AI agents are making security’s breakout-time metric obsolete, and no one agrees on what replaces it

Twenty-nine seconds after firewalls or access controls blocked its first attempt, an AI agent inside an Argentine healthcare organization’s network switched tactics, targeting the domain controller through SQL, according to security provider CrowdStrike. Seventeen minutes later, it had pulled five credential hashes from the domain controller. The attacker behind it compromised at least 15 Argentine healthcare organizations and took credentials and medical records from at least one, CrowdStrike said.

CrowdStrike’s October 21 report profiles four previously unreported attackers the company traced between May and August, and it names Claude Code in all four. CrowdStrike wrote that the four cases “likely demonstrate that agentic AI commoditizes baseline offensive cyber operations.” It saw agents at work because each attacker “left their offensive agent frameworks exposed via open directories,” it wrote. In the Argentine campaign, a “Supervisor” Claude Code agent picked the next task and an “Executor” agent carried it out. Anthropic was contacted and did not respond by press time.

Human attackers at keyboards issue dozens of commands an hour, and AI agents issue about 1,500 an hour, according to Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s senior vice president of counter adversary operations. “It’s just speed and volume,” Meyers told VentureBeat. “This is not using new and unseen exploits. It’s just using things that we already knew about, but it’s doing it faster, and it’s kind of connecting the dots at a volume that we’re not used to seeing.”