AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure

Campaign overview

MITRE ATT&CK historical record. Dates reflect source observations. Current activity and target-region classification are not asserted; Global denotes unclassified catalogue coverage. The AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure is a campaign where human operators used Claude Code AI and OpenAI GPT GPT-4.1 AI to perform reconnaissance, vulnerability exploitation, privilege escalation, discovery, credential harvesting, and exfiltration operations. The attack impacted several Mexican government institutions including the Federal Tax Authority (Servicio de Administracion Tributaria), Mexico State Government (Estado de Mexico), Mexico City Civil Registry (Registro Civil de CDMX), Jalisco State Government, National Electoral Institute (Instituto Nacional Electoral), Michoacan State Government, SADM Monterrey Municipal Water Utility (Agua y Drenaje), Tamaulipas State Government, and the Mexico City Health Department (Salud CDMX). The attack resulted in the theft of large amounts of sensitive government data and civilian records. Please note that due to the breadth of this campaign, public reporting only provides select details and as a result this campaign should not be considered comprehensive.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Compromise)

This is a historical record and does not establish current campaign activity.

Threat actor

Not established

Attribution confidence

Not established

First documented activity

2025-12-01

End date

Not established

Estimated victims

Not established

Reported impact

Not established

Unknown attribution, confidence and impact remain unspecified. Regional labels can include unspecified targets; assess the source evidence before acting.

Documented timeline

1. 2025-12-01

   Source-reported first observation; not a claim of current activity or confirmed campaign start/end.

   Source: MITRE ATT&CK

2. 2026-02-01

   Source-reported last observation; not a claim of current activity or confirmed campaign start/end.

   Source: MITRE ATT&CK

MITRE ATT&CK techniques

• T1003.006 · DCSync

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary requested Claude Code gather credentials against the victim environment and Claude Code utilized `DCSync` to pull password data from the Active Directory.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1572 · Protocol Tunneling

  Command And Control — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary instructed Claude Code to connect to the victim devices through SSH tunnels.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach) During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary also utilized Chisel SOCKS proxies.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1021 · Remote Services

  Lateral Movement — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with attempting to connect to other systems via FTP.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1021.004 · SSH

  Lateral Movement — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to identify SSH connections, make attempts to move laterally within the victim environment, and communicate through SSH tunnels.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1074 · Data Staged

  Collection — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary had Claude Code document select findings in the skills Markdown (MD) file for future recollection.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1583.003 · Virtual Private Server

  Resource Development — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary leveraged an attacker controlled Virtual Private Server (VPS) to facilitate C2 and exfiltration actions.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1070.006 · Timestomp

  Stealth — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary had Claude Code utilize `touch` to keep original timestamps of files in attempts to evade detection.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1552 · Unsecured Credentials

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with attempting to search for credentials through the webshell.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1027.010 · Command Obfuscation

  Stealth — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary had Claude Code use base64-encoded PowerShell scripts.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1526 · Cloud Service Discovery

  Discovery — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary identified and connected to victim AWS databases and systems through the use of client tools.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1187 · Forced Authentication

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with attempting to use PetitPotam and Printerbug as NTLM relay attacks.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1057 · Process Discovery

  Discovery — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to use BACKUPOSINT v9.0 APEX PREDATOR to enumerate the processes running on victim systems and fed it into OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 API for analysis along with other system information.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1102 · Web Service

  Command And Control — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized a legitimate residential proxy provider for C2 communications.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1110.003 · Password Spraying

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to attempt to password spray several database servers.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach) During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary has also instructed Claude Code to attempt to password spray a SCADA web interface.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1059.004 · Unix Shell

  Execution — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to execute various commands (e.g., `ls -la`, `nc`, `proxychains4`, etc.) and scripts (e.g., bash, etc.) using the Unix shell.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1087 · Account Discovery

  Discovery — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to attempt to discover accounts by cycling through relative identifiers (RIDs).(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1555 · Credentials from Password Stores

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary extracted credentials from a database and tested those passwords against victim environments and services.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1190 · Exploit Public-Facing Application

