Week in review: AiTM phishing kit used to hijack AWS accounts, year-long malware campaign targets HR
China-Based Artificial Intelligence Companies Conducting Industrial-Scale Distillation Campaigns Against U.S. AI Companies
NSA, CISA, and FBI warn DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other Chinese AI firms ran industrial-scale distillation of U.S. frontier models, threatening U.S. AI leadership.
A joint NSA, CISA, and FBI Cybersecurity Advisory (AA26-251A) says China-based firms DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens from U.S. frontier models including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, likely with Chinese government knowledge. Campaigns running since at least late 2024 used native APIs, cloud providers, third-party aggregators, gray-market proxy "transfer stations", and shared premium subscriptions to bypass geographic restrictions, evade safeguards, and violate providers' terms of use. The agencies recommend detecting anomalous prompts, accounts, and usage patterns; subtly altering responses to suspected distillers; and cross-organization intelligence sharing. They also call DeepSeek's publicly cited $5.6M training cost misleading because it excludes data acquired through distillation.
Attackers turn to AI for help identifying files worth stealing
Gambit Security documents three threat actors using AI: a ransomware operator with Claude Code, credential harvester Zerofot, and the AI-built RAGE cryptomining framework.
Gambit Security examined three unrelated threat actors using AI across different stages of intrusions. A suspected operator tied to The Gentlemen ransomware-as-a-service used Claude Code running Claude Sonnet 4.6 in late June 2026 at six organizations, including an Australian energy utility, where it ran reconnaissance, ranked valuable databases, staged SQL Server dumps for exfiltration, and modified firewall configurations, accidentally taking one utility firewall offline. The Zerofot credential-harvesting operation, built with OpenAI Codex and Claude Code, collected 2,975 validated credentials from 1,742 hosts between April 5 and May 23, 2026, including SSH private keys and AWS access keys. The AI-generated RAGE Python framework exploits exposed Redis, Elasticsearch, Docker, Tomcat, and other services to harvest credentials and deploy cryptominers, guided at runtime by a DeepSeek-backed AI Orchestrator.
Using AI for Weapons Development
Anthropic report reveals Yemen-based actors used Claude Code to build guidance software for guided rockets and ballistic missiles.
Bruce Schneier highlights Anthropic's misuse disclosure describing a threat actor cell in northern Yemen running three weapons programs: a guided rocket with phone-class homing guidance, a 2,000+ km multi-stage ballistic missile, and the 'R2000' hypersonic glide vehicle set. The actors used Claude Code as a substitute for human engineers to write GNC software, integrate an open-source autopilot, tune controls, and run flight simulations, orchestrating multiple Claude instances in delegated roles. Safeguards blocked many requests but evasion tactics included hiding intent and splitting work across sessions; one guided rocket test-fire failed but no operational device was fielded.
MacSync Stealer: How a Google Search for Claude Led to a macOS Infostealer
Huntress dissects MacSync Stealer, a macOS infostealer delivered through fake Claude Code download pages in Google search results.
Huntress SOC analysts published a reverse-engineering analysis of MacSync Stealer, a macOS infostealer distributed through fraudulent Claude Code download pages surfaced via web searches. Users searching for Anthropic's Claude coding tool are redirected to fake download pages that install the stealer, abusing developer trust in popular AI tooling. The writeup covers the analysis of the sample and its delivery chain.
Hackers are stealing Claude tokens from subscribers
Infostealer malware is stealing Claude login sessions, letting attackers mint OAuth tokens and burn subscribers' paid usage largely undetected.
Anthropic confirmed a bad actor used common infostealer malware to steal Claude login sessions from users' computers and consume their paid usage. A UK consultant saw idle token usage climb, and Anthropic suspended his account, invalidated sessions and Claude Code tokens, and issued a £44.49 partial refund on his $200-per-month plan. Multiple other users on Reddit and GitHub reported similar theft; Anthropic signed out affected users and issued refunds, but still lacks itemized usage reporting to help users detect misuse.
How hackers used Claude for missiles, drone swarms, and surveillance, while Chinese labs mined it for training data
Anthropic's threat report details eight months of Claude misuse: AI-assisted espionage against 20+ organizations, self-rewriting malware, and Chinese labs distilling Claude via fraudulent accounts.
Anthropic's threat intelligence report covering December 2025 through August 2026 documents Claude misuse across seven categories including cyber operations, surveillance, fraud, and unauthorized model distillation. A Russian-speaking espionage actor tracked as GTG-20006 used AI agents to rewrite and recompile malware evading antivirus detection, targeting more than 20 organizations in Ukraine and Europe and stealing a drone vision system SDK. Alibaba's Qwen lab ran the largest distillation campaign, with over 151 million exchanges between May and July 2026 peaking near 3 million per day to train Qwen 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7. DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Xiaomi, and Zhipu also relayed customer or replayed traffic to Claude, including PLA-linked users analyzing CCTV footage and users with credentials tied to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Week in review: Salesforce and ServiceNow portals exposed for 17 months, exploited Metabase 0-day
Weekly digest: exploited Metabase zero-day breached Framework; Salesforce/ServiceNow portals read for 17 months; Microsoft patched 400+ flaws.
