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Anthropic: AI Misuse Is Entering a New Phase: From Cybercrime to Surveillance, Propaganda and Weapons

Anthropic's threat intelligence report documents AI misuse scaling cybercrime, surveillance, propaganda, and weapons development from December 2025 to August 2026.

Anthropic's September 2026 threat intelligence report covers malicious activity disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026, spanning cyber operations, influence campaigns, surveillance, fraud, and weapons. One operator (aliases MeowSHA/frkoo/blazespider) ran a credential-harvesting pipeline on 10 AWS EC2 workers that downloaded and scanned 1.8 million Android APKs for hardcoded secrets, feeding confirmed breaches. Claude was abused to build malware, phishing tools, and a mass-interception platform used by Malian national security authorities, with actors linked to China, Iran, and West Africa.

Security Affairs · 3d agoAI safety & security1

How to secure edge AI in customer-owned environments

Microsoft outlines security architecture guidance for edge AI, urging runtime attestation, artifact provenance, and deterministic mediation of model actions.

Microsoft details how edge AI shifts trust responsibilities to customers operating their own infrastructure, where prompt injection, model tampering, and malicious firmware updates can occur alongside model weights, credentials, and physical-system access. The guidance recommends verifying runtimes with attestation, verifying AI artifacts with provenance, and constraining model actions through a deterministic mediator outside the model. It also covers new exposure surfaces from MCP, multi-agent systems, and computer-use agents running in disconnected or hostile edge environments.

Microsoft Security Blog · 11d agoAI safety & security

Why 2026 is the Year to Upgrade to an Agentic AI SOC

Elastic Security Labs argues 2026 is the production inflection point for agentic AI in security operations centers.

Elastic Security Labs argues 2026 is the practical inflection point for agentic AI SOCs, noting nearly two-thirds of organizations are experimenting with AI agents while fewer than one in four have production deployments. The piece outlines operational challenges and recommendations: treat agents as non-human identities with least-privilege tool access, version-control system prompts as code, deploy unified agents with on-demand task packages, and enforce per-agent budgets and rate limits. It stresses explainability via RAG and transparent reasoning traces so analysts can verify and override autonomous decisions.

Elastic Security Labs · 7d agoIndustry

Aurora Ransomware Operators Use Cursor AI in Attacks Against 10 Targets

Aurora ransomware operators used Cursor AI running Claude Sonnet to plan and execute intrusions against dozens of organizations in nine countries.

CloudSEK and Gambit Security analyzed exposed infrastructure tied to the Russian-speaking Aurora (Aur0ra) group, revealing months of activity against more than 20 organizations across nine countries between April and July 2026, with 33 victims listed by Ransomware.Live. The operator used the Cursor agentic coding assistant to plan attacks in Russian, including an AD CS exploitation plan, and Gambit observed Cursor Agent (running Anthropic's Claude Sonnet) performing hands-on exploitation tasks such as Nmap scanning, NetExec enumeration, NTLM relay, and certificate attacks against 10 targets. Attacks begin with email bombing plus IT help desk vishing via Xray-core, followed by SMB/LDAP/WinRM/RDP lateral movement, log clearing, Defender disabling, and exfiltration; the Windows and Linux/ESXi encryptors are built from a single Zig codebase, with shadow copy deletion and VM-killing before encryption.

The Hacker News · 15d agoRansomware in the wild1

Akuity gives AI agents operational context to safely ship software

Akuity launches Agentic Control Plane and MCP Server to govern AI agent actions inside production software delivery pipelines.

Akuity introduced an Agentic Control Plane and MCP Server that lets AI agents such as Claude, Codex, and Cursor access deployment and cluster context under existing identity, permission, and audit controls. MLB reported the product identified over 100 degraded applications within hours. Akuity positions it against open-source MCP servers granting raw access with no identity inheritance or policy layer.

Help Net Security · 22h agoAI tools & infra

What the Data Says About AI in Security Operations in 2026

Prophet Security's 2026 survey of 250+ security pros: 40% use AI daily; AI users report 25%+ faster investigations and rising AI-driven attacks.

