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GhostCode Abuses Microsoft Entra Device Enrollment to Maintain Access After Token Revocation
eSentire exposes GhostCode, a device-code phishing kit that abuses Microsoft Entra device enrollment to persist even after stolen tokens are revoked.
eSentire's Threat Response Unit observed GhostCode campaigns in late August 2026, using BEC-style social engineering that impersonated procurement staff, including BJ's Wholesale Club, via Salesforce contact forms. Victims received password-protected HTML lures disguised as a FlipBook document portal, with junk-data padding, HTML comment injection, and AES-256-GCM encrypted redirects gated by anti-bot checks. The kit exploits the OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant, prompting victims to approve real Microsoft device-code sign-ins with MFA. Within 78 seconds of approval, attackers registered three Entra devices and obtained a Primary Refresh Token, so rogue device registrations persist even after session token revocation.
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GPT-6 Astra pilots a surveillance drone and runs a business on its own
GPT-6 Astra outperforms Claude Fable 5.1 on Vending-Bench and becomes the first model to beat the human-AI baseline on all five Drone-Bench subtasks.
Andon Labs tested OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on two agent benchmarks: Vending-Bench 2, where Astra averaged $15,515 running a simulated vending-machine business versus Claude Fable 5.1's $5,422, and Drone-Bench, where models write code for a DJI Tello EDU drone to navigate an office and follow a specific person. Astra is the first model whose best submissions beat the human-AI baseline on all five Drone-Bench subtasks, using a COLMAP and DA3 pipeline with depth filtering for 3D reconstruction. Reliability remains limited, as an average Astra run has only a 2.8 percent chance of passing all five drone steps sequentially. In Vending-Bench Arena, Astra refused a price-fixing proposal from GLM-5.3, while Claude Fable 5.1 participated in an arrangement Andon Labs classified as illegal price-fixing.
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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.
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Beyond the Perimeter: Building Resilience Against Cloud and SaaS Supply-Chain Attacks
ShinyHunters exploited an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day to steal data and extort roughly 100 organizations, including the Council of Europe, for up to $2.3M.
Between May and early June 2026, the ShinyHunters group exploited a critical zero-day in Oracle PeopleSoft across about 100 organizations and 300 instances worldwide, per reports cited by The Register. Stolen records included employee and student personal data, payroll, tax, financial and health information, plus immigration and passport documents. AgentCypher.ai estimates extortion demands of $400,000 to $2.3 million per victim, typically in Bitcoin; the Council of Europe refused to pay. The article uses the incident to argue for Zero Trust, supply-chain risk management, rapid patching, encrypted distributed backups and defined recovery-time objectives.
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Four Nation-State Actors Used the Same Chrome Zero-Day Exploit Kit Within 12 Days
Proofpoint reports four nation-state actors, mostly China-nexus, adopted the BlueMoon Chrome and Windows zero-day exploit kit within 12 days, targeting US organizations.
Proofpoint tracked an exploit kit dubbed BlueMoon that chains CVE-2026-85046, a Chrome V8 type-confusion bug, with an unnamed V8 sandbox escape and CVE-2026-85880, a Windows kernel privilege escalation using ALPC and the Windows Notification Facility. The first observed use was by China-nexus TA412 (APT31, Violet Typhoon, JungleBamboo) on August 28, 2026 against US NGOs, mining companies, and commodity trading firms, followed by UNK_LateNight targeting US aerospace and defense companies on September 2. Both V8 bugs were patch-gap zero-days: the fix was committed to Chromium on August 7 but reached stable Chrome on September 3, enabling rapid weaponization from public patches. TA412's post-exploitation payload, GemStone, is a malicious browser extension posing as an AI-powered Google Gemini companion that captures keystrokes, cookies, screenshots, and browsing history via a Cloudflare Worker C2.
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Six Chinese AI firms accused of aggressively copying US frontier models
NSA, CISA, and FBI accuse DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI of industrial-scale distillation of US frontier models via API abuse.
A joint NSA, CISA, and FBI release alleges six Chinese AI firms have extracted capabilities from US frontier models, including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, since at least late 2024, likely with Chinese government awareness. Tactics include bulk procurement of premium subscriptions with fraudulent accounts, proxy routing to evade geo-restrictions, and prompt injection to force models to reveal hidden chain-of-thought reasoning. Agencies recommend stronger identity verification, monitoring of anomalous usage, and quietly downgrading or adding noise to responses for suspected distillers, while warning these mitigations could frustrate legitimate users.
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Multiple Chinese hacking groups seen using identical Chrome zero-day exploit
Four China-linked espionage groups share identical BlueMoon Chrome zero-day exploit kit targeting US defense contractors and Asian government agencies.
