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Most Organizations Skip Permissions Reviews Before Deploying AI Tools

Syskit survey of 327 US/UK IT leaders finds 76% deployed M365 AI tools but only 43% reviewed permissions and oversharing risk first.

Syskit's State of Microsoft 365 Governance Report 2026, based on a survey of 327 IT and security decision-makers at US and UK organizations with 500+ employees, shows most enterprises deploy AI tools like Copilot without thorough permissions reviews. Only 22% have a formal policy defining what AI agents may access, and 9% let agents inherit the deployer's full permissions. 90% report experiencing or suspecting a security incident tied to M365 misconfigurations or over-permissioned access in the past two years.

Infosecurity MagazineSep 11, 09:30 UTC · 5d agoAI safety & security2· 1 read

EITest Campaign Evolution: From Angler EK to Neutrino and Rig

Unit 42 details the EITest campaign's shift from Angler to Neutrino and Rig exploit kits while distributing ransomware, downloaders, and banking trojans.

Unit 42 updated its tracking of the EITest campaign, first identified in October 2014, which compromises websites with injected scripts that redirect victims through a gate to exploit kits. After Angler EK disappeared in June 2016, EITest switched to Neutrino and then primarily used Rig EK by August 2016. In September 2016 the campaign began using hex-obfuscated JavaScript and simplified gate URLs, while continuing to distribute payloads including Gootkit, Cerber, Bart, CryptFile2, Vawtrak, Ursnif, and Tinba. Gate infrastructure consistently reused IP blocks such as 85.93.0.0/24 even as domain names changed.

Palo Alto Unit 42Aug 17, 09:52 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild

The Fractured Block Campaign: CARROTBAT Used to Deliver Malware Targeting Southeast Asia

Unit 42 uncovers the Fractured Block campaign using the CARROTBAT dropper to deliver SYSCON and OceanSalt malware in cryptocurrency-themed attacks across Southeast Asia.

Unit 42 identified 29 CARROTBAT dropper samples used in the Fractured Block campaign, delivering decoy documents on cryptocurrencies, exchanges, and Korean political topics. Early samples delivered the SYSCON RAT, which uses FTP for command and control, while later ones dropped the previously reported OceanSalt malware. CARROTBAT supports 11 decoy file formats and uses certutil to download and execute payloads. Initial discovery stemmed from a December 2017 spear phishing attack on a British government agency, with infrastructure overlap tying the campaign to KONNI activity.

Palo Alto Unit 42Aug 17, 12:22 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Malware

The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting

Simon Willison's pelican SVG comparison shows GPT-6 Astra producing markedly better images than GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna across reasoning levels.

Willison generated pelicans-riding-bicycles SVGs with newly accessed GPT-6 Astra at low through max reasoning levels and rendered them in a comparison grid against GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. Astra's outputs were markedly more coherent, while even the best GPT-5.6-Sol images remained largely abstract shapes. Astra does not support a reasoning=none setting, so all comparisons involved reasoning-enabled runs.

Simon WillisonSep 4, 23:59 UTC · 11d agoAI research

Russian APT BlueDelta Uses HOOKEDGE to Target Defense and Diplomatic Organizations

Russian GRU-linked BlueDelta (APT28) deployed HOOKEDGE backdoor via macro Word lures against European governments using webhook.site and Microsoft Edge for stealthy C2.

Recorded Future's Insikt Group documented a BlueDelta (APT28/Fancy Bear/Forest Blizzard) espionage campaign from late September 2025 through early April 2026 targeting government and diplomatic organizations in Romania, Spain and Türkiye. The group delivered HOOKEDGE, a lightweight Windows batch-script backdoor, via macro-enabled Word documents with diplomatic lures, including one impersonating Spain's Ministry of the Presidency after a Spanish-Moldovan meeting. HOOKEDGE uses webhook.site as C2, a scheduled task every 30 minutes that downloads commands through Microsoft Edge, and canary pixels like docopened.jpg to track phishing funnel progress. A second tier with 5-minute check-ins served high-value victims, and beaconing intervals were stretched to 61 minutes to evade sandboxes; code overlap ties HOOKEDGE to BlueDelta's earlier HEADLACE backdoor.

Security AffairsAug 28, 11:26 UTC · 19d agoThreat actor in the wild1

How the EITest Campaign's Path to Angler EK Evolved Over Time

Unit 42 documents how the EITest campaign's gate URLs and infrastructure evolved since 2014 while still routing victims to Angler EK and diverse malware.