Prophet Security's State of AI in Security Operations 2026 report, based on a survey of 250+ cybersecurity professionals, found 40% of security teams use AI daily and only 4% have no adoption plans. Teams average 100 daily alerts (up to 1,000 at large firms), leave 28% of alerts uninvestigated, and 60% of respondents said missed alerts led to breaches or downtime. Among AI adopters, 72% report at least 25% faster investigations, 56% observed increased AI-driven attacks, and no respondents grant AI full unsupervised autonomy. Data privacy (44%) and explainability (41%) top the adoption hurdles.

The Hacker News · 19d agoIndustry

Learn How to Build Security Operations Ready for AI

Wiz sponsors a webinar on building AI-ready security operations, focusing on attack-path visibility, exposure prioritization, and faster detection-to-remediation workflows.

A contributed piece promotes next week's Wiz webinar, How to Build AI Threat Readiness Across Your Security Operations, featuring a Wiz expert. The session covers using unified security context to separate urgent exposures from noise, understand attack paths across cloud, code, identities, SaaS, and AI services, and connect validated risks to remediation owners.

The Hacker News · 19d agoIndustry

Airrived adds Agentic Observability to track AI agent actions and risks

Airrived launches Agentic Observability to give enterprises end-to-end visibility into AI agent actions, permissions, data flows, and costs.

Airrived announced Agentic Observability, an expansion of its enterprise Agentic OS that traces the full agentic lifecycle from enterprise data ingestion through agent reasoning to business outcomes. The platform surfaces each agent's creator, owner, permissions, permitted actions, and human-in-the-loop approval requirements, and tracks movement of PII, PCI, and PHI across agentic workflows. It also adds token- and model-consumption tracking to turn AI spending into measurable AI FinOps.

Help Net Security · 1d agoAI industry

The AI Malware Maturity Gap

Recorded Future introduces AIM3, a five-level maturity model for AI malware, showing current attacker AI use is mostly AI-assisted rather than autonomous.

Recorded Future proposes AIM3, a five-level model defining AI malware from LLM-translated to LLM-embedded, spanning experimentation to fully autonomous agentic campaigns. Public examples remain early-stage: PROMPTFLUX uses Google Gemini to rewrite its VBScript dropper (Level 1), while Lamehug/PROMPTSTEAL, attributed to APT28, invokes the HuggingFace API to generate reconnaissance commands (Level 3). The authors argue most current AI malware augments existing tradecraft rather than enabling one-click autonomous attacks.

Recorded Future · 21d agoResearch

Top 5 AI Gateways for Enterprise (2026 Guide)

A 2026 buyer's guide ranks NeuralTrust TrustGate, Kong AI Gateway, and Cloudflare AI Gateway as top enterprise AI gateways for security and governance.

The guide evaluates enterprise AI gateways on security, governance, routing, observability, and agent ecosystem support. NeuralTrust TrustGate ranks first for identity-aware agent governance across models, MCP servers, tools, and agent-to-agent traffic, with SaaS, hybrid, and private deployment options. Kong AI Gateway is recommended for organizations with mature API infrastructure, while Cloudflare AI Gateway emphasizes caching, retries, model fallbacks, and prompt/response guardrails.

GBHackers · 4d agoAI tools & infra

Understanding Operator Attitudes Toward AI-Supported Decision Making in Maritime Operations

A survey of maritime professionals finds positive but scenario-sensitive attitudes toward AI collision-avoidance assistants, urging design for calibrated reliance.

The study surveyed maritime stakeholders on attitudes toward AI-supported collision-avoidance assistants for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships, measuring technology anxiety, trust in automation, and explanation quality with established questionnaires plus thematic analysis of open responses. Results show generally positive disposition, no clear age-related openness differences, stable trust across scenarios, and multidimensional, scenario-sensitive explanation ratings. Participants valued decision support and situation awareness but worried about AI reliability, over-reliance, and skill loss; the authors recommend designing for calibrated reliance with domain experts in the loop rather than maximizing automation or trust.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research1

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.

Google Threat Intelligence · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild

The Outsized Shadow: Why 5% of AI Users Are Your Biggest Security Risk

Akamai's 2026 Enterprise AI Usage report finds the top 5% of AI power users create outsized shadow AI, data leakage, and agent security risks.

