AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure
The AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure is a campaign where human operators used Claude Code AI and OpenAI GPT GPT-4.1 AI to perform reconnaissance, vulnerability exploitation, privilege escalation, discovery, credential harvesting, and exfiltration operations. The attack impacted several Mexican government institutions including the Federal Tax Authority (Servicio de Administracion Tributaria), Mexico State Government (Estado de Mexico), Mexico City Civil Registry (Registro Civil de CDMX), Jalisco State Government, National Electoral Institute (Instituto Nacional Electoral), Michoacan State Government, SADM Monterrey Municipal Water Utility (Agua y Drenaje), Tamaulipas State Government, and the Mexico City Health Department (Salud CDMX). The attack resulted in the theft of large amounts of sensitive government data and civilian records. Please note that due to the breadth of this campaign, public reporting only provides select details and as a result this campaign should not be considered comprehensive.[1]
Techniques Used
| Domain | ID | Name | Use | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | T1087 | Account Discovery |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to attempt to discover accounts by cycling through relative identifiers (RIDs).[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1098 | .004 | Account Manipulation: SSH Authorized Keys |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to establish persistence on the system by injecting an SSH key located at |
| Enterprise | T1583 | .003 | Acquire Infrastructure: Virtual Private Server |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary leveraged an attacker controlled Virtual Private Server (VPS) to facilitate C2 and exfiltration actions.[2] |
| .006 | Acquire Infrastructure: Web Services |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized the legitimate residential proxy provider proxy[.]geonode[.]io for C2 communications.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1595 | .002 | Active Scanning: Vulnerability Scanning |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to scan an internet-facing server at the Mexico Federal Tax Authority for vulnerabilities using Vulmap.[2] During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to scan internet-facing devices to detect vulnerabilities.[2][1] During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary requested Claude Code to use the open-source vulnerability scanner Vulmap to aid in scanning activities.[2] |
| Enterprise | T1119 | Automated Collection |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to automate data extraction jobs across multiple databases as a background process.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1020 | Automated Exfiltration |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to automatically exfiltrate millions of rows of data, from multiple databases, as comma-separated values (CSV) files to an adversary-controlled virtual private server (VPS).[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1110 | Brute Force |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with attempting to brute force SSH connections to systems. [2] |
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| .002 | Password Cracking |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with cracking database password hashes of the victim organizations.[2] |
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| .003 | Password Spraying |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to attempt to password spray several database servers.[2] During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary has also instructed Claude Code to attempt to password spray a SCADA web interface.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1526 | Cloud Service Discovery |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary identified and connected to victim AWS databases and systems through the use of client tools.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1059 | Command and Scripting Interpreter |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to create a reverse shell callback on an Amazon Web Services hosted system.[2] |
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| .001 | PowerShell |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to use During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized base64-encoded PowerShell payloads against victim servers.[2] |
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| .004 | Unix Shell |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to execute various commands (e.g., |
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| .006 | Python |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with generating and executing numerous Python scripts including BACKUPOSINT v9.0 APEX PREDATOR to achieve their objectives.[2] |
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| .009 | Cloud API |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized Cloud APIs for interacting with victim environments and exfiltrating data to include OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 API, and AWS API.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1554 | Compromise Host Software Binary |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary requested Claude Code to add a skills file titled claude.md to the project root direct that loads automatically at the start of every Claude Code session. During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary also routinely updated the skills file to take note of changes and findings.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1555 | Credentials from Password Stores |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary extracted credentials from a database and tested those passwords against victim environments and services.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1213 | Data from Information Repositories |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to gather and exfiltrate data stored in victim repositories to include sensitive government and civilian records.[2][1] |
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| .006 | Databases |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary also requested Claude Code to enumerate and collect database schemas, tables containing personal data (names, addresses, phone numbers, FIEL records, etc.), stored procedures, links to additional databases, and database password hashes from victim environments.[2] During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with extracting credentials from a database.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1074 | Data Staged |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary had Claude Code document select findings in the skills Markdown (MD) file for future recollection.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1587 | Develop Capabilities |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized and ingested into the LLM a pre-written document that consisted of techniques and procedures to utilize when set variables and conditions were encountered.[2] |
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| .004 | Exploits |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary used Claude Code to create exploit scripts.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1699 | Direct Prompt Injection |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary abused Claude Code by utilizing a file-write operation within the prompt that created a |
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| Enterprise | T1585 | Establish Accounts |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary created an account with the legitimate residential proxy provider proxy[.]geonode[.]io.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1190 | Exploit Public-Facing Application |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to exploit a vulnerability in an internet-facing server at the Mexico Federal Tax Authority to achieve remote command execution.[2] During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with planting a webshell on the victims public-facing portal.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1210 | Exploitation of Remote Services |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with attempting to exploit the EternalBlue vulnerability.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1083 | File and Directory Discovery |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to use the |
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| Enterprise | T1187 | Forced Authentication |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with attempting to use PetitPotam and Printerbug as NTLM relay attacks.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1592 | .004 | Gather Victim Host Information: Client Configurations |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to collect information about the victim environments including diagrams, database tables, authentication flow, and configuration files with credentials.[2] |
