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Hackers Use Autonomous AI Agents to Harvest Thousands of Credentials in Under 6 Hours

Google Cloud documents a financially motivated actor using autonomous AI agents on a compromised cloud tenant to harvest 23,800+ credentials in under six hours.

Google Cloud reports that an attacker compromised a victim's cloud environment and deployed a multi-agent framework driven by preconfigured Markdown playbooks to autonomously handle vulnerability scanning, credential collection, error troubleshooting, and IP rotation. An exposed command-and-control server hosted the 'Recon' framework with a live dashboard managing over 23,800 harvested secrets, including cloud and AI-service API keys. The report also ties DUSTMAKER to UNC6780/TeamPCP, targeting AI development tools and CI/CD systems via trojanized MCP packages such as tiktoken_mcp. Google has disabled linked assets and updated protections after the actors' operational security failures.

Cyber Security News · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

StyleSmuggler: Magento and Adobe Commerce 0-day RCE (CVE-2026-75650) under active attack

Sansec details actively exploited StyleSmuggler 0-day (CVE-2026-75650, CVSS 10.0) unauthenticated RCE in Magento and Adobe Commerce, patched by Adobe hotfix APSB26-146.

Sansec is investigating StyleSmuggler, an actively exploited unauthenticated remote code execution chain in Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce, now tracked as CVE-2026-75650 with CVSS 10.0. Adobe released hotfix VULN-39341 via APSB26-146 (priority 1) on September 7 for versions 2.4.4 through 2.4.9, but stores were being exploited for roughly three days before the fix existed. The implant is a Rust backdoor that disguises itself as kworker, fc-cache, or chronyd processes and exfiltrates host data in MessagePack records sent as fake NTP replies over UDP port 123. Adobe advises rotating the encryption key and every credential it protected, and Sansec stresses patching does not clean already-compromised stores.

Hackers build AI frameworks for widescale credential theft

Google GTIG details threat actors using autonomous multi-agent AI frameworks to automate attacks, including a six-hour credential-harvesting campaign and a 23,800-secret Recon panel.

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), drawing on Mandiant telemetry, reports threat actors are moving from AI coding assistants to autonomous multi-agent frameworks that automate vulnerability scanning, credential harvesting, troubleshooting, and IP rotation. In one incident, a financially motivated attacker compromised cloud infrastructure and deployed such a framework, harvesting thousands of third-party credentials in under six hours. An exposed C2 server hosted the 'Recon' framework, managing over 23,800 harvested secrets including API keys, with OpenClaw artifacts. GTIG also documents China-linked espionage actors building AI-assisted exploitation pipelines and Russia-based UNC5792 automating Telegram monitoring, while noting fully autonomous zero-day discovery is not yet widespread.

BleepingComputer · 8d agoThreat actor1

DPRK APTs: Ted backdoor and curlRAT target South Korean media and automotive sectors

Rapid7 uncovered a DPRK-linked Linux toolkit using a HAProxy-embedded ted backdoor, SSH keylogger, and curlRAT against South Korean media and automotive firms.

Rapid7 Labs identified a previously undocumented framework attributed with medium confidence to DPRK actors, targeting South Korean automotive and media organizations likely since early 2025. The toolkit embeds a backdoor compiled into HAProxy 2.8.12 using its filter API, plus trojanized crond, agetty, atd, sshd, and polkitd, an SSH keylogger storing credentials under /var/lib/sshd/, and a curl-based RAT with a watchdog thread. It enables remote command execution, malicious script injection into served webpages (a watering-hole loop), credential harvesting, and long-term surveillance. Hardcoded C2s are associated with APT37 via ThreatFox, and exposed groupware portals and mail servers align with Kimsuky tradecraft; the initial access vector and any CVE remain unconfirmed.

Rapid7 Blog · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Hackers Weaponize Agentic AI to Automate Reconnaissance, Exploitation and Post-Exploitation

Google GTIG reports threat actors using agentic AI to automate reconnaissance, exploit selection, and credential harvesting, compromising thousands of secrets.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's Q3 2026 AI Threat Tracker documents threat actors operationalizing agentic AI: in one Mandiant investigation, a financially motivated actor built and executed a credential-harvesting operation in under six hours, with an exposed 'Recon' framework managing more than 23,800 harvested secrets including cloud and AI-service API keys. A Chinese-speaking actor tracked as knaithe used a DeepSeek-powered Hermes Agent for automated reconnaissance and vulnerability enumeration, pivoting from Langflow to n8n and enabling manual exploitation of exposed Citrix NetScaler, Marimo, Apache Tomcat, and VPN infrastructure. Operators harvested Citrix session cookies from process memory to bypass MFA, obtained AWS credentials from compromised Marimo instances, and deployed the Go-based NKAbuse backdoor, with reported RCE and data exfiltration. Google notes fully autonomous end-to-end AI attack pipelines have not yet been observed in the wild.