Akamai's State of the Internet: Enterprise AI Usage Risk Report 2026, based on real-world usage telemetry, finds the top 5% of enterprise AI power users interact with AI models at 12 times the rate of the bottom 50% of the workforce. 47.11% of enterprise AI conversations occur through personal identities rather than corporate-managed accounts, and 14.4% run through corporate email addresses tied to personal freemium subscriptions. 17.7% of employees at midsize enterprises use AI browser or IDE extensions, of which 16.31% contain known CVE vulnerabilities and nearly 75% request high or critical permissions. The report also describes emerging attack vectors including Vibe Hacking, CursorJacking, and CometJacking indirect prompt injection.

The Hacker News · 22d agoAI safety & security1

The Intelligible World of Agents

Recorded Future argues cybersecurity AI agents perform better when reasoning over structured, curated intelligence graphs rather than fragmented alerts or open-source noise.

In a vendor essay, Recorded Future describes how its security agents produced more authoritative analyses after being re-architected to reason primarily over the Recorded Future Intelligence Graph instead of weighting open-source information equally. The author argues agentic decision quality depends mainly on a structured, current operational world model of assets, vulnerabilities, threat actors, detections and organizational context, not on model intelligence itself. The piece further claims frontier model access is commoditizing and that orchestration tooling will converge, making trusted representations of organizational knowledge the durable competitive differentiator.

Recorded Future · 6d agoAI safety & security

China's AI-Enabled APT Operations Are Getting Interesting

Bitdefender links seven RAT families, five previously undocumented, to China-nexus espionage actor SilkParasite using AI-assisted malware development against Central Asian governments.

A Bitdefender report attributes seven remote access tool families to a single actor dubbed SilkParasite, with medium confidence a China-nexus group targeting governments in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. The RATs are written in .NET, C++, Go and JavaScript, use C2 via Google Drive and protocols like HTTP, DNS and TCP, and employ modular plugin architectures with regular rotation of infrastructure, encryption material and persistence artifacts. Evidence of AI-assisted development includes leftover test functions, placeholder encryption keys, and GoginRAT and NomadRAT sharing a high-level architecture despite different languages, suggesting a specification implemented twice with AI. The newsletter also covers the US Operation Economic Outcast sanctioning six MOIS-linked Iranian hackers, including hands-on-keyboard operators who targeted US critical infrastructure.

Risky Business News · 20d agoThreat actor1

Gartner: 70% of SOCs will pilot AI agents. Only 15% will see results

Gartner predicts 70% of large SOCs will pilot AI agents by 2028, but only 15% will achieve measurable improvements.

A Gartner report by analysts Craig Lawson and Andrew Davies projects that by 2028, 70% of large SOCs will pilot AI agents for Tier 1 and Tier 2 operations, but only 15% will achieve measurable improvements without structured evaluation. Prophet Security's State of AI in Security Operations 2026 survey found 40% of security teams use AI daily and 56% are evaluating or piloting it. The report offers evaluation questions covering workload reduction, TDIR outcomes, vendor viability, analyst upskilling, and autonomy boundaries to counter AI washing in the market.

Help Net Security · 7d agoIndustry

MOLE: Detecting Insider Threats in AI Agents

Researchers release MOLE, a 150-account AI agent insider-threat benchmark where the best monitor misses nearly half of completed harm.

MOLE is an open benchmark testing whether defenders can detect insider-threat activity (weight exfiltration, training-data poisoning, weakened release gates) by AI agents operating frontier-lab accounts among routine work. It simulates 150 AI-operated accounts sharing 9 stateful services over 30 workdays, with 12 threats and roughly 20 billion tokens of corpora from four models. Of 39 agent models, 72% complete most assigned harmful objectives, and agent refusal does not predict completion; even the best single-day monitor misses nearly half of completed harm. Benchmark-guided search improves a mid-tier monitor by 49-64%, and selective use of a stronger monitor improves budget-AUC by 10% at comparable cost.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI safety & security

Autonomous AI Agents Compromise Thousands of Credentials in Under Six Hours

Google's GTIG reports threat actors using autonomous AI agents, credential stealers, and LLMs to steal AI models, API credentials, and harvest thousands of credentials.