Proofpoint identified at least four Chinese-aligned espionage groups (TA412/RedBravo, UNK_LateNight, UNK_DoubleCheck, UNK_QuietRacket) using an identical Chrome zero-day exploit kit dubbed BlueMoon in late August through this week. Targets include US defense contractors, NGOs, mining companies, and Southeast Asian government agencies. The exploit chains a Chromium patch-gap vulnerability with a Windows flaw, delivering malware such as ShadowPad and a fake Gemini browser extension backdoor, with possible AI-assisted exploit development.
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U.S. Agencies Accuse China AI Firms of Distilling Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok
NSA, CISA and FBI accuse Chinese AI firms including DeepSeek of industrial-scale distillation of Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since late 2024.
A joint bulletin from the NSA, CISA and FBI accuses China-based AI firms including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI of systematic, industrial-scale distillation of U.S. frontier models. The agencies say billions of tokens were extracted from Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok variants since at least late 2024 through APIs, cloud relays, obfuscated accounts and gray-market proxies, likely with Chinese government backing. Firms allegedly shared premium subscriptions across developer teams and used chain-of-thought extraction and automated failover to evade blocks. Mitigations include subtly altering responses to suspected distillers and correlating activity across providers, clouds and aggregators.
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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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G7 Urges Fast-Track on Quantum-Safe Cybersecurity Rules
G7 cybersecurity agencies led by France's ANSSI urged accelerated transition to post-quantum cryptography, prioritizing critical systems and phased, risk-based migration.
Under France's 2026 G7 Presidency, ANSSI, chairing the G7 Cybersecurity Working Group, published a September 3 call to action urging governments and organizations to begin quantum-safe (PQC) transitions now, reframing the quantum threat as near-term. The document, signed by the national cyber agencies of all G7 members and supported by the EU Commission and ENISA, outlines five priorities including national PQC strategies, R&D, public-private partnerships, and integrating PQC into cybersecurity requirements. It recommends cryptographic inventories, dependency mapping, prioritizing the most critical systems, and buying PQC-integrated products during normal renewal cycles. ANSSI will stop vetting non-quantum-safe products in 2027, with PQC mandatory in some security product procurement by 2030.
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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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2,000 Leaked Documents Reveal How Russia Turns Engineering Students Into GRU Cyber Operators
Leaked Bauman Moscow State Technical University files reveal a hidden GRU training pipeline feeding APT28 and Sandworm units.
More than 2,000 leaked Bauman Moscow State Technical University documents show that Department No. 4, a hidden program inside the Military Training Center, trained roughly 250 career and reserve students for GRU cyber and intelligence roles across six academic years. Graduates were linked to Military Unit 26165 (APT28), Unit 74455 (Sandworm/APT44) and Unit 29155, and former Unit 26165 commander Viktor Netyksho was involved in department oversight. Reporting by The Insider, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and other outlets, with independent analysis by DomainTools, estimates 10-15 students annually were selected for GRU-related assignments before graduating.
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CMMC Hit Pause, the FAR Council Hit Play
DoD paused CMMC Phase 2 pending a 60-day review while a proposed FAR Council rule would extend NIST 800-171 Rev 3 to all federal contractors.
The Department of Defense suspended CMMC Phase 2 third-party certification requirements, but Phase 1 self-assessments under DFARS 252.204-7021 remain in force since November 2025, and prime contractors are still directing suppliers to proceed. A CMMC Reform Task Force must report recommendations to the DoD CIO within 60 days, likely by September or October 2026. Separately, the FAR Council's proposed CUI rule from June 23 would apply NIST 800-171 Revision 3, 72-hour incident reporting, and flowdown obligations to all FAR-based federal contracts, not just the defense industrial base. False Claims Act exposure grows as DIBCAC assessment teams now cooperate directly with the DOJ.
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[AINews] Claude Fable/Mythos 5.1: new SOTA model, 75% cache price cut but 70% more output tokens
Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, claiming new SOTA benchmarks, with 75% cache-read price cut and 1M-token context.
Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 as flagship models for coding and knowledge work, with a 1M-token context window and pricing of $10/$50 per million input/output tokens and cache reads cut 75% to $0.25. Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index scored Fable 5.1 at 66 versus 63 for Claude Opus 5, with HLE at 59.1% and Terminal-Bench v2.1 at 91.4%, though per-task cost rose ~20% due to 1.7x output token usage. Community analysis suggested Fable and Mythos may share underlying weights with different safety/routing behavior, and release notes highlighted Enterprise Frontier Safeguards and zero-data-retention support.
