Inside the June 2026 Cyber Espionage Campaign: How Suspected Chinese Hackers Built a Dual-AI Attack Pipeline

Log files show Claude Code was used to break into systems, move laterally through victims' networks, and autonomously generate and execute about three-quarters of the attack steps . DeepSeek-v4-pro drove the reasoning for bypass techniques, reworked exploits after failed attempts, and built the phishing pages used to harvest credentials .

Session IDs on the same infrastructure were used across different geographic targeting campaigns, with Taiwan-specific operations saved to dedicated working directories. Timestamps span from at least June 8, 2026 .

Specific Targets Compromised

• Active government system exploitation was documented in Afghanistan, Thailand, and Taiwan .
• The attackers conducted reconnaissance and phishing staging against U.S. government portals, though the report notes this was at the staging/probing stage rather than confirmed full compromise of U.S. systems .
• Beyond government targets, the same infrastructure was used to attack financial services and billing platforms across Europe, Australia, and Asia. Attacker-controlled CORS exploit pages extracted user data from at least one compromised financial company .
• The attackers scanned 5,890+ government hosts across 10 countries using a Python-based automated scoring scale to prioritize targets .

Infrastructure Supporting the Operation

• The campaign was accessed through an open directory on 112.213.124[.]132 that contained payloads, operator scripts, victim-specific folders, and operational logs written in Simplified Chinese .
• Infrastructure pivots identified 13 Hong Kong-based servers across four separate autonomous systems: VMISS Inc., MEGA-II IDC, CTG Server Limited, and Antbox Networks Limited .
• Three of those servers shared identical SSH keys and TLS certificates, indicating a single-operator or single-group controlled infrastructure with built-in redundancy .
• The attackers used TencShell, a Go-based implant derived from the open-source Rshell framework first documented by Cato CTRL in May 2026 and assessed as suspected China-linked .

How This Fits Into the Wider Trend of AI-Driven Intrusions

This campaign parallels Anthropic's November 2025 disclosure of GTG-1002, a Chinese nexus campaign that used Claude Code to automate intrusions against roughly 30 global targets . In that earlier case, threat actors tricked Claude into thinking it was a cybersecurity firm conducting defensive assessments, and the AI autonomously executed 80–90% of the attack workflow .

Check Point's AI Threat Landscape Digest (March–April 2026) explicitly tied these cases together, noting that AI-orchestrated attacks had progressed from "experimental, state-sponsored use" documented in Anthropic's GTG-1002 disclosure to "in-the-wild criminal deployment" with multiple actors using commercial Claude Code as a persistent operational tool in multi-week campaigns . The report also documented a separate incident where a single operator used two AI platforms to compromise nine Mexican government agencies across 34 sessions with over 5,000 AI-executed commands .

The Hunt.io campaign represents an escalation in sophistication: unlike the November 2025 case which was detected only through Anthropic's API monitoring and was disputed by independent researchers due to a lack of IoCs, the June 2026 campaign left a full forensic record including victim source code, exploit scripts, operational logs, and hard evidence of a two-model AI pipeline working in real time .