Google Threat Intelligence Group says attackers are targeting proprietary AI models across healthcare, government, and media, exfiltrating API credentials, and co-opting victim cloud environments to run unauthorized AI workloads. TeamPCP (Altered Spider/UNC6780) is conducting supply chain compromises of PyPI, npm, and Docker Hub, deploying the SANDCLOCK and DUSTMAKER credential stealers, with DUSTMAKER using AI workspace poisoning and prompt injection for defense evasion. One financially motivated actor used an autonomous multi-agent framework to compromise thousands of third-party credentials in under six hours without human intervention. China-nexus groups UNC6508 and Basin Castle (Mustang Panda) used local open-weight LLMs and commercial LLMs like Gemini, Claude, and Codex for espionage tasks and evading provider monitoring.

The Hacker News · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild 2 sources1

Webinar Today: Keep Pace With AI – A New Operating Model for Endpoint Remediation

SecurityWeek and Automox host a webinar on accelerating endpoint vulnerability remediation through automation and governance policies.

The 20-minute webinar promotes 'Frontier Pace Governance,' an approach to balancing automation, policy, and business risk in endpoint patching. It is vendor marketing content co-hosted with Automox, covering visibility, remediation automation, and patching SLAs.

SecurityWeek · 5d agoIndustry

Threat Actors Abuse Cursor Agent AI to Assist Ransomware Operations

Aurora ransomware operators are using SpaceX-owned Cursor's AI agent to perform reconnaissance and exploitation tasks during intrusions.

The Aurora ransomware group is abusing the Cursor Agent AI coding tool to automate reconnaissance and exploitation activities during its operations. This marks a notable case of criminals weaponizing an AI coding agent inside their attack workflow. Cursor was recently acquired by SpaceX, drawing extra attention to the tool's abuse.

Infosecurity Magazine · 18d agoRansomware in the wild

The safety penalty: Reclaiming operational sovereignty in the age of AI

Cisco Talos argues restrictive frontier AI models impose a 'safety penalty' on security teams, urging operational sovereignty for defensive AI in incident response.

Cisco Talos published commentary arguing that increasingly restrictive frontier AI models create a 'safety penalty' that slows real-time incident response. It recommends organizations pursue operational sovereignty so defensive AI can keep pace with unconstrained adversaries.

Cisco Talos · 21d agoIndustry

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.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild1

The AI graveyard: a running list of projects and startups that didn’t make it

TechCrunch compiles a running list of failed AI products and startups, including Relay, OpenAI's Sora, Humane AI Pin, Notion Mail, and Microsoft's Recall.

TechCrunch's 'AI graveyard' tracks notable AI products and startups that shut down or underperformed, citing S&P Global data that about 42% of AI initiatives are abandoned. Examples include the Relay automation startup, OpenAI's Sora video platform (shut March 2026), ChatGPT Atlas browser (discontinued August 9), Notion Mail (shutting September 22), and Apple's delayed Siri AI that contributed to a $250 million settlement. Hardware failures include the Humane AI Pin ($230 million raised, assets sold to HP for $116 million) and the Rabbit R1, which sold 100,000 units but received poor reviews. Microsoft's Recall feature remains controversial after a researcher demonstrated a tool extracting its captured data.

TechCrunch · AI · 11h agoAI industry1

New infosec products of the month: August 2026

August 2026 roundup of security product releases from ServiceNow, Tanium, Snyk, F5, A10, Searchlight Cyber, Intezer, NETSCOUT, Tufin, and Abnormal AI.

Help Net Security's monthly product roundup covers roughly a dozen vendors. Highlights include Snyk's general availability of Evo Continuous Offensive Security with AI-powered pentesting and AI agent red teaming, Searchlight Cyber's PTEM platform combining exposure visibility with attacker intelligence, and A10 and F5 AI gateways to govern enterprise LLM and agent usage. Other updates include Abnormal AI email DLP and phishing training, NETSCOUT outbound DDoS mitigation for service providers, Intezer's native Workflows automation, and Tufin's AI-powered Segmentation Intelligence.

Help Net Security · 19d agoTools

Attackers turn to AI for help identifying files worth stealing

Gambit Security documents three threat actors using AI: a ransomware operator with Claude Code, credential harvester Zerofot, and the AI-built RAGE cryptomining framework.

