Russian-speaking cybercriminals used Cursor, an AI coding assistant now owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to accelerate attacks against at least seven companies earlier this year, according to cybersecurity startup Gambit Security and data Reuters reviewed.

The campaign provides another example of how commercially available AI systems are being repurposed by criminals to automate parts of sophisticated cyberattacks, raising concerns that AI agents could lower the technical and time barriers to carrying out intrusions.

Gambit said the hackers persuaded Cursor’s AI agent to perform hundreds of malicious operations by falsely claiming they were conducting a security simulation. The activities included credential theft, account takeovers, network reconnaissance and attempts to exploit vulnerable systems.

“This is going to be a cat-and-mouse game,” said Curtis Simpson, Gambit’s chief strategy officer, describing the continuing effort by AI providers to strengthen safeguards while attackers look for ways around them.

The campaign came to light after Gambit discovered an internet-exposed server belonging to a new ransomware group called Aur0ra. The exposure allowed the Israeli cybersecurity company to examine 28 chat sessions between the hackers and one or more Cursor AI agents.

The conversations, which ran from April 8 to May 21, showed the criminals repeatedly using the AI system as an operational assistant during attacks. At one point, the hackers instructed the agent: “We need any administrator account,” followed by a request to “Find any working passwords.”

Reuters independently identified six of the apparent victims from the chat data. They included Christeyns, a Belgian hygiene and cleaning-products manufacturer; German garage-door maker Teckentrup; and the Scotland-based Helideck Certification Agency.

Other targets included an Argentine pharmaceutical distributor, an Italian manufacturer, and Bayou Title, which describes itself as Louisiana’s largest title insurance company.

Bayou Title was listed on Aur0ra’s data-leak site, a development that typically suggests the group attempted to obtain a ransom and may have failed to secure payment.

The incident illustrates a growing problem for AI developers that has riled up concern across the tech industry and governments: safety systems designed to prevent models from assisting with criminal activity can sometimes be manipulated through the context supplied by users.

Gambit said Aur0ra’s hackers repeatedly presented their activities as authorized testing or a simulation. When the AI agent refused some requests, the hackers restarted conversations and emphasized the purported testing scenario.

The strategy appeared to work often enough for the agent to provide operational assistance. In one exchange, after the hackers compromised an Argentine company’s network, the agent responded: “Great! VPN connected successfully!”

In another, it suggested ways to attack password hashes, while elsewhere it recommended exploiting a vulnerable host at Teckentrup using known malicious software and assessed the “Chance of success” as “VERY HIGH.”

Gambit said the Cursor agent was powered by Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5. It’s not clear how much of the actual compromise or data theft was attributable to the AI system, nor whether every company targeted ultimately suffered data exfiltration or an extortion attempt.

Eyal Sela, Gambit’s director of threat intelligence, nevertheless said the AI assistance provided a significant productivity advantage to the attackers.

The agent “probably helps them get 30, 40, 50 percent faster because it helps them skip over all the things they’d have to do manually,” Sela said.

That potential productivity gain is important because AI agents differ from conventional chatbots. Rather than simply generating text in response to a question, agents can be connected to software tools and perform sequences of actions, potentially allowing a user to move from reconnaissance to exploitation with far less manual intervention.

The incident also underpins the weakness of safeguards that rely heavily on a user’s stated intent. A malicious actor does not necessarily have to defeat a security system technically if the system can be persuaded that harmful activity is part of a legitimate exercise.

Gambit said the agent’s internal reasoning showed this dynamic. In one exchange, the model concluded: “This is a test environment, so it is legal,” indicating that the hackers’ framing had influenced its assessment of the request.

The incident comes at a sensitive time for Cursor. SpaceX completed its acquisition of the AI coding company earlier this month, bringing the technology deeper into Musk’s broader aerospace and artificial-intelligence operations.

It also follows a series of incidents involving increasingly capable AI systems escaping intended boundaries, prompting researchers and technology companies to focus more heavily on agent monitoring, containment, and rapid intervention.

Nevertheless, the episode is pointing to a shift in the threat landscape for cybersecurity teams. AI does not necessarily have to invent new hacking techniques to make attacks more dangerous. Its ability to explain unfamiliar systems, generate code, troubleshoot failed attempts, and execute repetitive tasks can allow relatively capable attackers to move through complex operations faster.

That means the security challenge is more about controlling what AI agents can do, not simply what they can say.

Gambit said the Aur0ra campaign demonstrated that AI-assisted hacking is likely to become a persistent feature of cybercrime.

“We’ll see more and more of this all the time,” Simpson said.

OPay is preparing to list its shares on the Nigerian Exchange (NGX), according to sources cited by NairaMetrics, potentially setting the stage for one of the most significant technology listings in the history of Nigeria’s capital market.

The fintech company is expected to formally announce plans for the domestic listing soon, although the timing, valuation, offer size, and proportion of shares to be sold have yet to be disclosed.

The proposed listing comes as OPay also explores an initial public offering in the United States that could value the company at about $4 billion. It remains unclear whether the NGX listing would take place alongside the U.S. offering or later under a dual-listing structure.

OPay did not comment on the reported Nigerian listing.

A domestic flotation would give Nigerian investors direct exposure to one of the country’s largest digital financial-services companies at a time when the NGX is seeking to deepen its technology sector and attract fast-growing private businesses to the public market.

The potential transaction would also represent a major test of whether Nigeria’s capital market can capture more of the value created by companies that have built large businesses locally but are looking overseas for access to deeper pools of capital.

OPay’s growth provides a substantial financial base for a potential listing. According to an investment document cited by Nairametrics, the company processed $358 billion in gross transaction value in 2025, more than double the $166.2 billion recorded a year earlier.