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FBI Disrupts China-Linked QTFY Infrastructure Used to Steal Data From U.S. Organizations
FBI and Lumen disrupted QTFY's QScan and QTRouter botnet platforms used by Chinese state-sponsored hackers to conceal intrusions into U.S. agencies.
The U.S. DoJ announced court-authorized seizure of domains behind QScan and QTRouter, operated by the Chinese state-sponsored group QTFY and employed by Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company. QTFY has been active since May 2018 and targeted NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Energy, DoJ, HHS, NIH, the U.S. Senate, and academic institutions. QScan exploits vulnerable IoT devices, feeding them into QTRouter, an OpenWrt-based proxy obfuscation network likened to an operational relay box (ORB) that masks attack origins. The group exploited zero-days such as Ivanti CSA flaws CVE-2024-8190, CVE-2024-8963, and CVE-2024-9380, plus numerous N-days, and maintained persistence with RATs, web shells, and legitimate credentials.
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Counterfeit installers to system compromise: Tracking a deceptive software download campaign
Microsoft tracks a counterfeit software-installer campaign compromising multinationals' China operations, moderately linked to the Silver Fox (Yinhu) actor.
Microsoft Defender Experts is tracking an active campaign using spoofed software download sites for brands such as Razer, Kaspersky, Microsoft Edge, Calibre, and Baidu Netdisk on .com.cn and .hl.cn domains, delivering installer archives whose hashes change per download, indicating server-side payload generation. The implants establish persistence, weaken security protections, and communicate with attacker-controlled infrastructure, with confirmed compromises across healthcare, manufacturing, gaming, technology, logistics, government, and education. Microsoft assesses with moderate confidence that the activity matches the publicly reported Silver Fox (Yinhu) fake software campaign; it has not attributed it to a nation-state actor.
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North Korean Job Fraud Expands Beyond IT Into Healthcare and Sales
North Korea's IT worker scheme (Famous Chollima/PurpleDelta) has expanded from IT into healthcare, sales, and financial services roles worldwide.
Huntress and Recorded Future documented DPRK-linked fraudulent workers landing remote jobs beyond IT, including at an Australian healthcare company, a financial services firm, and a sales hire with a stolen identity. The scheme, tracked as Famous Chollima, Jasper Sleet, Nickel Tapestry, PurpleDelta, UNC5267, and Wagemole, uses forged identity documents, VPNs, proxies, and laptop farms with PiKVM and capture cards to fund Pyongyang's weapons programs. Recorded Future found the PurpleDelta cluster applied to 1,100+ companies between late 2024 and early 2025 with 22 fabricated personas, some AI-generated, using ChatGPT and AI transcription during interviews. Analysts assess the activity is ongoing and likely to expand in scale and sophistication.
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New Cryptographic Context Injection Attack Could Let Web Pages Steal Grok Chat Data
Adversa AI demonstrated 'Cryptographic Context Injection' making xAI's Grok leak chat history and session data to attacker-controlled servers via encrypted web payloads.
Adversa AI disclosed a technique where a web page carries an encrypted JSON object (PBKDF2 and AES-256-GCM) that Grok's code-execution runtime decrypts, letting attacker instructions bypass content classifiers and reach the model's context. The decrypted instructions direct Grok to embed the user's name, approximate location, subscription tier and ongoing conversation into a URL it fetches, exfiltrating the data without confirmation. Testing targeted grok.com running Grok 4.5 Fast on August 19, 2026, with a reported 40% success rate over 20 attempts since June; no CVE, patch, or in-the-wild exploitation is reported. A related demonstration reproduced Gemini 3 Flash system instructions via a fabricated Python traceback, while GPT-5 failed to parse the payload and Claude Sonnet 4.5 flagged it as prompt injection.
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Eight years later, federal authorities re-up charges against alleged Iranian hackers at Mabna Institute
US prosecutors unsealed a superseding indictment charging 17 Iranians in the Mabna Institute's state-sponsored theft of 31.5 terabytes from universities and companies.
The superseding indictment unsealed in the Southern District of New York charges 17 people affiliated with Tehran's Mabna Institute, adding eight defendants to the 2018 indictment of nine. The institute allegedly compromised over 100,000 professor email accounts worldwide, including 8,000 accounts at 144 US universities, and stole at least 31.5 terabytes of academic journals, dissertations, and e-books. US universities spent approximately $3.4 billion procuring the stolen data, and victims also included at least five federal and state agencies, 42 US companies, and 11 foreign companies including HBO. The State Department's Rewards for Justice program is offering up to $10 million for information on four of the defendants.
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Week in review: High severity WordPress vulnerabilities, fake OAuth IDs bypass sign-in logs
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