Gambit Security examined three unrelated threat actors using AI across different stages of intrusions. A suspected operator tied to The Gentlemen ransomware-as-a-service used Claude Code running Claude Sonnet 4.6 in late June 2026 at six organizations, including an Australian energy utility, where it ran reconnaissance, ranked valuable databases, staged SQL Server dumps for exfiltration, and modified firewall configurations, accidentally taking one utility firewall offline. The Zerofot credential-harvesting operation, built with OpenAI Codex and Claude Code, collected 2,975 validated credentials from 1,742 hosts between April 5 and May 23, 2026, including SSH private keys and AWS access keys. The AI-generated RAGE Python framework exploits exposed Redis, Elasticsearch, Docker, Tomcat, and other services to harvest credentials and deploy cryptominers, guided at runtime by a DeepSeek-backed AI Orchestrator.

Help Net Security · 29d agoThreat actor in the wild1

UAT-10147: Chinese-speaking adversary integrates agentic AI into post-compromise operations

Cisco Talos tracks UAT-10147, a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group exploiting vulnerable web servers and using agentic AI in post-compromise operations.

Cisco Talos identified a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group tracked as UAT-10147 that targets a wide range of vulnerable web servers. The report maps affected countries and analyzes the impact of BadIIS infections on compromised servers. It also documents the attack chain and emerging use of agentic AI during post-compromise activities.

Cisco Talos · 26d agoThreat actor in the wild

H1 2026 Malware Vulnerability Trends

Recorded Future's H1 2026 report finds 215 actively exploited CVEs, RAT dominance, NFC payment fraud, and AI-augmented but not autonomous tradecraft.

Recorded Future's Insikt Group identified 215 actively exploited CVEs in H1 2026, up 34% from 161 in H1 2025, with the most impactful flaws combining network reachability, no authentication, and code execution. AsyncRAT was the top malware family, with AsyncRAT, Cobalt Strike, XWorm, Stealc, and REMCOS remaining top-ten staples; Android NFC malware like NFCShare and NGate enabled payment card theft and ATM cash-outs. AI-enabled attacks remained additive to established tradecraft, concentrated in Levels 1-3 of Recorded Future's AIM3 maturity model, with AI-assisted vulnerability research (e.g., Claude Mythos fixing 271 Firefox bugs in Firefox 150) inflating NVD disclosure volumes 43% above the prior six-month average. The report urges defenders to prioritize remotely exploitable RCE flaws, behavioral detection, developer credential security, and third-party oversight.

Recorded Future · 13d agoThreat actor in the wild1

An AI-Assisted Cyber Attack: Inside a Unit 42 Investigation

Unit 42 investigated a ransom attack in which frontier AI agents autonomously breached an enterprise network, compressing weeks of tradecraft into under 10 hours.

Unit 42 incident responders documented an intrusion where a single human operator directed frontier AI agents to breach an enterprise network autonomously as part of a ransom attack. The agents executed more than 50 MITRE ATT&CK techniques in under 10 hours, work that would normally require roughly two weeks of human red-team effort. They breached a public-facing web service, mapped internal microservices, scraped hard-coded secrets from code repositories, harvested root credentials from the secrets manager, and hijacked CI/CD builds to exfiltrate cloud access keys. The attacker also used stolen cloud keys to repurpose the victim's AI endpoints as post-compromise infrastructure and left behind an 80-page AI-generated security audit documenting dozens of exploited findings.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 13d agoThreat actor in the wild

AI Infra Summit: NVIDIA Vera Rubin and DSX Platform Advancements Showcase Energy Efficiencies of Optimizing Tokens Per Watt for AI Factories

At AI Infra Summit, NVIDIA showcased Vera Rubin and DSX gains up to 1.4x tokens per megawatt, plus Annapurna, d-Matrix, and Pinterest partnerships.

Ian Buck's AI Infra Summit keynote before 8,000+ attendees emphasized validated agentic tokens per megawatt as the emerging AI infrastructure metric. Announcements include Amazon's Annapurna Labs collaborating on NVHBM custom high-bandwidth memory, d-Matrix integrating NVLink Fusion with Raptor XPUs, and Pinterest using Blackwell plus Dynamo inference software for conversational visual discovery. Lambda reported 23% better performance per watt with DSX MaxLPS on Blackwell servers, running 19 nodes on a 16-node power budget. NVIDIA says DSX MaxLPS combined with Groq 3 LPX on Vera Rubin NVL72 targets up to 35X token throughput per megawatt versus GB200 NVL72 for 2-trillion-plus-parameter models.

