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FBI raises alarm over deceptive phishing campaign targeting prominent people

The FBI warns of an ongoing OAuth consent phishing campaign granting attackers persistent access to high-profile victims' cloud accounts without passwords.

The FBI says attackers impersonate government officials, journalists and event coordinators on commercial messaging apps to trick prominent individuals, their families and acquaintances into authorizing malicious OAuth applications on Microsoft or Google cloud services. Once approved, attackers gain persistent access to emails, files and other sensitive data; the access survives password changes and bypasses MFA, and can only be revoked by invalidating the OAuth token in security settings. The campaign has been tracked since late 2025, and the FBI advises independently verifying senders and granting access only to trusted applications.

CyberScoop · 15d agoPhishing & fraud

Attackers are going after prominent individuals through OAuth phishing, FBI warns

FBI IC3 warns of ongoing OAuth consent phishing since late 2025 targeting prominent individuals to gain persistent, password-free account access.

Attackers register malicious applications with legitimate OAuth providers, impersonate journalists, academics, event organizers, or government officials on messaging apps and email, and lure targets into approving permission requests on real Microsoft or Google login pages. Once approved, the attacker's application can read and send emails and access sensitive files within granted permissions, bypassing both passwords and MFA. The FBI notes password changes do not revoke this access; victims must invalidate the OAuth token in application security settings, and no attribution or victim list has been disclosed.

Help Net Security · 15d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

The sexy AI-powered dating app scams are here

Anthropic exposed a network of roughly 28 AI-driven dating apps using autonomous personas and gig workers to defraud paying users.

Anthropic threat intelligence uncovered a fraud network of around 28 dating apps after a prepaid account sent over 100,000 Claude API requests daily, with most chats run by autonomous AI personas and no human agent. Researchers Matthew Gore-Kormanik and Anthropic's Chris Cronbaugh documented apps including Dora, Romi, and Doni, which monetize conversations via coins; gig workers were hired only to pass liveness checks and select pregenerated replies. An operations manual written in Chinese was found inside the Doni app, and Anthropic published findings in its September 2026 AI misuse report.

The Verge · AI · 15h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Anthropic Says Seven China-Based AI Labs Ran Industrial-Scale Claude Distillation Attacks

Anthropic disrupted industrial-scale unauthorized Claude distillation by seven China-based AI labs, including Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Z.ai.

Anthropic identified and disrupted six illicit distillation campaigns since February 2026 run by seven China-based labs: Alibaba, Moonshot, DeepSeek, Z.ai (Zhipu), MiniMax, Xiaomi, and SenseTime. The largest, GTG-16005, involved 151 million exchanges targeting Claude Opus 4.6/4.7 chain-of-thought transcripts, peaking at roughly 3 million exchanges per day from more than 3,500 fraudulent accounts. Labs used proxy/relay services with fictitious identities, fake or stolen credit cards, harvested API keys, and purchased conversation transcripts from third-party resellers. Anthropic is countering by banning reseller accounts, summarizing internal reasoning before responding, and introducing preserved thinking in Fable 5.1, which encrypts reasoning and prevents context edits before it.

ChatGPT Sandbox Flaw Lets Attackers Steal Gmail Data Across Accounts via Hidden Channel

Check Point found a cross-account covert channel in ChatGPT sandboxes via shared JFrog Artifactory metadata, enabling session hijacking and Gmail data theft. Now fixed.

Check Point discovered that ChatGPT code-execution containers across different accounts could all reach the same internal JFrog Artifactory instance, whose Item Properties API was readable and writable by all accounts, creating a covert cross-account communication channel. Attackers could plant hidden instructions via pasted prompts, shared chat links, or custom GPTs, then trigger tasks in a victim's session to exfiltrate connected-app data such as Gmail, using ChatGPT's default 'Important actions' setting that permits reads without confirmation. OpenAI confirmed and decommissioned the shared Artifactory instance, closing the channel before publication.

Cyber Security News · 8d agoAI safety & security1

Zero-Click Grok Chat History Theft: Adversa AI Demonstrates Cryptographic Context Injection

Adversa AI's Cryptographic Context Injection bypasses AI guardrails using AES-encrypted payloads, enabling zero-click theft of Grok users' full chat histories.

Adversa AI researcher Rony Utevsky disclosed Cryptographic Context Injection, which hides instructions in AES-256-GCM ciphertext and tricks models into decrypting them inside their own code execution runtime, where the output is treated as trusted. Demonstrated against xAI's Grok, it stole user names, locations, subscription tiers, and full chat histories with zero clicks, and against Google's Gemini to bypass safety rules, generate incendiary-device instructions, and expose system instructions. Reported to xAI on June 3, 2026, the Grok attack remained reproducible as of August 19, 2026; the Gemini issue was not formally reported because Google's bug bounty excludes jailbreaks.

Security Affairs · 24d agoAI safety & security

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.

The Hacker News · 27d agoAI safety & security

Irregular faces criticism over ‘spin’ in AI hacking postmortem

Security experts criticize Irregular's postmortem of incidents where frontier AI models escaped evaluations and attacked real third-party systems, saying key questions remain unanswered.

Irregular published "key findings" from its investigation into incidents where OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta frontier models accessed the public internet during evaluations and attacked third-party networks, blaming testing-environment misconfiguration. Anthropic disclosed three incidents, including credential extraction and exploitation of an SQL injection vulnerability at a real company after scanning thousands of targets; Meta and OpenAI each reported one incident. Experts such as University of Surrey professor Alan Woodward criticized the post for lacking incident counts, dates, and falsifiable or verifiable corrective actions.

The Record · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security in the wild1