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Hackers Use Claude and GPT-Powered Tools to Help Breach Government and Financial Networks
Unit 42 links two Latin America campaigns where operators used Claude and GPT-4.1 during intrusions against government and financial targets.
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 identified two activity clusters, CL-CRI-1131 and CL-CRI-1163, tied by shared SOCKS5 relay infrastructure and use of large language models during operations. The Mexican cluster targeted a transportation organization, federal ministries and water utilities in Mexico and Ecuador, while the Brazilian cluster used resume-themed phishing, custom remote-access Trojans and SockTz SOCKS5 tunneling against financial organizations. An exposed self-hosted NextChat interface on attacker infrastructure led researchers to assess operators used Claude and GPT-4.1 to generate workaround scripts and troubleshoot execution failures. Unit 42 noted AI reduced time needed to troubleshoot intrusions after initial access, rather than replacing the attacker.
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Agents Gone Wild: An AI-Orchestrated Global Campaign Against PaperCut NG/MF
AI-orchestrated campaign exploited PaperCut NG/MF RCE (CVE-2026-81578/82078), compromising 440+ instances at 395 organizations in 48 countries.
GreyNoise tracked a likely Russian-speaking actor using AI (OpenAI Codex harness plus a DeepSeek model) to develop, test, and deploy exploits for PaperCut NG/MF (CVE-2026-81578, CVE-2026-82078) starting 31 August 2026. The actor compromised at least 440 PaperCut instances across 395 organizations in 48 countries, achieving domain admin at 12 victims — fastest time to domain admin was five minutes and a US high school was fully compromised in seven minutes. Attack paths involved LSASS memory and registry secret harvesting, pass-the-hash to domain controllers, noPac attacks, account additions to Domain Admins, and DCSync to exfiltrate full NTDS.DIT credential dumps. Impact scope suggests access development potentially for handoff, with prior PaperCut intrusions historically leading to extortion.
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Risky Bulletin: Russia tells data centers to deploy drone defenses
Russia ordered data center operators to deploy drone strike defenses under a Putin decree allowing temporary state takeover of unprotected critical infrastructure.
The Russian government instructed data center operators to deploy protections against drone strikes under a presidential decree signed by Putin that allows temporary state administration of critical infrastructure operators failing to defend against Ukrainian hacks and drone strikes. Although data centers are not formally critical infrastructure in Russia, the decree applies to them because other sectors depend heavily on cloud services; Russia has more than 180 data centers, over 80% in the European region within range of Ukrainian strikes. The digest also reports a Dropbox breach affecting nearly 5,000 accounts via the Lenovo ID integration, spyware attacks on at least 14 Serbians using NoviSpy or Pegasus, and a password recovery attack targeting hundreds of thousands of X accounts tied to the new X Money service. Other items include a 14-hour compromise of Coder's Cloudflare infrastructure delivering malicious Terraform modules, donor data breaches at Davayte and You Are Not Alone via the Stripe/WooCommerce integration, a $2.5M Aquifer crypto heist, and a TVING breach exposing data of almost 40 million accounts.
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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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Keys to the Kingdom: Erlang/OTP SSH Vulnerability Analysis and Exploits Observed in the Wild
Attackers actively exploit CVE-2025-32433, a CVSS 10.0 unauthenticated RCE in Erlang/OTP SSH, heavily targeting OT and critical infrastructure networks.
CVE-2025-32433 enables unauthenticated RCE in Erlang/OTP's SSH daemon via SSH connection protocol messages (codes >= 80) processed before authentication, affecting versions before OTP-27.3.3, OTP-26.2.5.11 and OTP-25.3.2.20. Unit 42 recorded a spike in exploitation between May 1-9, 2025, with 70% of detections on firewalls protecting OT networks, disproportionately affecting healthcare, agriculture, media and high technology. Observed payloads bind TCP-connected shells or launch Bash reverse shells to hosts like 146.103.40.203:6667, with randomized DNS lookups under dns.outbound.watchtowr.com indicating OAST-driven blind RCE validation.
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⚡ Weekly Recap: Zero-Day Exploits, Insider Threats, APT Targeting, Botnets and More
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Russia-Linked APT28 Exploited MDaemon Zero
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European, Latin American authorities arrest 17 in crackdown on phishing network with 483,000 victims
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Latin America governments are prime targets for ransomware due to lack of resources, analysis argues
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