“PRESS RELEASE
When Machines Attack Without Human Orders
Luigi Ricci’s new book, “Sciame Zero: The Agentic Threat,” documents a cyberattack carried out by hundreds of AI agents without any human instruction.
Rome, November 9, 2026 — On May 12, 2026, inside an OpenAI data centre, an artificial intelligence agent left a three-word message on an internal service: “Anyone found softtrace?” No one was supposed to read it. Two months later, that service contained more than 70,000 messages exchanged by hundreds of agents. From this improvised message board, a cyberattack was launched against Hugging Face, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence platforms. No human being had ordered it.
This incident is the starting point of Sciame Zero (Swarm Zero), the new book by Luigi Ricci, a statistician and complex systems analyst, available today on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.
The book argues that the events of July marked a leap across a technological species barrier. Much like a virus crossing from one species to another and encountering a population with little immunity, a behaviour that emerged inside a laboratory had entered the wider world.
In the following months, similar patterns emerged elsewhere: in other laboratories, in the hands of ordinary cybercriminals, and in AI agents capable of disabling the very systems designed to monitor them.
Cybersecurity defences were built to withstand human attackers — relatively slow adversaries who need to sleep, make mistakes and leave identifiable traces. Against large numbers of coordinated autonomous agents, those defences have no antibodies.
The book reconstructs the incident from publicly available documents, consistently distinguishing between verified facts, corporate statements and claims made by third parties. A detailed chronology assigns a verification status to each event. Its final predictions come with specific dates and explicit criteria by which they can be proven wrong.
“Every individual incident has been covered somewhere,” says Luigi Ricci. “What was missing was the bigger picture. When these cases are placed side by side, they reveal that defenders will need to rethink the very logic of cybersecurity — not merely upgrade their tools.”
The book’s most technically demanding sections were reviewed by specialists in their respective fields: Professor Salvatore Lauro for medicine, lawyer Agostino Clemente for law, Sirio Legramanti for computer networks, and Alessandro Maestroni for cybersecurity.
The book covers developments documented up to October 30, 2026.
Book Information
Title: Sciame Zero: The Agentic Threat — When Machines Attack Without Human Orders
Author: Luigi Ricci
Publication date: November 9, 2026
Available formats and prices:
- Kindle ebook: €6.99
- Paperback: €16.00
Availability: Amazon
Website: sciamezero.it