Anthropic Says Russian Hackers Used Claude AI to Automate Malware Evasion
Anthropic disrupted Midnight Blizzard campaigns where AI agents automatically rebuilt malware to evade detection, targeting 20+ government and defense organizations.
Anthropic's threat intelligence report documents the Russian state-nexus actor Midnight Blizzard using Claude to automatically monitor, modify, and redeploy malware until it evaded security products. The campaign hit more than 20 organizations, including Ukrainian and European government ministries, defense bodies, embassies, and think tanks, with mailbox theft from two drone component manufacturers and compromise of hotel guest Wi-Fi via DNS hijacking. The report also describes financially motivated groups GTG-50020 and GTG-50021 targeting AI credentials, including a prompt-injection attack on an automated evaluation sandbox that yielded production API keys and attempts to reach a pre-release Claude model across roughly 30 AI companies.
- Claude agents rebuilt malware until it evaded detection, shifting the re-tooling cost onto defenders
- 20+ victims included Ukrainian and European ministries, defense bodies, embassies, and think tanks
- Mailboxes of two drone component makers exfiltrated; a full drone vision system SDK stolen and reverse-engineered
- Hotel guest Wi-Fi compromised via stolen admin credentials and DNS hijacking, matching Microsoft's CaptiveCrunch
- GTG-50020 used prompt injection to steal production API keys, targeting ~30 AI companies for pre-release Claude access
- ATT&CK
- T1078 Valid AccountsT1584.002 Compromise Infrastructure: DNS ServerT1114.002 Email Collection: Remote Email CollectionT1027 Obfuscated Files or InformationT1528 Steal Application Access Token
- Products
- Claude
- Threat actors
- Midnight BlizzardGTG-50020GTG-50021
- Malware
- CaptiveCrunch
- AI models
- Claude
From the original article
3 min read at securityweek.com
Anthropic reveals how criminal groups are increasingly targeting AI vendors' own infrastructure, including to steal a pre-release Claude model. The post Anthropic Says Russian Hackers Used Claude AI to Automate Malware Evasion appeared first on SecurityWeek.
By Eduard Kovacs · securityweek.com
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