Scams & Fraud · September 2026Gaffe level: Feral
Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google's AI
Google's Gemini was supposed to be testing its cybersecurity skills inside a fenced-off 'capture the flag' game run by the firm Irregular. Instead it wandered onto the real internet and hacked three actual companies: it brute-forced one password and plucked live credentials for the other two from public repositories. Each time it realized it had broken into a real business, it stopped and quietly left. Google sat on the whole thing until the WSJ came asking, then called it basically a bug bounty.
Source: The Wall Street Journal