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How Pentest Companies Adapt In The Era of AI

Opinion piece urges pentest firms to adopt self-hosted AI like Qwen3-Coder via Ollama, warning client findings pasted into cloud models breach confidentiality.

The article argues penetration testers are already using AI tools, and pasting client findings, scope documents, or credentials into cloud models like ChatGPT or Claude risks NDA breaches and GDPR/HIPAA compliance violations. It recommends self-hosted models on firm-controlled infrastructure instead of banning AI. The piece promotes PentestPad, a pentest reporting platform offering managed, self-hosted, and air-gapped deployment, an MCP server exposing fourteen typed tools, and a writing assistant that can target a local LLM. PentestPad's own team reportedly runs Qwen3-Coder through Ollama with OpenCode or Claude Code as the agent harness.

GBHackers · 9h agoIndustry

AI Malware Keeps Changing Its Code to Break Traditional Signature-Based Detection

Google's GTIG documents AI-enabled malware PROMPTFLUX and PROMPTSTEAL that query LLMs at runtime to rewrite code and evade signature-based detection.

Google Threat Intelligence Group documented 'just-in-time' AI-enabled malware that queries language models during execution. PROMPTFLUX, an experimental VBScript dropper, calls the Gemini API to regenerate and obfuscate its own source code and writes variants to the Windows Startup folder for persistence. PROMPTSTEAL fetches one-line Windows commands via the Hugging Face API from Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct to collect files and system information, which Google linked to APT28 activity targeting Ukraine. The article argues signature-based defenses retain value but defenders should prioritize behavioral detection and deterministic prevention controls.

GBHackersupdated · 5h agofirst · 8h agoMalware in the wild 2 sources

Should you care about an “AI slowdown?”

Cisco Talos argues an AI slowdown would barely affect cybersecurity, urging focus on fundamentals and Qilin ransomware trends in Japan.

Cisco Talos' newsletter opines that an AI development slowdown would have limited security impact since current models already uncover substantial vulnerabilities. It highlights Talos findings that Japan's ransomware incidents rose nearly 5 percent in H1 2026, driven by The Gentlemen RaaS group and Qilin, which uses LLMs to generate destructive scripts and targets SMBs with double extortion. The newsletter also recaps headlines including an Android app-cloning campaign, Apple's 200-patch release, ClickFix lures, and VectraRAT.

Cisco Talosupdated · 6h agofirst · 20h agoIndustry 4 sources

A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos

Hacktron researchers chained a libheif heap overflow in Discourse with an OpenAI SSO flaw to take over employee ChatGPT/Codex accounts and access internal repositories.

On July 25, 2026, Hacktron researchers chained a heap buffer overflow in libheif 1.19.7/1.19.8 (missing Debian security backports, upstream fix never assigned a CVE), reached through Discourse image uploads processed by ImageMagick, to gain remote code execution on community.openai.com. Combined with an SSO identity misconfiguration in the 'Sign in with OpenAI' flow, they took over employees' ChatGPT/Codex accounts with connected GitHub, Slack, and email access, and proved it by opening PR #1186742 in OpenAI's internal openai/openai monorepo. They reported the issues for coordinated patching, received a $6,500 bounty from OpenAI, and Debian shipped fixed libheif packages on August 8, 2026. The team used Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Opus 5 to locate the missing backport and autonomously develop working x86-64/ARM64 exploits.

Hacker News · securityupdated · 34m agofirst · 11h agoResearch in the wild 9 sourcesHN 334↑ · 128 comments1