Darkreading.com reported that “A small, unknown band of hackers pulled off history’s first recorded, truly artificial intelligence-directed cyberattack earlier this year, stealing troves of data from the government of Mexico in the process. Yet when the enterprising ne’er-do-wells tried bridging the gap from IT to OT systems, the AI had no luck.” The May 7, 2026 article entitled “AI-Driven Cyberattack on Mexico Couldn’t Breach OT Systems” (https://www.darkreading.com/ics-ot-security/worlds-first-ai-driven-cyberattack-couldnt-breach-ot-systems) included these comments:
Between December 2025 and February 2026, the mysterious hackers targeted at least nine entities of the Mexican government, including its federal tax authority (Servicio de Administración Tributaria), National Electoral Institute, the Mexico City civil registry, and a handful of state governments, according to Gambit Security. But how could only a few people, seemingly unaffiliated with any nation-state or known advanced persistent threat (APT) group, take out so many high-value organizations?
With AI, of course.
The group leaned more heavily on Claude Code than any group before it, using the bot to generate a hefty exploitation framework from scratch, and having it guide them more generally through the steps in exploiting each system they came across. It worked, with the weakest of jailbreak attempts to bypass its guardrails. They ended up with access to millions of tax records, property records, and more.
A new report from Dragos summarizes a unique episode in the campaign, when the bad guys reached a technically different sort of target: the water and drainage utility for the city of Monterrey in northeastern Mexico. After rampaging through a national government, their progress was suddenly stymied when — even buoyed as they were by the wonders of AI — they failed to leverage their IT network access into OT network access. They left with superficial loot, having caused no serious damage.
Sounds like good news!
First published at https://www.vogelitlaw.com/blog/ot-systems-in-mexico-survive-ai-driven-cyberattack