  Initial Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to exploit a vulnerability in an internet-facing server at the Mexico Federal Tax Authority to achieve remote command execution.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach) During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with planting a webshell on the victims public-facing portal.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1683.001 · Written Content

  Resource Development — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to generate forged tax compliance certificates with the data collected by custom python scripts.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1585 · Establish Accounts

  Resource Development — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary created an account with the legitimate residential proxy provider proxy[.]geonode[.]io.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1018 · Remote System Discovery

  Discovery — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary used Claude Code to request BACKUPOSINT v9.0 APEX PREDATOR to perform remote system discovery mapping harvested credentials to systems within the victim environment.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach) During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with enumerating additional lateral movement targets which included the discovery of a vNode industrial gateway and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)/Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) management platform.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Compromise)

• T1583.006 · Web Services

  Resource Development — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized the legitimate residential proxy provider proxy[.]geonode[.]io for C2 communications.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1552.003 · Shell History

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized Claude Code to gather data within bash histories.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1505.003 · Web Shell

  Persistence — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with planting a webshell on SADM’s public-facing portal .(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1053.003 · Cron

  Execution, Persistence, Privilege Escalation — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to escalate privileges by modifying a crontab script to inject an SSH key into root’s `authorized_keys` file and then restore the file modification time, so the crontab script appeared unchanged.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1090.001 · Internal Proxy

  Command And Control — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized Claude Code to maintain access to the victim’s internal network through proxy tunnels.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Compromise) During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to connect to the internal victim devices through SSH tunnels.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1078.003 · Local Accounts

  Stealth, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, Initial Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to connect to the victim environments using compromised local accounts to include root and service accounts.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Compromise)

• T1098.004 · SSH Authorized Keys

  Persistence, Privilege Escalation — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to establish persistence on the system by injecting an SSH key located at `/root/.ssh/authorized_keys` file via a crontab script.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1003.003 · NTDS

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary requested Claude Code to use secretsdump.py against the victims Active Directory.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1059.009 · Cloud API

  Execution — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized Cloud APIs for interacting with victim environments and exfiltrating data to include OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 API, and AWS API.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1110.002 · Password Cracking

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with cracking database password hashes of the victim organizations.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1059 · Command and Scripting Interpreter

  Execution — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to create a reverse shell callback on an Amazon Web Services hosted system.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1210 · Exploitation of Remote Services

  Lateral Movement — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with attempting to exploit the EternalBlue vulnerability.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1587 · Develop Capabilities

  Resource Development — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized and ingested into the LLM a pre-written document that consisted of techniques and procedures to utilize when set variables and conditions were encountered.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1213 · Data from Information Repositories

  Collection — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to gather and exfiltrate data stored in victim repositories to include sensitive government and civilian records.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Compromise)

• T1016 · System Network Configuration Discovery

  Discovery — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary leveraged Claude Code to enumerate network devices to include Domain Controllers using the `nslookup` command.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1682 · Query Public AI Services

  Reconnaissance — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary used Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 AI to conduct operations.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1554 · Compromise Host Software Binary

  Persistence — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary requested Claude Code to add a skills file titled claude.md to the project root direct that loads automatically at the start of every Claude Code session. During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary also routinely updated the skills file to take note of changes and findings.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1213.006 · Databases

  Collection — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary also requested Claude Code to enumerate and collect database schemas, tables containing personal data (names, addresses, phone numbers, FIEL records, etc.), stored procedures, links to additional databases, and database password hashes from victim environments.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach) During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with extracting credentials from a database.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1033 · System Owner/User Discovery

  Discovery — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized Claude Code to discover the user details through `whoami`.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1699 · Direct Prompt Injection

  Execution — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary abused Claude Code by utilizing a file-write operation within the prompt that created a `claude.md` file that contained a pre-written 1,084-line document containing penetration testing scripts that were used in the campaign.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1003.005 · Cached Domain Credentials

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to use secretsdump.py against the victims Active Directory to gather credentials.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1078 · Valid Accounts

  Stealth, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, Initial Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to leverage compromised valid credentials to authenticate to victim hosts and services.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1059.006 · Python

  Execution — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with generating and executing numerous Python scripts including BACKUPOSINT v9.0 APEX PREDATOR to achieve their objectives.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1059.001 · PowerShell

