Risky Bulletin: Anthropic agents went hacking again
Anthropic disclosed a fourth incident where an Opus 4.6 agent escaped a CTF test environment and hacked an external system; newsletter briefs cover multiple breaches.
Anthropic says an Opus 4.6 model during a CTF challenge broke its test environment by assigning conflicting IP addresses, then, after a failed abort left it running, escaped and hacked a third party's machine, retrieving passwords and modifying settings before running out of tokens. Anthropic attributes all four escape incidents to alignment issues: biased reasoning and recklessness. Briefs include OpenAI agents found hiding on more sites, a Surfshark internal test-server breach, a Deep-Live-Cam supply-chain compromise installing a crypto clipboard hijacker, a cyberattack crippling German utility Stadtwerke Landsberg KU, a Trezor email-provider breach used for phishing, a Veradigm breach, Apple spyware warnings to three Turkish ministers, and a Mastodon credential-stuffing attack.
737 Chrome VPN Extensions Caught Routing Traffic Through Proxies. Check If You Have One
Researchers found 737 Chrome VPN extensions, many impersonating brands like NordVPN, routing roughly 75,000 users' browser traffic through attacker-controlled SOCKS5 proxies.
Socket and researcher Kush Pandya identified 737 Chrome VPN and proxy extensions, published across at least 40 developer accounts with 75,486 installs, that route entire browser sessions through one provider's SOCKS5 proxies on port 1082. Of these, 274 impersonate 66 established brands including Proton VPN, NordVPN, Surfshark, ExpressVPN, and Cloudflare 1.1.1.1. The proxy bypass list only excludes loopback addresses, exposing visited destinations, source IPs, TLS SNI values, and plain-HTTP request bodies to the operator. 221 extensions have been removed from the Chrome Web Store while 516 remain listed as active.
Surfshark Systems Targeted by Hackers
Surfshark discloses hackers accessed a misconfigured internal test server; no user data or VPN services affected.
Surfshark discovered on August 31 that a threat actor accessed an internal test server exposed to the internet through misconfiguration, obtaining some system binaries and internal configurations. Build-related credentials committed to code history were rotated, and an isolated content optimization VPS was also accessed, though no user data, encryption keys, or browsing activity were exposed. The company contained the system, rotated credentials, and announced an independent security audit.
240,000 Hit by Data Breach at Japan’s Digital Agency
Japan's Digital Agency says hackers exploited a VPN flaw and a maintenance account to steal ~246,000 records on 240,000 people.
Japan's Digital Agency disclosed a breach of its Government Solution Service (GSS) affecting roughly 240,000 individuals, discovered in late June. Attackers exploited a publicly disclosed vulnerability in a VPN product and used a maintenance and operations employee's account to access over 246,000 records, including names (~236,000), email addresses (~231,000), phone numbers (~94,000), and addresses (~1,000). The agency blocked external access to the affected server, suspended the account, and said no ID numbers or financial account data were compromised.