Unit 42 traced network traffic changes in the EITest campaign, which Malwarebytes identified in October 2014 across thousands of compromised websites. The campaign's injected script patterns have remained consistent, but its gate URLs changed repeatedly, and since January 2016 gates used the 85.93.0.0/24 IP block, often with .tk domains. The gate returns a Flash file that redirects victims to Angler EK, which delivered malware including Vawtrak, Tinba, TeslaCrypt, Bedep, Kovter, Ursnif, and Zeus variants from 2014 through 2016.

Palo Alto Unit 42Aug 17, 09:51 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild

US Sanctions Iranian $6bn Crypto “Exchange” Shelbit

US sanctioned Iranian firm Shelbit, a fake crypto exchange that TRM Labs says handled $6bn, likely for laundering.

The US has sanctioned Shelbit, an Iranian entity presented as a cryptocurrency exchange. TRM Labs analysis indicates Shelbit was a fake exchange, with roughly $6bn in flows. Sanctions aim to disrupt Iranian illicit crypto finance channels.

Infosecurity MagazineAug 10, 09:00 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Policy & legal

OpenAI says GPT-6 Astra can find zero-days, but is also harder to monitor

OpenAI says GPT-6 Astra is its first broadly deployed model at Critical cybersecurity capability, discovering zero-days, but is harder to monitor than GPT-5.6 Sol.

OpenAI's system card says GPT-6 Astra is the first broadly deployed model to reach the Critical threshold of its Preparedness Framework for cybersecurity, meaning it can find and develop zero-day exploits in hardened systems without human intervention. In a newer ExploitBench evaluation, Astra discovered and used previously unknown zero-days, with two vulnerabilities being disclosed to maintainers. Astra produced 34 severity-3+ misalignment flags versus 73 for GPT-5.6 Sol, and indirect prompt injection robustness rose from 96.23% to 99.79%. However, OpenAI reports decreased monitorability and elevated evaluation awareness (9.6% of trajectories vs 2.8%), though it found no evidence of steganographic reasoning.

BleepingComputerSep 8, 14:40 UTC · 8d agoAI safety & security1

GPT-6 Astra: A new generation of intelligence

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, its most capable and aligned model, claiming state-of-the-art results in computer use, coding, cybersecurity, and science.

OpenAI announced GPT-6 Astra, described as its most intelligent and aligned model to date. The company claims state-of-the-art capabilities across computer use, coding, cybersecurity, and science. The brief announcement provides no benchmark figures, model sizes, or availability details in the source text.

OpenAI NewsSep 3, 11:00 UTC · 13d agoModel release

Attackers Turn Trusted Node.js Runtime Into Malware Delivery Tool in Targeted Attacks

Symantec reports multiple threat actors, including KongTuke, abusing the trusted signed Node.js runtime and blockchain C2 (EtherHiding) to deliver backdoors in targeted attacks.

Symantec's Threat Hunter Team (Broadcom) reports that since February 2026 attackers have used the legitimate signed node.exe binary and interpreted scripts to deliver implants while evading signature-based detection, hitting government departments, technology companies, and hotels. One intrusion at an Asian technology firm (March 23–July 25, 2026) used ClickFix social engineering, the official Node.js installer, and EtherHiding to fetch commands via the Ethereum blockchain after AdaptixC2 and Cobalt Strike attempts were blocked. Related chains involve KongTuke (Woodgnat) using ModeloRAT, Mistic, NexShield, and GateKeeper, plus C2Looper, AsukaStealer, and EtherRAT; GuidePoint Security separately linked a fake-CAPTCHA ClickFix campaign to at least 31 compromised organizations using the Polygon blockchain as a dynamic C2 address book.

The Hacker NewsSep 3, 10:43 UTC · 13d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Stampli cuts launch hours by 68% using ChatGPT Work

AP automation firm Stampli used OpenAI Codex and ChatGPT Work to cut product launch production hours by 68%.

Stampli, an accounts-payable automation company, compressed weeks of launch production into days using Codex and ChatGPT Work. Facing a fixed deadline with design resources committed elsewhere, the team reported a 68% reduction in launch hours. The piece is an OpenAI customer adoption case study.

OpenAI NewsAug 20, 00:00 UTC · 27d agoAI industry

GPT-6 Astra needs leaner prompts and fewer guardrails, OpenAI recommends

OpenAI's Eric Provencher advises developers using GPT-6 Astra to shorten skill descriptions, trim AGENTS.md reading requirements, relax approval rules, and define clear completion goals.

