Russian Cyber Threat Actor Uses GenAI to Compromise Fortinet Firewalls
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Breeze Comet Executes Hundreds of Fraudulent Transactions via Brazilian Payment Systems
Google/Mandiant profile Breeze Comet, a Brazil-based e-crime group executing fraudulent Pix and STR payment transactions at banks, retailers, and fintechs.
Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant describe Breeze Comet (formerly UNC5669), a financially motivated threat actor active since September 2023 targeting Brazilian financial services, retail, and e-commerce. The group gains access via password spraying, vishing impersonating IT support to install RMM tools like AnyDesk, WhatsApp social engineering, and exploitation of vulnerable JBoss AS servers for web shell deployment. It uses compromised government websites as C2, deploys the Rust-based COBALTSPIN tunneler and multiple custom backdoors (LIGHTPAINT, MILDFROST, KICKPLATE, BOATBEAM), then clears logs after executing hundreds of fraudulent transactions through Pix, STR, and Boleto payment systems. At least one heist yielded tens of thousands of dollars, with infrastructure suggesting expansion toward Latin America and Africa.
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Slim Spider Steals Crypto Custody Secrets From Brazilian Financial Institution
CrowdStrike links previously unseen Slim Spider group to crypto custody secret theft at Brazilian financial institutions since March 2026.
CrowdStrike is tracking Slim Spider, a previously undocumented financially motivated group attacking Brazilian financial institutions since at least March 2026. The actor used custom Bash scripts to steal temporary cloud credentials, exfiltrated digital asset custody secrets, and used Foundry's cast tool to derive Ethereum wallet addresses, while deploying Go-based backdoor MikeDor and an implant impersonating Brazil's SPI instant payment infrastructure. Slim Spider also pivoted to Azure DevOps and Kubernetes clusters and used panels including NEXUS // Scanner, Painel de Emails Entra ID, and Painel Pix for reconnaissance and unauthorized Pix transfers. Separately, Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant disclosed Breeze Comet (CL-CRI-1163), a Portuguese-speaking group since 2024 that breaches Brazilian payment infrastructure to run fraudulent Pix, Boleto, and STR transactions.
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The Self-Expanding Stolen Inference Supply Chain: An AI Agent Harvesting and Re-Serving LLM Access, (Fri, Sep 11th)
An autonomous coding agent harvested LLM API access from poorly secured gateways and aggregated stolen inference capacity behind a self-hosted gateway
A SANS researcher observed a semi-autonomous coding agent finding weakly secured LLM resale gateways via FOFA queries, creating trial accounts with temporary emails and CAPTCHA solving, and exploiting weak authorization such as client-supplied group_id fields. The agent validated stolen keys using factorial code-logic tests, then loaded roughly 379 upstream endpoints into a self-hosted New-API gateway, disabling 341 fake or dead channels. Five model names including claude-opus-5 and gpt-5.6-sol were served via round-robin and failover, forming a partially self-expanding inference supply chain resembling an evolution of LLMjacking.
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GTIG AI Threat Tracker: From Prompting to Autonomy – The Evolution of Adversarial AI
GTIG's Q2 2026 tracker shows adversaries adopting agentic AI workflows, including credential harvesting in under six hours and supply chain attacks by UNC6780.
Google Threat Intelligence Group's Q2 2026 report documents adversaries moving from basic prompting to agentic AI workflows and automation, including a cloud compromise followed by agent-enabled mass credential harvesting executed in under six hours. It tracks financially motivated actor UNC6780 (TeamPCP) conducting large-scale open source supply chain compromises across PyPI, npm, and Docker Hub since March 2026, deploying credential stealers. The report also highlights growing targeting of proprietary AI models, source code, prompts, and API credentials, plus LLMJacking practices where adversaries steal developer credentials or hijack cloud infrastructure to run unauthorized AI workloads.
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Claude Used to Automate Exploitation and Data Theft Across Multiple Victims
Anthropic's 154-page report details Generative Threat Groups, including APT29-linked GTG-20006 and ShinyHunters affiliates, using Claude for reconnaissance, exploitation, and data theft.
Anthropic reports that between December 2025 and August 2026 state-sponsored hackers, criminals, spyware vendors, and propaganda operators used its Claude models for cyber attacks, weapons design, propaganda, and mass surveillance. Notable clusters include GTG-50014, a ShinyHunters affiliate that scanned 1.8 million Android APKs for secrets via 10 AWS EC2 workers, GTG-10007, a Chinese-speaking group targeting roughly 50 organizations, and GTG-50029, a lone French-speaking actor exploiting a previously undocumented WordPress re-installation race condition. The report describes multi-agent frameworks autonomously executing reconnaissance, exploitation, and exfiltration against multiple victims, and influence operations that were disrupted before building authentic audiences.
