This is not hype: autonomous offensive AI has crossed from red-team demos into live criminal infrastructure, and Symantec's report is one of the first documented cases. The nastiest part is the economics — victims effectively fund their own attacks, which removes the main cost barrier for threat actors. It also exposes an industry hygiene failure: any unauthenticated inference endpoint is now a free drone for someone else's botnet. Expect hardened defaults, spend caps, and agent sandboxing to become standard rather than optional extras. For anyone deploying models publicly, the message is simple — treat your API like an internet-facing server, because attackers already do.