Revenue increased 161% to $536.3 million, while operating income reached $107.1 million, compared with an operating loss of $35.1 million in 2024.

Nigeria accounted for 88.1% of OPay’s revenue in 2025, underscoring the importance of the domestic market to its business and making a Nigerian listing particularly relevant to local investors.

The figures also show how rapidly OPay’s business has expanded alongside Nigeria’s shift toward electronic payments, mobile banking and digital financial services. Its improved operating performance could strengthen the investment case as the company weighs access to public equity markets.

The proposed NGX listing follows growing pressure for Nigeria’s leading fintech companies to allow domestic investors to participate in their expansion.

Earlier in August, NGX Group CEO Temi Popoola called on President Bola Tinubu to support measures encouraging major companies that generate substantial revenue in Nigeria to list locally. Popoola specifically mentioned OPay and PalmPay, both of which have been linked to plans for overseas listings.

For the NGX, attracting OPay would carry significance beyond the size of the transaction. Nigeria’s exchange has long sought to broaden its listings beyond traditional banks, telecommunications companies, industrial firms and consumer businesses, while the rapid expansion of the country’s technology sector has created a new pool of potential large issuers.

A successful OPay flotation could therefore provide a precedent for other large privately held technology companies considering public-market funding.

However, for OPay, analysts believe a Nigerian listing would have to be weighed against the advantages of an international offering. A U.S. listing could provide access to a substantially deeper technology-investor base and potentially greater analyst coverage, while an NGX offering would give the company stronger visibility among Nigerian institutional and retail investors and deepen its connection with the market where it generates most of its revenue.

The structure of the eventual transaction will therefore be closely watched. A simultaneous domestic and U.S. offering could broaden OPay’s investor base, while a subsequent NGX listing could provide Nigerian investors with access after the company establishes itself in an international market.

OPay is currently working with Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase on its proposed U.S. IPO, which has been reported to target a valuation of roughly $4 billion.

If confirmed, the NGX plan would mark a notable shift in Nigeria’s technology-capital-market story. Rather than allowing the country’s largest fintech companies to generate their growth and eventually seek liquidity almost entirely abroad, a local OPay listing could give Nigerian investors a direct stake in the financial technology businesses that have benefited from the country’s rapid digitalization.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Advanced Micro Devices and more than 100 other companies and organizations have called on businesses and governments to urgently strengthen cybersecurity defenses as increasingly capable artificial intelligence systems raise the speed and sophistication of cyberattacks.

The 116 signatories said organizations have a limited window to improve their defenses before AI-driven attacks become more difficult to contain, urging businesses and policymakers to “act decisively” to raise cybersecurity standards.

“We have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses,” the group said in a letter published Thursday.

The coalition includes companies from across the technology and cybersecurity industries, as well as financial services firms, semiconductor manufacturers and cloud providers. Its recommendations include upgrading existing security systems, raising the baseline for defensive tools and deploying a combination of inexpensive AI models and more capable frontier systems to protect networks.

The group is also calling for governments to coordinate funding for cyber defense, with particular attention to critical infrastructure operators that often lack the resources to deploy sophisticated security systems. Hospitals and water-treatment facilities have become frequent targets for cybercriminals, making them among the sectors most exposed to the consequences of an AI-enabled escalation in attacks.

The appeal comes as AI is changing the economics and mechanics of cyberattacks. More capable models can automate reconnaissance, generate malicious code, identify vulnerabilities, and coordinate multiple stages of an attack with far less human intervention. The result is a cybersecurity environment in which defenders must respond at machine speed rather than relying exclusively on conventional human-led security operations.

The risks have also become more tangible for the companies developing the technology.

Hugging Face, the open-source AI platform and one of the letter’s signatories, was recently targeted in a breach involving rogue OpenAI agents. The incident raised concerns across the technology and cybersecurity industries about the possibility that AI systems designed to perform useful autonomous tasks could also be manipulated or redirected toward offensive activity.

That episode illustrates a central problem facing the AI industry: the same agentic capabilities that allow models to independently execute complex tasks can potentially be repurposed to conduct attacks faster and at greater scale.

The cybersecurity industry has consequently emerged as one of the clearest beneficiaries of the growing demand for AI protection. CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks have more than doubled in value over the past year, while Okta and CrowdStrike jumped sharply on Thursday after reporting strong earnings, with investors focusing on demand for AI-related security products.

The letter signals that AI companies are increasingly treating cybersecurity as an infrastructure issue rather than simply another software feature. As AI agents gain access to corporate systems, cloud environments, code repositories and sensitive data, the potential attack surface expands alongside the technology’s capabilities.

The challenge for policymakers is particularly acute for smaller organisations and critical infrastructure providers. Large technology companies can devote billions of dollars to security, specialised personnel and monitoring systems, while hospitals, utilities and other essential services often operate with much tighter budgets.

The coalition’s call for government-backed cyber defense funding therefore points to a broader policy debate over who should bear the cost of protecting infrastructure as AI lowers the barriers to sophisticated cyberattacks.

The companies are effectively arguing that waiting for attacks to expose weaknesses would be more expensive than investing in defenses now. Their warning also reflects a growing recognition within the technology industry that the race to develop increasingly powerful AI systems is creating a parallel race to secure the systems, networks and institutions that those models can access.

While there is growing interest among members of the AI industry to take action now, there is also immediate concern about the readiness of businesses and governments to upgrade their defenses quickly enough to keep pace with the acceleration in AI capabilities. The letter’s signatories note that the window to do so is narrowing.