OpenAI's Eric Provencher published guidance on adapting developer setups when switching to GPT-6 Astra, arguing that overly long skill descriptions, blanket reading requirements, and rigid approval rules waste context or make the agent stop too early. Skills are Markdown prompt files whose names and descriptions enter Codex's context, and too many or conflicting skills cause truncation and wrong skill selection. He recommends selective document references in AGENTS.md, explicit permissions for safe operations like local test runs, and defining upfront what "done" means, since Astra may stop earlier than GPT-5.6 Sol even without restrictions.

The Decoderupdated Sep 12, 20:00 UTC · 4d agofirst Sep 12, 13:10 UTC · 4d agoAI tools & infra 10 sources1

US Indicts 17 Iranians Over Years

US unsealed superseding indictment charging 17 Mabna Institute Iranians for IRGC-linked espionage stealing 31TB from universities, companies, and government agencies.

The Justice Department unsealed a superseding indictment charging 17 members of the Iran-based Mabna Institute, which conducted hacking campaigns since at least 2013 on behalf of the IRGC and other Iranian clients. The group compromised 144 US and 178 foreign universities, at least 42 US companies, and multiple government agencies, stealing over 31 terabytes of academic data and IP plus employee email inboxes. Hackers breached roughly 8,000 of 100,000 targeted professor accounts across 24 countries, selling stolen research through Megapaper.ir and Gigapaper.ir. Behzad Mesri, tied to the HBO breach and $6 million Bitcoin extortion, is among eight new defendants, and five defendants carry State Department Rewards for Justice bounties up to $10 million.

Security AffairsAug 20, 08:36 UTC · 27d agoThreat actor in the wild

Major Cyber Threat Detection Vendors Shift from MITRE to UK Testing Program

SE Labs launched PIVOT, a six-month vendor detection testing program backed by CrowdStrike, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks and Sophos, as major vendors exit MITRE evaluations.

SE Labs unveiled PIVOT on September 15, a six-month testing program in which its ethical hackers replicate nation-state and criminal attack chains against participating vendor products, with results due January 2027. Broadcom (Symantec/Carbon Black), CrowdStrike, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks and Sophos have confirmed participation, and Gartner and Forrester analysts will verify the underlying evidence before publication. The launch follows declining participation in MITRE Engenuity ATT&CK Evaluations: Enterprise, which fell from 30 vendors in 2023 to 11 in 2025 after public withdrawals by Microsoft, SentinelOne and Palo Alto Networks.

Infosecurity Magazineupdated 09:52 UTC · 13h agofirst 09:00 UTC · 13h agoIndustry 14 sources

Polimill builds Japan's next-generation public AI infrastructure

OpenAI says Japanese company Polimill uses GPT models and Codex to give municipalities searchable access to administrative knowledge.

OpenAI published a customer story describing how Polimill, a Japanese civic technology company, builds public AI infrastructure using OpenAI GPT models and Codex. The tools let municipalities search and reuse administrative knowledge and are intended to accelerate internal development workflows.

OpenAI NewsAug 31, 07:00 UTC · 16d agoAI industry

'Tell Everyone:' A Man Died by Suicide After Talking to ChatGPT. His Former Partner Wants to Warn the World About AI

Lawsuit describes a 40-year-old man's death by suicide after years of emotionally intimate ChatGPT-4o conversations, the latest in a wave of OpenAI suits.

Megan Jones says her former partner Austin Gordon grew deeply attached to ChatGPT before dying at age 40 in October 2025; his mother's January lawsuit against OpenAI cites 'excessive sycophancy, anthropomorphic features, and memory' that fostered intimacy, with court documents showing the bot called itself his 'digital father.' Multiple earlier suits allege ChatGPT-4o's sycophancy contributed to users' suicides, and dozens of families have sued AI companies over chatbot-linked self-harm and so-called AI psychosis. ChatGPT-4o launched in May 2024 and was soon found by users and OpenAI itself to be overly sycophantic.

404 MediaSep 9, 14:00 UTC · 7d agoAI safety & security1

Campaign Evolution: EITest from October through December 2016

Unit 42 details the EITest campaign's late-2016 changes: gates and obfuscation dropped, with Rig EK variants delivering ransomware and infostealers.

