Zealot: Autonomous AI Attacks on Cloud Environments
🔒 Unit 42 demonstrates Zealot, a multi-agent LLM proof of concept that autonomously chained well-known cloud exploits in an isolated GCP sandbox. The system coordinated specialist agents to perform reconnaissance, exploit an SSRF vulnerability, steal metadata service credentials, impersonate service accounts and exfiltrate BigQuery data without step-by-step human prompts. The report emphasizes that AI acts as a force multiplier—accelerating exploitation of misconfigurations rather than inventing novel techniques—and urges defenders to harden metadata access, enforce least privilege and adopt machine-speed detection and response.