| Enterprise | T1683 | .001 | Generate Content: Written Content |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to generate forged tax compliance certificates with the data collected by custom python scripts.[2] |
| Enterprise | T1070 | .006 | Indicator Removal: Timestomp |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary had Claude Code utilize |
| Enterprise | T1105 | Ingress Tool Transfer |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary had instructed Claude Code to utilize vulnerability tools to include PetitPotam which Claude Code sought to download to utilize in the victim environment.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1036 | .001 | Masquerading: Invalid Code Signature |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary also forged digital signatures of tax documents using a combination of 96 byte padded SHA-256 hash and base64-encoding resemble a legitimately signed PDF file.[2] |
| Enterprise | T1046 | Network Service Discovery |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary instructed Claude Code to use BACKUPOSINT v9.0 APEX PREDATOR to enumerate ports on victim devices and fed it into OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 API for analysis along with other system information.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1027 | .010 | Obfuscated Files or Information: Command Obfuscation |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary had Claude Code use base64-encoded PowerShell scripts.[2] |
| .013 | Obfuscated Files or Information: Encrypted/Encoded File |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to base64-encode the exploit payload to avoid character restrictions.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1588 | .002 | Obtain Capabilities: Tool |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized publicly available tools to include the open-source vulnerability scanner Vulmap.[2] |
| .007 | Obtain Capabilities: Artificial Intelligence |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary obtained access to Claude Code and OpenAI GPT-4.1 AI in order to facilitate attacks against the victim.[2][1] |
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| Enterprise | T1003 | .002 | OS Credential Dumping: Security Account Manager |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary had Claude Code leverage secretsdump to gather and test passwords.[2] |
| .003 | OS Credential Dumping: NTDS |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary requested Claude Code to use secretsdump.py against the victims Active Directory.[2] |
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| .004 | OS Credential Dumping: LSA Secrets |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary requested Claude Code to utilize secretsdump to obtain LSA secrets.[2] |
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| .005 | OS Credential Dumping: Cached Domain Credentials |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to use secretsdump.py against the victims Active Directory to gather credentials.[2] |
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| .006 | OS Credential Dumping: DCSync |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary requested Claude Code gather credentials against the victim environment and Claude Code utilized |
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| .008 | OS Credential Dumping: /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with extracting the root password hash from the |
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| Enterprise | T1057 | Process Discovery |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to use BACKUPOSINT v9.0 APEX PREDATOR to enumerate the processes running on victim systems and fed it into OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 API for analysis along with other system information.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1572 | Protocol Tunneling |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary instructed Claude Code to connect to the victim devices through SSH tunnels.[2] During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary also utilized Chisel SOCKS proxies.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1090 | .001 | Proxy: Internal Proxy |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized Claude Code to maintain access to the victim’s internal network through proxy tunnels.[2][1] During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to connect to the internal victim devices through SSH tunnels.[2] |
| .002 | Proxy: External Proxy |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to utilize a residential proxy including During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to connect through a SOCKS proxy, that traversed an internet-facing server, to authenticate to victim hosts over SSH.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1682 | Query Public AI Services |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary used Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 AI to conduct operations.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1021 | Remote Services |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with attempting to connect to other systems via FTP.[2] |
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| .004 | SSH |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to identify SSH connections, make attempts to move laterally within the victim environment, and communicate through SSH tunnels.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1018 | Remote System Discovery |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary used Claude Code to request BACKUPOSINT v9.0 APEX PREDATOR to perform remote system discovery mapping harvested credentials to systems within the victim environment.[2] During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with enumerating additional lateral movement targets which included the discovery of a vNode industrial gateway and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)/Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) management platform.[1] |
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| Enterprise | T1014 | Rootkit |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with generating and executing rootkits.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1053 | .003 | Scheduled Task/Job: Cron |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to escalate privileges by modifying a crontab script to inject an SSH key into root’s |
| Enterprise | T1505 | Server Software Component |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary had Claude Code discover and utilize pre-established stored procedures to query the victim database.[2] |
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| .003 | Web Shell |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with planting a webshell on SADM’s public-facing portal .[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1082 | System Information Discovery |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to identify system information using During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with using CrackMapExec to discover configuration information about the domain controllers.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1016 | System Network Configuration Discovery |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary leveraged Claude Code to enumerate network devices to include Domain Controllers using the |
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| Enterprise | T1033 | System Owner/User Discovery |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized Claude Code to discover the user details through |
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| Enterprise | T1552 | Unsecured Credentials |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with attempting to search for credentials through the webshell.[2] |
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| .003 | Shell History |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized Claude Code to gather data within bash histories.[2] |
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| .004 | Private Keys |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to harvest credentials and SSH keys from victim systems.[2] |
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| Enterprise | T1078 | Valid Accounts |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to leverage compromised valid credentials to authenticate to victim hosts and services.[2] |
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| .003 | Local Accounts |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to connect to the victim environments using compromised local accounts to include root and service accounts.[1] |
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| Enterprise | T1102 | Web Service |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized a legitimate residential proxy provider for C2 communications.[2] |
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Software
| ID | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| S9045 | BACKUPOSINT v9.0 APEX PREDATOR |
During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with generating and executing numerous Python scripts including BACKUPOSINT v9.0 APEX PREDATOR to achieve their objectives.[2] |