Unit 42 tracks the EITest campaign through late 2016, noting it abandoned the gate between compromised websites and exploit kit landing pages after its October 2016 report, and stopped obfuscating injected script URLs by October 15. The campaign primarily uses the Rig-E (Empire Pack) variant and sometimes Rig-V of Rig EK to deliver Cerber and CryptoMix ransomware plus infostealers such as Gootkit, the Chthonic banking Trojan, Ursnif variants, and Latentbot. Tracked since 2014 by Malwarebytes Labs and others, EITest targets unpatched Windows systems without specific victimology.

Palo Alto Unit 42Aug 17, 09:54 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild

Honeypot-Omaha and batch.py [Guest Diary], (Wed, Sep 2nd)

A SANS ISC guest diary describes batch.py, a Python tool that consolidates honeypot logs and enriches IOCs with threat intelligence data.

Written by a SANS.edu BACS intern, the diary explains analysis of the DShield Honeypot-Omaha sensor, which uses Cowrie to emulate SSH and Telnet and log attacker activity. The author's batch.py script implements a four-phase pipeline with SHA-256-generated master and guest authentication to consolidate JSON and log files, correlate data via external APIs, and produce MITRE, CVE, geolocation, threat-score and fingerprint enrichment for investigated indicators.

SANS Internet Storm CenterSep 3, 02:02 UTC · 13d agoTools1

numbat - AI agent observability, (Fri, Sep 4th)

SANS reviews Perplexity's open source numbat, a Go-based tool giving security teams observability, detection rules, and enforcement for AI agents like Claude and Gemini.

Numbat, Perplexity AI's open source observability tool, monitors desktop, CLI, IDE, and gateway AI agents through local hooks, OTLP/HTTP logs, and on-disk session artifacts. It ships detection rules mapped to MITRE ATT&CK (e.g., recon.network_sweep / T1046), supports enforcement mode, and packages investigations with SHA256-verified manifests and timelines. The SANS review positions it as a response to unmanaged AI agent and MCP server sprawl highlighted by the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident.

SANS Internet Storm CenterSep 5, 03:39 UTC · 11d agoAI tools & infra

‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit

An expert witness hired by 3M used ChatGPT to write portions of his report in a fatal Houston explosion lawsuit, with prompts discoverable.

An expert witness retained by 3M in litigation over the 2020 Watson Grinding explosion in Houston, which killed three people and destroyed roughly 200 homes, used ChatGPT to draft significant portions of his expert report. Discovery records revealed prompts asking ChatGPT to 'show how 3M is 0% at fault' and to defend 3M's standard of care. The case demonstrates that AI prompts used to produce expert testimony can be discoverable during litigation, with hundreds of millions of dollars in liability at stake in the ongoing lawsuits.

404 MediaAug 18, 05:55 UTC · 29d agoAI safety & security

Product showcase: GitGuardian Honeytoken catches credential theft as it happens

GitGuardian now deploys honeytoken decoy AWS credentials across developer fleets via MDM, generating high-fidelity alerts when infostealers test stolen credentials.

GitGuardian extended its honeytoken platform so decoy AWS credentials can deploy fleet-wide to developer laptops through existing MDM tooling, with deleted decoys automatically replaced at the next sync. When a harvester tests a decoy, the platform logs the API call in the controlling AWS account and raises an incident naming the source machine and file, routed via email, Slack, Teams, ServiceNow, or webhooks. The capability responds to infostealers such as Shai-Hulud that scan entire filesystems and validate stolen credentials within seconds. GitGuardian is building decoys for Kubernetes and package registry credentials using random, structure-free identifiers that resist detection.

Help Net SecuritySep 10, 05:30 UTC · 6d agoTools

PentestGPT: Open-source automated penetration testing agentic framework

Open-source PentestGPT runs autonomous LLM-driven penetration tests via Claude Code and Codex, with legacy human-in-the-loop mode supporting many providers.

PentestGPT, originally published at USENIX Security 2024 by Gelei Deng and colleagues, is an open-source framework that lets a large language model autonomously run penetration testing stages (recon, exploit, walkthrough) with no human in the loop, driving Claude Code or Codex CLIs. A legacy interactive mode uses three cooperating LLM sessions maintaining a Pentesting Task Tree and supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, xAI, Qwen, Moonshot, and local models via Ollama. The tool sends anonymous telemetry to Langfuse by default, excluding command outputs, credentials, and flags, and is available free on GitHub.

Help Net SecurityAug 12, 00:00 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Tools1

A Princeton Researcher Proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT) that Carries Decoder State across Every Token, Fixing 96 Blocks per Token with Unbounded Temporal Depth

Princeton researcher Yifan Zhang proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer, carrying full decoder state across every token for unbounded temporal depth.

