Attackers Expose Ongoing AI Tool Use Targeting Organizations in Latin America
Two distinct campaigns targeting organizations in Latin America – one in Mexico and another in Brazil – demonstrate a growing trend of threat actors leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance their operations. Both campaigns involved living-off-the-land techniques, custom remote access Trojans, and AI-driven proxy networks. Attackers utilized commercial large language models (LLMs) to troubleshoot issues, generate exploit scripts, and overcome operational hurdles. Despite employing advanced tools, the campaigns suffered from fundamental operational security weaknesses, such as exposing staging infrastructure with NextChat directories, which allowed researchers to track and disrupt the attackers' activities. The campaigns highlight a broader regional trend of increasingly sophisticated actors adopting AI to accelerate their attacks, while simultaneously exhibiting poor operational security practices.
We have analyzed two ongoing, multi-stage network intrusion and data-exfiltration campaigns targeting organizations in Latin America. Corroborating recent findings from the broader threat intelligence community, we observed attackers leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance their capabilities.
Our investigation categorizes this activity as follows:
- Mexican transportation campaign: This campaign impacted a transportation organization, alongside federal government ministries and municipal water utilities in Mexico and Ecuador. Operators relied on living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques. They executed iterative batch scripts to manipulate and exfiltrate sensitive data, and self-hosted NextChat instances on operational infrastructure. We track the activity in this cluster as CL-CRI-1131.
- Brazilian financial campaign: Attackers targeted the Brazilian financial sector. We observed an expansion of previously reported targeting of vulnerable web servers in a job-themed phishing campaign. The attackers employed custom remote access Trojans (RATs) and tunneling tools, including a Go-based SOCKS5 proxy with iterative filenames that suggest AI-enablement. We track the activity in this cluster as CL-CRI-1163.
We track them as two separate activity clusters with distinct geographic focuses. However, the technical and behavioral overlaps between CL-CRI-1131 and CL-CRI-1163 highlight shifting trends in Latin American targeting and threat actor tooling.
Both clusters have overlapping SOCKS5 relay infrastructure and they both rely on AI to orchestrate operations via commercial large language models (LLMs). This signals a broader evolution in the regional threat landscape. Rather than isolated incidents, these clusters demonstrate how diverse threat groups in Latin America are independently adopting advanced proxy networks and AI integration to streamline their execution.
Palo Alto Networks customers are better protected from the threats discussed here through the following products:
- The Advanced WildFire machine-learning models and analysis techniques have been reviewed and updated in light of the indicators shared in this research
- Advanced URL Filtering and Advanced DNS Security identify known domains and URLs associated with this activity as malicious.
- Cortex XDR and XSIAM are designed to help prevent the threats described in this article, by employing the Malware Prevention Engine. This approach combines several layers of protection, including Advanced WildFire, Behavioral Threat Protection and the Local Analysis module, intended to prevent both known and unknown malware from causing harm to endpoints.
If you think you may have been compromised or have an urgent matter, get in touch with the Unit 42 Incident Response team or call:
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Palo Alto Networks has shared these findings with our fellow Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA) members.