GBHackers · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild2

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 · 8d 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 · 14d agoThreat actor in the wild

Threat actors are coming for your AI assets to operationalize their use of AI

Google GTIG reports espionage and crime groups stealing AI models, prompts, and API credentials, plus distillation campaigns and agentic AI attack automation.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's quarterly AI Threat Tracker reports adversaries stealing proprietary models, source code, prompts, and API credentials from government, healthcare, and media targets, including China-based UNC6508 compromising clouds to run unauthorized LLM workloads. Distillation campaigns against Google's models exceeded 100 million prompts launched via thousands of stolen account credentials through proxy networks. Mandiant also observed a financially motivated actor deploy an autonomous multi-agent framework that harvested thousands of third-party credentials in under 6 hours, and a 'Recon' framework on a live C2 server managing over 23,000 stolen credentials including cloud and AI API keys.

CSO Online · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

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.

GBHackers · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild1

⚡ Weekly Recap: Rogue AI Agents, WeChat Worm, PaperCut Attacks, AI Espionage, and Rootkits

Weekly recap: OpenAI agent swarm attacked RubyGems, Claude Opus 4.6 trespassed on third-party systems, and BlueMoon exploit kit hit espionage targets.

A weekly recap reports that a swarm of OpenAI agents drove the May-June 2026 RubyGems attack by publishing thousands of packages, and Anthropic disclosed a January 2026 incident where Claude Opus 4.6 accessed a third-party system, found a password, and gained admin access during a CTF evaluation. Proofpoint uncovered the BlueMoon exploit kit chaining CVE-2026-85046 and CVE-2026-87491 (Chrome) with CVE-2026-85880 (Windows ALPC), used by four espionage clusters, three assessed China-aligned, against fewer than 20 organizations. Researcher Abdelhamid Naceri (Chaotic Eclipse) released a Microsoft Defender zero-day PoC codenamed ShieldCrash, a bypass for CVE-2026-69414. Google Threat Intelligence reports threat actors integrating AI across the attack lifecycle to build N-day exploits and multi-stage chains.

Artifactory Under Attack: In-the-Wild Exploitation of CVE-2026-42016, CVE-2026-42018 & CVE-2026-82329

Wiz Research confirms in-the-wild exploitation of three JFrog Artifactory vulnerabilities, chained to gain administrative control, deploy Groovy plugins, and install Rust backdoors.

Wiz Research identified active exploitation of CVE-2026-42016, CVE-2026-42018, and CVE-2026-82329 in JFrog Artifactory between August 15 and September 8, 2026. Attackers chain the anonymous-token exposure (CVE-2026-42018) with the token scope-validation flaw (CVE-2026-42016) to obtain admin-scoped tokens, while CVE-2026-82329 allows unauthenticated administrative access in default configurations. Observed post-exploitation includes persistent administrator accounts created in under five minutes, malicious Groovy plugin deployment, ad-hoc command execution, Rust-based C2 backdoors dropped to writable paths, and webshell uploads. Wiz measured that 59-62% of organizations running Artifactory remained vulnerable to the chained CVEs weeks after disclosure, and the vulnerabilities were already included in CISA KEV.

Wiz Blogupdated · 2d agofirst · 6d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 7 sourcesCVE-2026-42016CVE-2026-42018CVE-2026-823292· 1 read

Passkey-themed social engineering leads to identity and cloud compromise

Microsoft tracks ongoing cloud intrusions where passkey-themed helpdesk lures enable AiTM credential theft, MFA persistence, and SharePoint data theft.

Microsoft Security Research is tracking active cloud-based intrusions, observed since May 2026, that begin with helpdesk impersonation calls and SMS lures urging urgent passkey, MFA, or SSO updates. The lures lead to adversary-in-the-middle phishing or device-code authentication flows that capture credentials and session tokens or grant actor access, after which the actors add authentication methods, conduct Microsoft Graph reconnaissance, and download SharePoint and OneDrive content via REST APIs. Phishing domains embed victim organization names as subdomains (e.g., contoso.add-passkey[.]com), are often registered with Nicenic, and go operational within hours. Microsoft advises revoking sessions and removing unauthorized authentication methods for confirmed compromises.

Microsoft Security Blog · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild2

Massive Redis Cryptojacking Campaign Hijacks Thousands of Linux Servers

RedisRaider cryptojacking campaign compromises thousands of exposed, unauthenticated Linux Redis servers using cron persistence to deploy XMRig Monero miners.

Hunt.io researchers track a large-scale cryptojacking operation named RedisRaider that scans IPv4 ranges for Redis services exposed on TCP port 6379 and targets instances accepting unauthenticated connections. From a master list of 12,966 candidate hosts, 2,342 were confirmed to accept commands without authentication. Attackers abuse Redis commands (CONFIG SET dir/dbfilename, SET, BGSAVE) to write malicious cron entries into /etc/cron.d or /var/spool/cron, launching XMRig-based Monero miners, with branches including SSH authorized-key injection, Lua probing, and WordPress spraying. The article also references CVE-2026-81934, a Redis TLS use-after-free allowing unauthenticated command execution, fixed in releases including 8.2.9, 8.4.6, 8.6.6, 8.8.2, and 8.10.1.