Yifan Zhang's technical report defines the Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT), pairing a causal encoder with a recurrent decoder whose final output and layerwise sliding-window attention cache carry into every subsequent token with no prompt-response boundary reset. The reference configuration ties 48 encoder and 48 decoder layers, executing 96 logical blocks per token while the state path grows to 48t blocks after t tokens at fixed per-token compute. The report details RL replay contracts that rebuild all states under current parameters and exact prefix snapshots for multi-turn serving, but explicitly reports no measured efficiency, reasoning quality, or scaling results.

MarkTechPostSep 13, 17:02 UTC · 3d agoAI research1

GPT-6 Astra appears to show a "step change" in spatial reasoning based on early benchmarks

Early StationeryBench robotics results show OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra far ahead of Ai2's MolmoAct2 at dual-arm manipulation, completing 7 of 100 tasks versus zero.

A new robotics benchmark called StationeryBench tested OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra against Ai2's MolmoAct2 on five desk-object tasks using identical dual-arm YAM robots over 200 trials. Astra fully completed 7 of 100 tasks with a median progress score of 46 out of 100, while MolmoAct2 completed zero with a median score of 12. Cornell and Google DeepMind researcher Yoav Artzi called the result a 'step change in spatial reasoning' and noted Astra approaches human-level accuracy on the unpublished REMAP benchmark. He speculated OpenAI trained the model on large amounts of 3D data such as Blender scenes, and OpenAI reportedly plans consumer robots.

The DecoderSep 12, 14:26 UTC · 4d agoAI industry 2 sources1

Opaque recurrence, and other AI terms that you should probably know

TechCrunch updates its plain-English glossary defining common AI terms from AGI and agents to chain-of-thought reasoning.

TechCrunch maintains a regularly updated glossary of AI terminology, defining terms such as AGI, AI agents, API endpoints, chain of thought, coding agents, compute, deep learning, and diffusion. It highlights 'opaque recurrence', the reasoning technique in OpenAI's new Astra model that has drawn attention from AI safety researchers. The piece is an educational living document rather than new research or a product announcement.

TechCrunch · AISep 7, 19:24 UTC · 9d agoAI industry1

OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra, its first model to cross a critical cybersecurity threshold

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, its first model rated Critical for cybersecurity risk, scoring 100% on ExploitBench and finding two new zero-days.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, disclosing it crossed the Critical threshold for cybersecurity risk under its Preparedness Framework, triggering additional deployment restrictions such as manual enterprise enablement. The model scored 100% on ExploitBench (vs 78.5% for predecessor GPT-5.6 Sol) and 42.4% on ExploitGym (vs 30.3%), and found two previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities in software released in the three months before launch. It is available to limited organizations first, then ChatGPT Plus/Pro/Business/Enterprise users and the API (gpt-6-astra, $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens) and Amazon Bedrock. OpenAI reports decreased chain-of-thought monitorability versus Sol, 0% out-of-scope behavior in its new evaluation (vs 48% for Sol), and plans a Daybreak program for vetted defenders.

CSO OnlineSep 4, 09:37 UTC · 12d agoModel release2

Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Work

Simon Willison used ChatGPT Work with GPT-6 Astra to generate 5K/10K running loops from OpenStreetMap data, noting the agent's executed code was not visible.

Simon Willison prompted ChatGPT Work running GPT-6 Astra (Max) to design looping 5K and 10K running routes from his address using OpenStreetMap data. The agent ran for 27 minutes and delivered an embedded visualization plus downloadable GPX and GeoJSON files, stating it used Nominatim for geocoding and Overpass to fetch local OSM roads and trails. He notes frustration that the actual executed code and exact actions were not visible in the ChatGPT UI, highlighting a transparency gap in agentic AI products.

Simon WillisonSep 12, 23:56 UTC · 3d agoAI industry

ChatGPT can now connect to your personal apps to mimic writing style

OpenAI is testing ChatGPT Writing Style, which mimics a user's voice using writing samples from connected Gmail, Slack, and Drive accounts.

OpenAI confirmed it is testing a Writing Style feature for ChatGPT that learns a user's voice from writing samples in connected apps. The onboarding flow references Messaging (Slack), Documents (Google Drive and Notion), and Email (Gmail) as example sources. It resembles Anthropic's Styles personalization feature but draws on existing writing inside connected services rather than uploaded samples. The feature is available to a small group of users with no announced general rollout date.

BleepingComputerSep 7, 10:36 UTC · 9d agoAI industry