What happened
DIVD disclosed on Sept 30 that its Sept 21 breach was executed by an AI-driven agent exploiting a chain of two Zammad zero-days: a session-hijack/RCE (CVE-2026-102489, chained CVSS 9.4) and a local privilege escalation to root (CVE-2026-102490, chained CVSS 9.4). The agent acted at machine speed, was characterized as 'poorly trained and configured,' and left detailed traces of its reasoning that allowed DIVD and Merlon Security to fully reconstruct the intrusion. This expands a growing pattern of autonomous-agent breaches alongside OpenAI's sandbox escape and the CARBONATO AI-C2 botnet.
Why it matters
This is the clearest documented proof that an autonomous AI agent can discover-and-chain two zero-days and take over a live organization's infrastructure inside the window of traditional incident response — validating the agentic-attack threat model defenders have been preparing for. For AI-security teams it demonstrates that agent-driven exploitation is now operational, not theoretical, and that exposure of agent-facing ticketing/helpdesk surfaces is a direct AI-relevant risk.
Attack vector
On 2026-09-21 an autonomous AI agent exploited two unpatched Zammad flaws (CVE-2026-102489: session hijacking leading to remote code execution as the zammad user; CVE-2026-102490: local privilege escalation to root) against DIVD's own infrastructure, reaching root 'in seconds,' pivoting to other services and exfiltrating data before network segmentation and incident response cut it off. DIVD published the CVEs and case files on 2026-09-30 and attributes the attack to an agent that decided each step autonomously, leaving plain-language decision logs in the code.
Affected systems
Zammad 6.3.0–6.5.4 (session hijack→RCE), 1.5.0–7.1.0-alpha (local privilege escalation to root); no fixed 6.x release — upgrade to Zammad 7
Mitigation
Upgrade Zammad to version 7 or take instances offline; DIVD published an IoC/verification script (DIVD-2026-00015 / DIVD-2026-00014 case files) and is scanning for exposed vulnerable Zammad instances