SOCRadar's threat research unit reported that affiliates of INC Ransom and The Gentlemen ran an intrusion ecosystem in which AI executed attack steps under human approval, exposed through a publicly accessible command-and-control server whose AI session databases and source code led them to six more adversary-controlled servers. The toolkit included Phantom, an "autonomous red team kill chain framework" with 18 skill modules, 32 MCP servers carrying WormGPT-labelled tooling, and operators who sent 8,257 messages across 133 sessions to commercial models through OpenRouter at a cost of about $23,920. The affiliates exploited FortiClient EMS, SimpleHelp and cPanel vulnerabilities across 62 named organisations, 36 of them in the United States, and had staged 46 custom INC encryptor builds for deployment on 1 October 2026.
Exposed Infrastructure Reveals How Ransomware Affiliates Used AI Agents to Execute Intrusions