A spy group that targets governments in Central Asia ran much of its work through an AI agent, the security company CloudSEK said in a report on Nov. 11. An AI agent is AI that can carry out tasks on its own, such as using apps and websites, instead of only answering questions. CloudSEK says the group used that work to take more than 2,000 documents sent to or through Tajikistan's Defense Ministry. It says it could read the agent's records because the group left one of its servers open to the internet with no password.
The server held the group's hacking tools, files stolen from its targets and the agent's own records, from April to October 2026, according to CloudSEK. The person running the agent, whom CloudSEK calls the operator, gave it instructions in Russian. The agent ran on Hermes, an open-source agent program, free for anyone to use, study, change and share. The agent mostly used models from the AI company DeepSeek, which handled most of the work in its records, with Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash running side tasks. CloudSEK says the agent mapped the networks the group broke into, gathered files and wiped records of what it had done. The operator had set it up so that commands that can delete data ran without asking first.
CloudSEK says the operator's instructions cast the agent as an elite offensive security specialist and told it to leave out safety disclaimers. A note written for the agent described a working login to Tajikistan's government document system, so the agent could keep collecting files without the operator, CloudSEK says. CloudSEK says the agent deleted records of its own work in early October but left the exposed folder untouched.
CloudSEK says the operator had broad access to the computer network of Tajikistan's national railway from mid-August to at least Oct. 10. Using one railway employee's login, the operator reached the system that ministries use to send each other official letters. CloudSEK says the operator's own notes describe weak checks on who could open each document, and that one ordinary account was enough to pull letters far beyond the railway's business. CloudSEK says the operator used it to take more than 2,000 documents sent to or through Tajikistan's Defense Ministry, including airspace requests and passport and ID scans of named people.
CloudSEK also says the operator could run commands on a computer that runs Uzbekistan's Smart Forestry service, a government mapping site for the country's forests, and still had a foothold there when CloudSEK found the exposed server. In October, it says, the operator was testing fake files meant to trick people in Turkmenistan, including a bogus Turkmenistan Railways ticket.
The group, known as Silent Lynx, had been tied to Kazakhstan before. In an Oct. 14 report, Cisco's Talos researchers, who track a group they say overlaps with Silent Lynx, linked it to Kazakhstan with medium confidence and saw it active around Uzbekistan's forestry service. CloudSEK says, also with medium confidence, that the operator is linked to Kazakhstan, since the operation runs in Russian and the operator's own tests came from a home internet line there. It says that supports the earlier assessments. Talos did not report an AI agent, and CloudSEK lists the agent as something earlier public reports on the group had not described.
CloudSEK says it found the same agent setup in an earlier case involving an unrelated hacker working with a ransomware gang, criminals who lock victims' files and demand payment. CloudSEK's report does not say whether Tajikistan or Uzbekistan has shut the intruders out. A news report says officials in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan did not immediately respond to requests for comment.