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What 90 days and a small budget can buy in AI agent security
Versa Field CISO details hidden costs of self-hosting open-weight models and a 90-day AI agent security plan of inventory, blast-radius reduction and testing.
In a Help Net Security interview, Prasad Tharippala, Field CISO at Versa, argues running open-weight models in-house improves control but shifts hardening, patching, access control, monitoring and incident response onto the buyer, with underestimated costs in GPU infrastructure, licensing review, EU AI Act compliance and scarce AI/ML security skills. On red-teaming AI agents, he recommends testing prompt injection, indirect injection, excessive permissions, data leakage, memory and RAG poisoning, malicious tool outputs, cross-agent trust abuse and infrastructure attack paths, mapped to OWASP agentic guidance and MITRE ATLAS. He highlights the handoff between chained agents as a major risk zone and stresses exercising human approval, shutdown and rollback controls under test conditions. For teams with 90 days and small budgets, he ranks inventory, blast radius reduction and ongoing testing as the priority order.
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ToolHive: The open-source way to run any MCP server securely
Stacklok's open-source ToolHive runs Model Context Protocol servers in isolated containers with per-request identity enforcement, audit logging and a signed registry.
ToolHive, shipped under Apache 2.0, containersizes MCP servers locally via Docker or Podman or in clusters through a Kubernetes operator, applying permissions, network filtering, and secrets management. The platform includes a Registry Server implementing the official MCP Registry API with signing and provenance verification, a Virtual MCP Server gateway with OIDC/OAuth single sign-on and OpenTelemetry traces, and a desktop Portal for one-click installs. The browser-based cloud UI is retired, so the desktop app and CLI are the supported rollout paths.
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Bot detection arrives in CrowdSec 1.8.0, along with two DoS fixes
CrowdSec 1.8.0 adds WAF bot detection via challenges and fingerprinting and fixes denial-of-service flaws in HTTP and Kubernetes audit datasources.
CrowdSec 1.8.0, released August 31, introduces bot detection in its WAF using client challenges and fingerprinting, plus fixes for two denial-of-service vulnerabilities in the HTTP acquisition datasource (unbounded decompressed body size, trusted Content-Length) and the Kubernetes audit webhook datasource (unbounded request body reads). The release also adds a dedicated Kubernetes datasource pulling logs directly from the apiserver, new HTTP helpers for external queries in the expression language, and performance work on the decisions stream endpoint. The challenge requires SSE4.1 and writable-executable memory, so some legitimate visitors may be blocked.
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Hottest cybersecurity open-source tools of the month: August 2026
August's open-source security roundup highlights NVIDIA SkillSpector for AI agent skill scanning, Future AGI, Chainloop, PentestGPT, and Hazmat agent containment.
Help Net Security's August 2026 roundup covers five open-source tools: NVIDIA's SkillSpector, a scanner that assesses AI agent skills from directories, zips, SKILL.md files, or Git URLs and returns findings and risk scores; Future AGI, an Apache 2.0 platform for tracing, evaluating, simulating, and guardrailing LLM agents; Chainloop, a software supply chain evidence store that produces signed in-toto attestations in CI pipelines; PentestGPT, an agentic penetration testing framework running recon, exploit, and reporting stages; and Hazmat, which runs AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex inside a separate machine account for containment.
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Hazmat: Open-source containment for AI agents
Open-source tool Hazmat runs AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex in a dedicated account, restricting access to credentials and files.
Hazmat is a free open-source containment tool that launches AI coding agents, including Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Cursor Agent, under a separate local account, sharing only a chosen project directory and enforcing per-session sandbox policies, network rules, and optional backups. On macOS it backs up the project, builds a session-specific sandbox policy, and starts the harness behind a firewall rule; Linux runs natively and an Apple-container backend is experimental. About 5.5% of the code is a TLA+ formal specification of its containment model.
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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.
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AI will not fix a governance problem in your camera estate
Hikvision EMEA security director argues camera estates need governance, recovery controls, and secure-by-default settings rather than AI fixes.