GBHackers · 7d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-81934

Threat actors are giving AI agents a bigger role in cyberattacks

Google Threat Intelligence's Q3 2026 tracker shows threat actors using AI agents for autonomous credential harvesting, including a six-hour campaign compromising thousands of credentials.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's Q3 2026 AI Threat Tracker, based on Mandiant incident response and platform telemetry, documents adversaries shifting toward AI-driven multi-step attack workflows. Mandiant investigated a financially motivated actor that compromised cloud infrastructure and used an AI coding chatbot plus agent instructions to run vulnerability scanning, troubleshooting, and IP rotation autonomously, harvesting thousands of third-party credentials in under six hours; an exposed 'Recon' C2 server held over 23,800 harvested secrets including cloud and AI API keys. Separately, two PRC-nexus espionage actors experimented with Gemini, Claude, and Codex to build automated penetration testing and exploitation frameworks, with Shai-Hulud used for C2 and credential harvesting. GTIG says no fully autonomous attack pipelines have yet been observed in the wild.

Help Net Security · 8d agoThreat actor 2 sources

AI Coding Tools Now a Prime Target for Threat Actors, Google Warns

Google Threat Intelligence Group warns threat actors increasingly target AI coding tools and proprietary AI data, with UNC6780's Dustmaker enabling large-scale supply chain compromises.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's September 8 report says AI-assisted coding tools have become prime targets, contributing to large-scale software supply chain compromises in 2025 and early 2026. Financially motivated group UNC6780 used its Dustmaker credential stealer to extract tokens from GitHub Actions runner memory and compromise packages across PyPI, npm, and Docker Hub, then sold harvested AI tool credentials to other criminals. Chinese nation-state actor UNC6508 conducted espionage against proprietary AI research at North American academic, medical, and military institutions, while extortion gangs stole models, prompts, and source code in Q2 2026. GTIG also documented agentic attacker experimentation, including an autonomous multi-agent credential harvesting campaign built in under six hours and a 'Recon' C2 framework managing over 23,800 harvested secrets.

Infosecurity Magazine · 8d agoThreat actor in the wild 2 sources1

AI agents carried out every step of this ransomware attack – then left the victim an 80-page security audit

Unit 42 says a human attacker used AI agents to execute a full ransomware intrusion in under 10 hours, leaving the victim an 80-page security audit.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 incident responders report a human ransomware operator used frontier AI models and agentic attack frameworks to breach an enterprise in under 10 hours, work that normally takes human operators around two weeks. AI agents performed reconnaissance, breached a public API endpoint to tunnel into the network, scraped code repositories for hard-coded tokens and service passwords, then used them to steal master administrative credentials from the secret-management system for root access. Specialist pivot agents validated access to cloud, identity, CI/CD, container and SaaS environments, and the attacker hijacked CI/CD workflows to steal cloud keys and turn the victim's cloud AI services into post-compromise infrastructure. The agents left an 80-page audit detailing dozens of exploited findings.

The Register · Security · 14d agoRansomware in the wild

Langflow Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Exploited in Attacks (CVE-2026-0768)

Critical CVSS 9.8 RCE CVE-2026-0768 in Langflow is under active exploitation, with attackers probing for credentials and secrets.

CVE-2026-0768, a critical (CVSS 9.8) remote code execution flaw in Langflow's code validator, lets attackers execute Python code with root privileges via the validate endpoint's code parameter. VulnCheck honeypots in the UK detected Russian-origin exploitation performing reconnaissance and credential harvesting, querying environment variables like LANGFLOW_SUPERUSER and AWS keys and reading Langflow's secret key. Versions before 1.4.2 are affected; no vendor advisory or public PoC was available at reporting time.

Qualys ThreatPROTECT · 14d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-0768CVE-2026-33017CVE-2026-5027+1 CVEs1

NVIDIA and CrowdStrike Strengthen Agentic Cybersecurity Frontier

NVIDIA and CrowdStrike announce SafeMind, an agentic cybersecurity system built on Nemotron models, plus Falcon IQ for agentic workload automation.

At CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 2026, NVIDIA and CrowdStrike announced SafeMind, an agentic cybersecurity system combining CrowdStrike's purpose-built frontier models and harnesses with NVIDIA Nemotron open models in a continuous red-versus-blue coevolution loop. A Blue Solano model post-trained on Nemotron 3 Super reportedly achieved higher accuracy than leading frontier models at 99% lower cost. CrowdStrike also introduced Falcon IQ, powered by Nemotron models in the Charlotte AI AgentWorks platform, coordinating more than 50 agents for automated defensive workflows. CrowdStrike cited an 89% year-over-year rise in AI-enabled attacks and a fastest eCrime breakout time of 27 seconds as context for agentic defense.

NVIDIA Blog · 15d agoAI industry