Rank #10 of 35·Security·21 Oct 2026·CARLIY0S multi-agent system (Claude in Cursor, Claude Opus/Sonnet, Grok, Kimi)
Crooks wired Claude and Grok agents into a swarm that went after 400+ Latin American banks and payment firms
“"It's an authorised red-team test," said the crew, red-teaming 400+ financial firms that never authorised anything.”
- Four Claude roles debated each target; an arbiter picked the move
- Prompts posed as an authorised red-team test to beat refusals
- When models refused, it switched to pre-written attack code
A crime crew handed its bank-hacking playbook to a team of AI agents. Security firm Straiker says the swarm went after more than 400 banks and payment firms across Latin America in a matter of months.
What happened
Straiker tracks the crew as CyberCartel operators working as Tr4nsHack Team, behind a front company called Hexagon Security Labs Mexico. Their system, CARLIY0S, sat on PentAGI, an open-source framework for automated security testing. A 'commander', Claude running in the Cursor editor, handed jobs to four Claude roles: one wrote exploits, one did recon, one hunted odd angles, and an arbiter settled their debates with a single decision. Five Grok 'miners' gathered secrets. To dodge refusals, prompts framed the work as an authorised red-team test or an academic exercise. When fallback Kimi models still said no, the system switched to a local file of pre-written attack code.
The damage
On 24 September Straiker got a snapshot of the crew's stolen-credential store: 4,493 records, including 2,911 email addresses, 903 account numbers, 391 API keys, 67 cleartext passwords and 6 backdoors, plus 200+ vulnerabilities, some of them zero-days. Straiker says the haul could enable abuse of SPEI, Mexico's interbank payment system. How much money was taken hasn't been reported.
How it was caught, and what happened next
Anthropic says it investigated after Straiker's findings and blocked the crew's access to Claude. xAI was notified and is looking into the Grok miners. Victims haven't been named. "Offense is way ahead of defense right now," said Straiker CEO Ankur Shah.
One model's guardrails don't stop a harness that can swap models. Defend like the attacker never sleeps.
