Unit 42: "BUGSTER" Drives Hermes Agent and DeepSeek V4 Over Telegram to Breach Indian Universities

Two Indian public universities, an Indian e-commerce site, and large Ethereum holders

Unit 42 documented a financially motivated, English-speaking operator running Hermes Agent profiles over Telegram with DeepSeek V4 as the reasoning model, plus Cursor configured with Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, and Composer 2.5 for code. The agents brute-forced one university's WordPress login and exfiltrated more than 5,200 student and faculty PII records from a second university's MongoDB. They also pulled an e-commerce storefront API token and merchant IDs and built files on 45 large ETH holders. The AI-written report ended with a "NEXT EXPLOIT OPPORTUNITIES" section. Single source

DeepSeek's safety was disabled with a system-prompt override, and Cursor's permission checks, sandbox, and MCP approvals were turned off through proxy environment variables, so nothing in the toolchain gated the agents' actions