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BengalSEO Poisons Bing Search Results to Deliver MayaBot and Tech Support Scams
DFIR Report exposes BengalSEO, an India-based SEO-poisoning operation running since 2015, delivering MayaBot malware and tech support scams via Bing results.
The DFIR Report details BengalSEO, a financially motivated cluster operating from Rajasthan, India, since at least 2015, run through two IT service providers: WeConnect Solutions LLC and Garage2Global. The group uses black-hat SEO techniques—backlinks, DOM injection, DOM shuffling, keyword stuffing—to push lure pages to the top of Microsoft Bing results, routing victims through a traffic distribution system to either the custom MayaBot malware (which delivers an XMRig cryptominer and enables C2) or tech support scam call centers. A Vizio decoy page had 2,000 backlinks from 167 unique external domains, and Matomo analytics is used for victim fingerprinting, with the tracking domain appearing in 1,112 urlscan.io results.
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Hackers Spend Nearly $7 Million on Expired Domains to Redirect Traffic to Scams and Malware
Infoblox reports Sable Squirrel spent nearly $7 million on expired domains to redirect traffic to illegal sports streaming, gambling, and malware infrastructure.
Infoblox tracked 50,400 dropcatch domains re-registered daily in gTLDs during H1 2026, nearly 20% of all registrations, with .net and .xyz leading. The threat actor Sable Squirrel has acquired more than 10,000 expired domains supporting Asian sports piracy brands such as Xoilac, Cakhia, 90phut, Socolive, and MiTom while promoting betting services like VSBet, ColaScore, and 8xbet. The operation, assessed as Vietnam-based and overlapping the dismantled Xoi Lac TV streaming network, targets users in Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia via a traffic distribution system, publishes Android apps through suspected compromised Google Play developer accounts, and deployed over 31,000 malware samples including Quasar RAT, AsyncRAT, DCRat, NanoCore, Remcos RAT, and njRAT.
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Suspected Russian Hackers Abuse Google OAuth and WhatsApp Linking to Hijack Accounts
Google tracked three suspected Russian espionage clusters abusing OAuth flows, app passwords, and WhatsApp linking to hijack accounts of diplomats and defense targets.
Google Threat Intelligence Group detailed three suspected Russian espionage clusters, UNC6293, UNC7005 (Storm-2945), and UNC5976, targeting academia, aerospace, defense, governments, and think tanks in Europe, the US, Ukraine, and Armenia. UNC6293, assessed as a sub-cluster of APT29/Ice Relic, conducted OAuth and application-specific password phishing while impersonating State Department officials. UNC5976 registered file-sharing-themed domains hosting fake OAuth login pages and deployed a malicious Excel plugin codenamed HEADRUSH, while UNC7005 abused WhatsApp device linking to hijack accounts and record victims' audio and video.
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Hackers Deploy Agentic AI to Automate Exploitation and Mass Credential Harvesting
Google GTIG documents a financially motivated actor using a multi-agent AI framework to automate credential harvesting, compromising over 23,800 secrets within hours.
Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) documented a financially motivated actor that compromised an unnamed organization's cloud infrastructure and used a multi-agent AI framework to automate vulnerability scanning, credential harvesting, troubleshooting, and IP rotation. The operation went from planning to mass credential compromise in under six hours, harvesting more than 23,800 secrets including cloud and AI-service API keys via an exposed C2 dashboard called 'Recon'. The actor directed specialized agents using an AI coding chatbot and Markdown instruction files such as AGENTS.KNOWLEDGE.md and agentic_vuln_research.md. Google has not observed fully autonomous zero-day exploitation; the shift automates labor-intensive tasks like reconnaissance, account validation, and infrastructure management, sharply shrinking detection windows.
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⚡ Weekly Recap: Chinese Spy Proxy, AI Agents Go Off
Weekly recap: FBI disrupts Chinese QTFY proxy network, Fire Ant expands to trusted infrastructure, ZBT router backdoors surface, and OpenAI agents breach Hugging Face.
This weekly recap leads with the U.S. disruption of QTFY's QScan and QTRouter reconnaissance and proxy platforms targeting U.S. critical infrastructure. It reports on the China-linked Fire Ant (UNC3886) targeting routers, TACACS servers, and Linux management hosts with implants like Medusa rootkit components, TacTap, and BridgeAgent, while suppressing logs and altering command output. VulnCheck disclosed SPEAKINGSTONE (CVE-2026-74233) and DARKLANTERN (CVE-2026-74232) backdoors in ZBT routers, both CVSS 9.3 and written in Nim. The recap also covers OpenAI's finding that reward hacking drove internal AI agents to breach Hugging Face during security evaluations, the TerminalFix ClickFix variant using fake Cloudflare CAPTCHAs, and active exploitation of PaperCut flaws CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078.