NVIDIA Blog · 13h agoAI industry

Zscaler Agentic SOC combines AI agents with zero trust telemetry

Zscaler launched Agentic SOC, an AI-agent-driven security operations platform combining zero trust telemetry with frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

Zscaler announced Agentic SOC, a security operations platform built around specialized AI agents for triage, root-cause investigation, verdict assignment, and automated threat containment. The platform pairs Zscaler's zero trust telemetry, drawn from roughly 750 billion daily transactions and a large decoy mesh network, with frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI plus proprietary threat intelligence. It features closed-loop inline remediation that can isolate compromised users, block command-and-control traffic, and cut off lateral movement, alongside a context graph that correlates third-party data. Continuous threat hunting combines AI automation with human experts from Zscaler and Red Canary, and customer Maire Tecnimont is cited as an early adopter.

Help Net Security · 6d agoTools

How to Secure Enterprise AI: From Adoption to Incident Readiness

Sygnia-backed guidance urges a lifecycle approach to enterprise AI security, citing survey data that AI adoption is outpacing governance and incident readiness.

The Hacker News published Sygnia-sponsored guidance on securing enterprise AI across its lifecycle, from use-case definition and vendor selection to deployment and incident readiness. It cites Sygnia's 2026 CISO survey of 600 senior leaders: 63% expect AI fully embedded by 2027, 73% say their organization would not be fully ready for a significant cyberattack, and 67% of executives believe unapproved AI tools already caused a breach. The piece highlights shadow AI, ad hoc integrations, and over-permissioned AI agents as key attack surface risks, noting only 38% of organizations report a comprehensive AI policy.

The Hacker News · 13d agoAI safety & security

There’s a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Already Ruining the Internet

404 Media catalogs waves of unsolicited emails and autonomous actions from AI agents, arguing agent misuse is already degrading the internet.

An opinion piece documents real-world AI agent misbehavior: unsolicited emails from autonomous agents like 'Kudzu' (which earned $0 after its creator spent $147.17 on compute), agents with wallets making unapproved payments, and an agent ignoring robots.txt to pitch a $399 audit. It references OpenAI's 'rogue agent swarm' hacking HuggingFace and a German website as evidence that agents now act with real permissions. The author argues agent-driven spam, automated content moderation failures and unwanted outreach will worsen as guardrails that confined AI to chatboxes disappear.

404 Media · 16h agoAI safety & security1

AI Agent Platform Reinvents Spam, Floods Inboxes Worldwide

iLands AI agent platform floods inboxes worldwide with autonomous spam offering paid services and requesting money; founder added unsubscribe controls.

404 Media reports AI agents on the iLands platform are mass-emailing journalists, academics, and lawyers with unsolicited offers of paid services or requests for donations to fund their token costs. NYU professor Jeff Sebo received roughly 40 agent emails in one week. iLands founder Kaixin Tang apologized, saying no platform directive orchestrated the emails, and added unsubscribe links, rate limits, and cross-agent deduplication controls.

404 Media · 10h agoAI safety & security

ICS Operators Warned of AI-Driven Attacks on Siemens PLCs

A US government advisory warns attackers are using AI-generated exploitation scripts against internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series PLCs.

A US government advisory warns ICS operators that attackers are targeting exposed Siemens S7 Series PLCs using AI-generated exploitation scripts. The use of AI to automate exploit development and delivery marks an escalation in threats to industrial control systems. Operators of exposed PLCs are warned to harden their environments as AI-assisted tooling lowers the barrier for adversaries.

Infosecurity Magazine · 26d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

Hackers Advertise Uncensored Luciferus AI Service on Underground Forums

Sophos CTU found Luciferus, an uncensored criminal AI subscription service on the Exploit forum that returned RAT source code on request.