Rob Janssens, EMEA Cyber Security Director at Hikvision Europe, discusses securing surveillance camera estates whose lifecycles outlive their installers, leaving lost documentation and admin credentials. He advocates secure-by-default settings such as mandatory password activation, login-failure monitoring, IP filtering, and controlled SSH access, and argues customers should be able to recover control without the original integrator. He distinguishes secure-by-design from secure-by-default, recommends VPNs and network segmentation over disabling controls, and weighs European requirements like source code escrow and country-of-origin rules.
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Four corporate investigation mistakes organizations make under pressure
BlackBerry security executive outlines four investigation mistakes, warning poor chain of custody has cost firms over $2 billion in SEC penalties.
In a Help Net Security video, BlackBerry VP and Chief Security Advisor Christine Gadsby explains how early decisions in corporate investigations—granting access, informal conversations and undocumented choices—damage chain of custody, privilege and regulatory outcomes. She cites more than $2 billion in SEC penalties across over 100 financial firms since 2021 tied to missing records. Her guidance includes naming an incident commander, using communication channels with audit trails, verifying participants, and documenting decisions in real time.
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The story behind the intelligence
Cisco Talos newsletter features adversary-engagement podcast, flags AI guardrail 'safety penalty' slowing defenders, and recaps McKesson breach and PaperCut patching headlines.
The Threat Source newsletter spotlights the Beers with Talos podcast, in which researcher Azim Khodjibaev describes maintaining eight dark-web personas to identify prolific cybercriminals and support disruption efforts. Talos also argues frontier AI guardrails impose an AI 'safety penalty', citing a July 2026 incident where Hugging Face's primary cloud LLM refused to analyze forensic breach data and delayed response. Recapped headlines include ShinyHunters claiming theft of 284 million patient records from McKesson via vishing and Okta account takeover, Anthropic warning Claude users about infostealer malware, and PaperCut issuing emergency patches for chained vulnerabilities.
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A battery storage cyberattack would look exactly like a badly tuned controller
Risk modeling suggests a few hundred compromised grid-scale batteries dispatched through cloud optimizers could trigger blackouts in Texas or Great Britain.
Centrii analysis estimates 1,500 compromised one-megawatt units (5.4% of ERCOT's ~28 GW fleet) or 400 units (about 29% of Great Britain's ~1,400-unit fleet) could destabilize the grids, with modeled damage of $12-65 billion in Texas and a national blackout costing £2-10 billion in Britain. The study puts the probability of a major attack affecting at least one million people by 2031 at 92.1%, dropping to 61.4% with IEC 62443 certification and quarterly drills, based on 10,000 Monte Carlo runs. Because hostile battery swings are phased like legitimate frequency response, control rooms would see nothing unusual; Centrii proposes hunting for a reverse-governor signature where inverter output feeds oscillations. Spain's April 2025 blackout took an expert panel until March 2026 to rule out cyberattack, partly because key plants had no recordings.
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What your vendor says about PQC tells you if they are ready
Allot CTO outlines a telecom post-quantum migration playbook: inventory crypto, deploy hybrid ML-KEM on TLS first, and avoid missed interfaces.
Dr. Yaakov Stein, VP CTO of Allot, explains how mobile operators should triage post-quantum migration by data shelf life, protecting subscriber identity mappings, billing records, and call metadata that stay sensitive for years. He recommends starting with a comprehensive crypto inventory, then hybrid ML-KEM key exchange on TLS-protected 5G SBA and management interfaces, followed by IPsec backhaul and roaming links. Stein warns that migrations most often fail operationally through missed legacy interfaces such as SSH, RADIUS, or forgotten load balancers, and cites the early Kyber multi-packet TLS client hello issue as an example of middlebox incompatibility.
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Building a ransomware decision tree before the call comes in
Arctic Wolf's IR VP urges pre-deciding ransomware response choices on containment, negotiation authority, law enforcement engagement, and crisis communications.
A Help Net Security video features Kerri Shafer-Page, VP of Incident Response at Arctic Wolf, walking through a ransomware decision tree. She recommends settling four decision areas in advance: containment, extortion negotiation limits, law enforcement involvement, and communications. She frames paying as a business decision that can cost less than insurance retention and renewal hikes, and notes agencies may know the threat actor and help avoid sanctions issues.
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