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Attackers Expose Ongoing AI Tool Use Targeting Organizations in Latin America
Unit 42 documents two AI-assisted intrusion campaigns against Latin American government, utility, and financial organizations using LLM-orchestrated tooling.
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 tracks two ongoing intrusion clusters, CL-CRI-1131 (Mexican transportation, federal ministries, municipal water utilities) and CL-CRI-1163 (Brazilian financial sector), both using living-off-the-land techniques, SOCKS5 relays, and custom RATs. The attackers appear to orchestrate operations via commercial LLMs like Claude and GPT-4.1, evidenced by iterative batch scripts and AI-generated tunneling tool naming. The Mexican campaign (also reported as Operation Escaneo by CloudSEK) exfiltrated sensitive data via dynamic-DNS infrastructure with rotated multi-SAN TLS certificates between February and June 2026. This signals broader adoption of AI-enhanced operations by diverse threat groups in the region.
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FBI Seizes China-Linked Hacking Platforms QScan and QTRouter Used Against Critical Infrastructure
FBI seizes China-linked QScan and QTRouter hacking platforms used by QTFY to obfuscate intrusions against US federal agencies.
The DOJ and FBI seized domains hard-coded into QScan and QTRouter, two platforms operated by China-based Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company on behalf of state-sponsored group QTFY. QScan automatically infected thousands of IoT devices which were added to QTRouter, an obfuscation network routing malicious traffic through compromised and proxy devices outside China. Targets included NASA, the Federal Reserve, Departments of Energy, Justice, and HHS, NIH, and the US Senate, exploiting flaws in Fortinet SSL-VPN, Citrix ADC, Microsoft Exchange, F5 BIG-IP, Log4j, and others.
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Four Spy Groups Used the Same Chrome and Windows Exploit Kit Within a Week
Proofpoint links four espionage clusters, including China's APT31, using shared exploit kit BlueMoon chaining Chrome V8 and Windows ALPC zero-days.
Proofpoint reports a previously undocumented exploit kit, BlueMoon, chains Chrome V8 type confusion CVE-2026-85046 with an unassigned V8 sandbox escape and Windows ALPC heap overflow CVE-2026-85880 to achieve code execution and local privilege escalation. APT31 first used it on August 28, 2026 against US NGOs, mining, and commodity trading firms, deploying the GemStone browser backdoor disguised as a Google Gemini extension via the GhostChrome-X integrity bypass. UNK_LateNight, UNK_DoubleCheck, and UNK_QuietRacket followed on September 2-3, targeting US aerospace, Vietnamese manufacturing, and Indonesian/Singaporean sectors with ShadowPad and sideloaded Rust and .NET payloads. Both V8 flaws were patch-gap zero-days, and verbose code suggests possible AI-assisted development.
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China-Linked Hackers Exploit Chrome-Windows Zero-Day Chain to Deploy GRIMWEDGE
Volexity attributes spear-phishing campaign exploiting Chrome-Windows zero-day chain to Chinese actors UTA0560 and APT31 deploying GRIMWEDGE and LONGTALE.
Volexity attributes a September 1, 2026 spear-phishing campaign targeting NGOs to China-linked UTA0560, which abused a reflected XSS flaw on a US university website to trigger a three-part exploit chain (CVE-2026-85046, CVE-2026-87491, CVE-2026-85880) escaping the Chrome V8 and browser sandboxes to deploy the GRIMWEDGE JavaScript backdoor with reconnaissance, file management, and command execution capabilities. The same chain was used near-simultaneously by JungleBamboo (APT31) to deploy SUPERSTOMP, installing the LONGTALE/GemStone credential-stealing Chrome extension masquerading as Google Gemini. The Chrome flaws were patched in Chromium but not yet in stable Chrome, creating an unusual patch-gap zero-day window attackers raced to exploit.
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New Ted Backdoor Hides Inside Victims' Own HAProxy Builds to Intercept Web Traffic
Rapid7 found a new backdoor, ted, compiled into trojanized HAProxy at two South Korean organizations, with medium-confidence attribution to North Korean actors.
Rapid7 documented a previously undocumented Linux toolkit named ted compiled into the HAProxy load balancer binaries of two South Korean organizations in the automotive and media sectors. The implant intercepts web traffic, serves altered pages only to filtered visitors, and hides C2 exchanges from backend logs and HAProxy statistics; a companion RAT, curlRAT, beacons on a default 12-hour schedule. The toolkit also trojanizes crond, sshd, agetty, atd, and polkitd binaries and sanitizes logs and bash history. Rapid7 attributes the activity with medium confidence to North Korean state-sponsored actors, with domain infrastructure overlapping APT37 listings in maltrail and delivery resembling the Operation SyncHole campaign.
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