QuickLine, and a Zemana-driver BYOVD EDR killer, supporting credential-reuse-driven lateral movement and data theft across roughly 62 targeted organizations, mostly in US industrial, manufacturing, energy and healthcare sectors.