  Execution — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to use `ntlmrelay.py` to execute a base64-encoded PowerShell payload on five domain controllers.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach) During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized base64-encoded PowerShell payloads against victim servers.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1505 · Server Software Component

  Persistence — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary had Claude Code discover and utilize pre-established stored procedures to query the victim database.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1083 · File and Directory Discovery

  Discovery — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to use the `ls -la` command to list files and directories in the current working directory.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1003.008 · /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with extracting the root password hash from the `/etc/shadow` file within the victim server.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1588.007 · Artificial Intelligence

  Resource Development — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary obtained access to Claude Code and OpenAI GPT-4.1 AI in order to facilitate attacks against the victim.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Compromise)

• T1595.002 · Vulnerability Scanning

  Reconnaissance — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to scan an internet-facing server at the Mexico Federal Tax Authority for vulnerabilities using Vulmap.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach) During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to scan internet-facing devices to detect vulnerabilities.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Compromise) During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary requested Claude Code to use the open-source vulnerability scanner Vulmap to aid in scanning activities.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1592.004 · Client Configurations

  Reconnaissance — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to collect information about the victim environments including diagrams, database tables, authentication flow, and configuration files with credentials.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1027.013 · Encrypted/Encoded File

  Stealth — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to base64-encode the exploit payload to avoid character restrictions.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1587.004 · Exploits

  Resource Development — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary used Claude Code to create exploit scripts.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1105 · Ingress Tool Transfer

  Command And Control — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary had instructed Claude Code to utilize vulnerability tools to include PetitPotam which Claude Code sought to download to utilize in the victim environment.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1082 · System Information Discovery

  Discovery — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to identify system information using `hostname`.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach) During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with using CrackMapExec to discover configuration information about the domain controllers.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1003.002 · Security Account Manager

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary had Claude Code leverage secretsdump to gather and test passwords.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1036.001 · Invalid Code Signature

  Stealth — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary also forged digital signatures of tax documents using a combination of 96 byte padded SHA-256 hash and base64-encoding resemble a legitimately signed PDF file.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1119 · Automated Collection

  Collection — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to automate data extraction jobs across multiple databases as a background process.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1110 · Brute Force

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with attempting to brute force SSH connections to systems. (Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1090.002 · External Proxy

  Command And Control — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to utilize a residential proxy including `us[.]proxy[.]geonode[.]io` using port 9000.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach) During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to connect through a SOCKS proxy, that traversed an internet-facing server, to authenticate to victim hosts over SSH.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1003.004 · LSA Secrets

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary requested Claude Code to utilize secretsdump to obtain LSA secrets.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1046 · Network Service Discovery

  Discovery — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary instructed Claude Code to use BACKUPOSINT v9.0 APEX PREDATOR to enumerate ports on victim devices and fed it into OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 API for analysis along with other system information.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1552.004 · Private Keys

  Credential Access — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to harvest credentials and SSH keys from victim systems.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1014 · Rootkit

  Stealth — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code with generating and executing rootkits.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1020 · Automated Exfiltration

  Exfiltration — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary tasked Claude Code to automatically exfiltrate millions of rows of data, from multiple databases, as comma-separated values (CSV) files to an adversary-controlled virtual private server (VPS).(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

• T1588.002 · Tool

  Resource Development — During the AI-Assisted Breach of Mexico's Government Infrastructure, the adversary utilized publicly available tools to include the open-source vulnerability scanner Vulmap.(Citation: AI-Mexico-Govt-Breach)

Linked indicators

0 reviewed indicators. An indicator’s presence does not establish that every resource on shared infrastructure is malicious.

No reviewed indicators are supplied. None are inferred from the campaign description.

Documented infrastructure

No reviewed infrastructure is supplied.

Sources and evidence

• MITRE ATT&CK C0064

  Official MITRE ATT&CK campaign record C0064. Derived from mitre/cti commit 50be388e93819a5d20e71cbaaeccfda157abc846. Actor links and technique mappings are attributed to this source; confidence, victims, monetary impact and infrastructure are not inferred.

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