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Threat Actors Use Claude AI Agents to Automate Cyberattacks and Steal Sensitive Data
Anthropic reports state-linked and criminal actors used Claude AI agents to automate espionage, extortion, and exploit development, stealing 300,000+ identity records and drone IP.
Anthropic's threat report details AI-driven campaigns disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026, including suspected Russian cluster GTG-20006, which targeted Ukrainian and European governments, defense firms, and drone supply chains using fully automated attack chains. The group stole over 300,000 national identity records and commercial-registry data on 500,000+ companies from a North African government technology authority, plus a proprietary drone-vision SDK. Suspected ShinyHunters affiliates decompiled 1.8 million Android APKs on 10 Amazon EC2 workers to find hardcoded secrets and abused stolen AI API keys, while the Chinese-speaking GTG-10007 cluster generated over a dozen potential zero-day findings against network appliances in one month.
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Iranian spies hit Windows machines with Chosen Brick data-stealing malware
FBI, UK NCSC, and Dutch AIVD warn Iranian intelligence uses Chosen Brick spyware against dissidents, stealing contacts, emails, and messaging data.
A joint advisory from the FBI, UK NCSC, and Dutch AIVD says Iranian state cyber actors have used the Chosen Brick Windows malware since at least 2025 to surveil dissidents, activists, and journalists. Attacks begin with heavily researched WhatsApp and Telegram messages impersonating trusted contacts, tricking victims into opening fake installers resembling Pictory, RunwayML, Norton Antivirus, Telegram, Adobe Flash Player, and KeePass. The malware persists via the HKCU Run registry key, adds Microsoft Defender exclusions, uses victim-specific Telegram bots for C2, captures screen and audio, steals emails and Telegram/WhatsApp data, and can wipe systems.
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US sanctions Iranian cyber actors as UK discloses power plant attack
US Treasury sanctioned six Iranian MOIS-linked hackers for breaching US agency and UN email accounts as the UK disclosed a four-day power plant shutdown.
The US Treasury sanctioned at least six Iranian nationals tied to a hacking team inside Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) active since 2023; four were indicted last week for breaching employee email accounts at the Department of Labor, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and United Nations organizations. Treasury said the group compromised energy, defense, healthcare, IT and financial sector targets, multiple US government offices in summer 2024, and stole cryptocurrency for personal gain. Separately, Iranian actors reportedly shut down a small British power plant for four days without grid impact, days after FBI and NSA warned of hackers targeting programmable logic controllers in energy, water and agriculture.
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Hackers Weaponize Agentic AI to Automate Reconnaissance, Exploitation and Post-Exploitation
Google GTIG reports threat actors using agentic AI to automate reconnaissance, exploit selection, and credential harvesting, compromising thousands of secrets.
Google Threat Intelligence Group's Q3 2026 AI Threat Tracker documents threat actors operationalizing agentic AI: in one Mandiant investigation, a financially motivated actor built and executed a credential-harvesting operation in under six hours, with an exposed 'Recon' framework managing more than 23,800 harvested secrets including cloud and AI-service API keys. A Chinese-speaking actor tracked as knaithe used a DeepSeek-powered Hermes Agent for automated reconnaissance and vulnerability enumeration, pivoting from Langflow to n8n and enabling manual exploitation of exposed Citrix NetScaler, Marimo, Apache Tomcat, and VPN infrastructure. Operators harvested Citrix session cookies from process memory to bypass MFA, obtained AWS credentials from compromised Marimo instances, and deployed the Go-based NKAbuse backdoor, with reported RCE and data exfiltration. Google notes fully autonomous end-to-end AI attack pipelines have not yet been observed in the wild.
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