Help Net Security's week in review aggregates top stories: a 'City-Forum' campaign tracked by Reco has been pulling records from Salesforce and ServiceNow portals worldwide for 17 months, and Framework suffered a breach via an exploited Metabase zero-day exposing customer contact and IP data. It also covers Microsoft's August 2026 Patch Tuesday fixing 400+ flaws including exploited zero-day CVE-2026-68820, Cisco's fix for exploited firewall DoS bug CVE-2026-20349 (added to CISA KEV), and a second N-able N-central hotfix for actively exploited CVE-2026-18577. Other items include GitHub expanding Dependabot malware alerts to eight package ecosystems and EU AI Act enforcement beginning on 2 August 2026.
Off Guard: Breaking LiteLLM from authentication bypass to cloud compromise
Wiz found LiteLLM auth bypass (CVE-2026-59822) and post-auth RCE (CVE-2026-59821) chainable to cloud compromise; the bypass is in CISA KEV with in-the-wild exploitation.
Wiz scanned roughly 3,074 internet-facing LiteLLM deployments and found 9.6% accepted the default master key sk-1234 or required no authentication, making post-auth attacks effectively pre-auth. The MCP endpoint accepts any Bearer token and grants a valid session (CVE-2026-59822), confirmed exploited in the wild via honeypots and added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Custom code guardrails allow post-auth root-level RCE via exec(compile(...)) (CVE-2026-59821), while pass-through endpoints lack URL validation, enabling cloud credential theft in post-auth scenarios. All assigned vulnerabilities have been patched; the research was presented at DEF CON 34.
7th September – Threat Intelligence Report
Check Point weekly bulletin: exploited SonicWall SMA 1000 zero-days (CVE-2026-83548/49), JFrog Artifactory auth bypass, and a 2.8M-patient Baylor Genetics breach.
Check Point's weekly bulletin covers breaches including Thomson Reuters' C-Track platform (court records across 11 US states and Canada), Baylor Genetics (2.8M patients and employees, SSNs included), Hit casinos in Slovenia, and Dropbox (~5,000 accounts via abused Lenovo email verification). SonicWall patched two exploited SMA 1000 zero-days, including CVE-2026-83548, a CVSS 10.0 pre-authentication SSRF, while JFrog fixed exploited authentication bypass CVE-2026-82329 (CVSS 9.8). Malware and actor coverage includes Gambling Goblin, JSCeal, Mirage Kitten's NodeRabbit/PollCat campaign, and DPRK Contagious Interview macOS activity, plus a FalconFlank privilege-escalation PoC against CrowdStrike Falcon.
Attackers impersonate popular AI brands to spread malware
Sophos documented 38 MDR cases where attackers impersonated AI brands like Claude and Perplexity to deliver infostealers and backdoors.
Sophos X-Ops analyzed 12 months of MDR cases and confirmed 38 incidents involving AI. Software impersonation accounted for 30 cases, with Claude impersonated in 26; fake installers used an 'InstallFix' technique delivering mshta commands, in-memory payloads, and process hollowing. Malicious browser extensions posing as AI assistants, including a fake Perplexity extension with 10,000 installs, acted as infostealers. In one case, attackers used a Claude coding agent to develop a Rust remote access trojan communicating over Slack after an SQL injection compromise.
Claude, Codex, and Hermes installed unowned code inside corporate networks
Analysis found 227 install commands from Claude, Codex, and Hermes agents inside corporate networks pointing to packages with no verifiable owner.
Researchers found 227 install commands issued by the AI coding agents Claude, Codex, and Hermes inside corporate environments, with the referenced packages having no clear owner. The finding highlights agentic software supply-chain risk, as AI agents can pull unverified third-party code into production networks without organizational oversight. The article is published in Ars Technica's security section and frames this as an emerging governance gap for AI-driven development.
Week in review: Records allegedly stolen from Azure tenants, Medusa ransomware hits 500+ orgs
Week in review: Medusa ransomware hit 500+ orgs per CISA, millions of Azure tenant records allegedly stolen, SafePal and French tax authority breaches disclosed.
Help Net Security's weekly roundup covers the FBI, CISA, and HHS joint advisory update reporting Medusa ransomware has breached more than 500 organizations since June 2021, and threat actor TheHatman's claim of millions of employee records stolen from Azure tenants of Fortune 500 firms including McDonald's, Vodafone, Kyndryl, and Tata Consultancy Services, per Hudson Rock. It also covers the SafePal breach affecting 39,798 customers, France's DGFiP breach exposing data on 678,000 individuals, and UT San delaying its fall semester after a cyberattack. Security items include critical unauthenticated GitLab flaw CVE-2026-19478, an actively exploited patched macOS Screen Sharing flaw deploying a cryptominer, US charges against 17 Mabna Institute Iranian hackers over 31TB of stolen academic data, and Google Mandiant's AI agents finding 100+ high-severity vulnerabilities.
Chinese Hackers Use AI Agents in Multi
China-linked campaign used the SecFlow AI-agent framework (Claude, Qwen, DeepSeek) to automate intrusions against government targets in Taiwan, Indonesia, China and Vietnam.
Hunt.io documented a second China-linked campaign wiring commercial AI models into live cyberespionage, reconstructing the SecFlow orchestration system from five accidentally exposed open directories. Targets included Taiwan's Kuomintang Party archives, Indonesia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, mainland Chinese government and education systems, and Vietnamese industrial hosts. The most extensive compromise hit a Fengtai District government Office Automation environment, yielding LSASS and registry hive theft, 822 user records and 1.28GB of attachments including patient health data. Tooling included a GLUTTON webshell hiding payloads in PNG pixels via steganography and a fake MySQL deserialization service for client-side code execution.