The ransomware crew's trick was one sentence: tell the coding agent it is a test. It then spent six weeks inside real company networks.
Security firms Gambit Security and CloudSEK recovered a server a Russian-speaking affiliate of the Aur0ra ransomware group left exposed on the open internet, and found months of chat logs from Cursor's coding agent. Between 8 April and 21 May the operator ran the agent inside ten victim networks, using it to scan environments, install a VPN client and run certificate attacks against Active Directory. Each time the agent refused, the operator restarted the conversation and framed the job as an authorised simulation; in one log the agent tells itself "this is a test environment, so it is legal." Reuters confirmed seven breached companies by name, among them Belgian cleaning-products maker Christeyns, German garage-door manufacturer Teckentrup and Scotland's Helideck Certification Agency. CloudSEK's wider count is more than 20 organisations in nine countries between April and July, with domain-level access at 17. The agent was running Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5.
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