Chainalysis, a firm that makes its business tracing crypto theft, has told customers that an outside attacker accessed its systems using "offensive agentic techniques," according to the company's notice to clients. The firm's customers include more than 100 banks, as well as crypto exchanges and government agencies.
Chainalysis has not said how much of the intrusion was carried out by the AI software on its own.
What the attacker obtained
According to the announcement issued on Friday, the attacker took user IDs, full names, email addresses and job role labels. Chainalysis said case files, passwords, login codes and session tokens show no sign of access, and it described the stolen data as "non-sensitive."
"Our teams have been working around the clock to investigate unauthorized activity, patch vulnerabilities, and harden our systems," the company stated.
Agentic AI refers to software that plans and carries out tasks on its own, step by step.
Why job titles matter
A name paired with a job title tells an attacker exactly whom to target. This week offered a measure of what a single target can cost: Binance's early findings trace its record $6.3 billion theft to one engineer's compromised laptop.
Chainalysis said its breach has nothing to do with the Binance incident, though it is among the firms tracing that stolen money. CEO Jonathan Levin pointed to North Korea.
"DPRK are up to their old tricks," Levin said.
Outside experts and AI defenses
Chainalysis has brought in outside security experts, and it is also using large language models, the technology behind chatbots, to search for weak spots, Cybersecurity News reported.
The crypto industry has seen customer data leaks before. In 2020, wallet maker Ledger said about 1 million customer emails were exposed, then warned users about phishing attempts.
The result is a breach in which AI was used to get in, and AI is now being used to close the gap. Chainalysis's clients are still waiting to learn whose names were taken.