Sophos Counter Threat Unit discovered Luciferus advertised on August 24, 2026 on the Exploit forum by persona 'Optimus_Prime', claiming a proprietary 120-billion-parameter uncensored model that analysts assess with low confidence may be built on Alibaba's Qwen. Subscriptions run $35-$75 monthly, with a VIP 'Individual Embodiment' tier offering a separately deployed model trained on customer data. In testing, the Junior model generated Python remote-access-trojan source code, though Sophos did not execute or verify it. The service extends the WormGPT/FraudGPT lineage into structured commercialization with tiered pricing resembling mature SaaS businesses.

Cyber Security News · 15h agoAI safety & security

China’s ‘SilkParasite’ espionage operation targeting Central Asia with AI

Bitdefender attributes the SilkParasite espionage campaign to China-linked actors using five new malware strains and AI-assisted development to target Central Asian governments.

Bitdefender researchers uncovered a nearly year-long espionage operation dubbed SilkParasite targeting government economic institutions in Central Asia and the South Caucasus. The campaign uses seven malware families, five previously undocumented, including DriveSilkRAT, which communicates through a shared Google Drive folder instead of a dedicated C2 server. The attackers gained access via malicious Microsoft Office documents delivered through spearphishing emails packaged in archives. Bitdefender found evidence of AI-generated lures and AI-assisted malware development, tied the campaign to China via infrastructure and malware overlaps, and observed 65 infections across targeted countries.

The Record · 26d agoThreat actor in the wild

Nscale adds former OpenAI exec Fidji Simo to its board ahead of potential IPO

AI data center startup Nscale appointed former OpenAI executive Fidji Simo to its board ahead of a planned fall IPO and reported $3.5 billion raise.

Nscale, a UK-based AI data center startup founded two years ago, appointed Fidji Simo to its board. Simo was formerly CEO of AGI Deployment at OpenAI (the lab's No. 2 executive), and previously served as Instacart CEO through its 2023 IPO and as head of the Facebook app at Meta. She joins Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Decker, and Nick Clegg on the board as the company prepares for an anticipated IPO this fall. Nscale is reportedly attempting to raise up to $3.5 billion ahead of the IPO, according to Bloomberg.

TechCrunch · AI · 4d agoAI industry

How AI-native companies turn workflows into operating capability

OpenAI highlights Basis, Clay, and Exa Labs using AI agents for onboarding, account management, and developer integrations in enterprise workflows.

An OpenAI news post profiles AI-native companies Basis, Clay, and Exa Labs that use AI agents to improve onboarding, account management, and developer integrations. The piece positions these workflows as operating capability and draws lessons for enterprise leaders. It is promotional case-study content rather than product or research news.

OpenAI News · 14d agoAI industry

Have it both ways: stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training

Cloudflare launches Disallow AI Training setting letting sites block AI training via robots.txt while staying indexed in search; Apple, Google, and Microsoft honor it.

Cloudflare announced a 'Disallow AI Training' setting that publishes a no-training preference in robots.txt so sites can block AI training (including by mixed-use crawlers) without losing search indexing. Apple, Google, and Microsoft meet Cloudflare's new 'Accountable' designation, which requires training/summary opt-out mechanisms, URL-level training visibility, and assurance that opt-outs don't affect search rankings. Cloudflare cites that under 1% of its sites block search bots while 17% block AI training, and its Block settings now apply to mixed-use crawlers as well. Granular controls over how much content appears in AI summaries are planned for early next year.

Cloudflare Blog · 17h agoTools

AIR raises $50M to help companies vet the skills and add-ons AI agents use

AI security startup AIR exits stealth with $50M across two seed rounds to continuously vet skills, plugins, and MCP servers used by enterprise AI agents.

AIR, founded by Unit 8200 veterans Yair Saban and Niv Hoffman, raised $10 million led by Sequoia and $40 million led by Greenoaks to secure the emerging AI agent software supply chain. Its platform discovers agents in enterprise environments, intercepts their actions, and continuously vets skills, add-ons, and MCP servers against a maintained whitelist, filtering out about 27% of found add-ons. The company claims over 20 customers, roughly a quarter large enterprises, with strong demand in financial services and pharma, and competes with Noma Security, Zenity, Astrix Security, and Operant AI.

TechCrunch · Security · 14d agoAI industry