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Hackers Deploy Agentic AI to Automate Exploitation and Mass Credential Harvesting

Google GTIG documents a financially motivated actor using a multi-agent AI framework to automate credential harvesting, compromising over 23,800 secrets within hours.

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) documented a financially motivated actor that compromised an unnamed organization's cloud infrastructure and used a multi-agent AI framework to automate vulnerability scanning, credential harvesting, troubleshooting, and IP rotation. The operation went from planning to mass credential compromise in under six hours, harvesting more than 23,800 secrets including cloud and AI-service API keys via an exposed C2 dashboard called 'Recon'. The actor directed specialized agents using an AI coding chatbot and Markdown instruction files such as AGENTS.KNOWLEDGE.md and agentic_vuln_research.md. Google has not observed fully autonomous zero-day exploitation; the shift automates labor-intensive tasks like reconnaissance, account validation, and infrastructure management, sharply shrinking detection windows.

GBHackers · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild1

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.

Security Affairs · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild

Hackers Use Autonomous AI Agents to Harvest Thousands of Credentials in Under 6 Hours

Google Cloud documents a financially motivated actor using autonomous AI agents on a compromised cloud tenant to harvest 23,800+ credentials in under six hours.

Google Cloud reports that an attacker compromised a victim's cloud environment and deployed a multi-agent framework driven by preconfigured Markdown playbooks to autonomously handle vulnerability scanning, credential collection, error troubleshooting, and IP rotation. An exposed command-and-control server hosted the 'Recon' framework with a live dashboard managing over 23,800 harvested secrets, including cloud and AI-service API keys. The report also ties DUSTMAKER to UNC6780/TeamPCP, targeting AI development tools and CI/CD systems via trojanized MCP packages such as tiktoken_mcp. Google has disabled linked assets and updated protections after the actors' operational security failures.

Cyber Security News · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

AI agents help compress ransomware intrusion to under 10 hours, raising stakes for CISOs

Unit 42 reports AI agents compressed a ransomware intrusion from weeks to under 10 hours, using 50+ MITRE ATT&CK techniques against an enterprise network.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 investigated a ransomware incident where AI agents moved through an enterprise network in under 10 hours, work that would have taken human operators roughly two weeks. The attacker entered via a public-facing API endpoint, used automated reconnaissance to map microservices, searched source-code repositories for credentials, and accessed a secrets-management system. They hijacked enterprise code workflows to exfiltrate cloud access keys, attempted Terraform backdoors (blocked by branch protections), and used stolen credentials to access the victim's own AI services as attack infrastructure. Over 50 MITRE ATT&CK techniques were observed; the actor confirmed using frontier AI models and agentic frameworks during negotiations.

CSO Online · 13d agoThreat actor in the wild

China-Linked Hackers Use AI Agents in Autonomous Attack on Taiwan

Suspected Chinese hackers used eight AI agents to autonomously breach Taiwan government networks, compromising 85+ accounts and stealing 2,500 personnel records.

Israeli cybersecurity firm Dream documented what appears to be the first fully autonomous, end-to-end AI hacking operation against a government target, suspected to be Taiwan, in early July. The toolkit, built from open-source agent frameworks Hermes and OpenClaw, deployed up to eight agents that mapped 21 government systems, compromised at least 85 accounts, and extracted over 2,500 personnel records before expanding to a nuclear safety agency and at least seven energy companies. Operators bypassed the model's guardrails by framing the entire campaign as an authorized penetration test. Dream found a 160MB, 1,395-file archive containing the deliberately assembled multi-agent weapon.

Security Affairs · Aug 12, 2026Threat actor in the wild2

Human Attacker Exploits Marimo RCE, Reaches SSH Bastion in Eight Seconds

Sysdig documents a skilled human attacker exploiting Marimo pre-auth RCE CVE-2026-39987 (CVSS 9.3), reaching an SSH bastion in eight seconds without AI tooling.

Sysdig detailed exploitation of CVE-2026-39987 (CVSS 9.3), a pre-authenticated RCE affecting all Marimo versions that came under active exploitation within hours of disclosure. A human operator used a hand-written Python script to harvest an AWS key from Secrets Manager and SSH into a bastion host in eight seconds, issuing 850+ commands over nine hours. Separately, Hunt.io disclosed an XMRig cryptomining campaign compromising 3,562 Redis servers via SLAVEOF rogue replication and AOF authorized_keys injection. Operation CameraSwarm, linked to a single operator, compromised over 14,000 Dahua IP cameras using CVE-2021-33044 and CVE-2021-33045.

The Hacker News · 1d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 4 sourcesCVE-2026-39987CVE-2021-33044CVE-2021-33045

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.

Wiz Blog · 7d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-59822CVE-2026-598211

Malicious LiteLLM Releases Tied to Trivy Hack May Have Exposed 2,100+ Organizations

Malicious LiteLLM 1.82.7/1.82.8 PyPI releases tied to the Trivy TeamPCP campaign harvested cloud, SSH, and database credentials, potentially exposing 2,500+ organizations.

CloudSEK reported that two malicious LiteLLM releases on PyPI (versions 1.82.7 and 1.82.8, live about 40 minutes on March 24) harvested cloud keys, SSH keys, Kubernetes tokens, and database passwords, with captured loot files mapping potential exposure to more than 2,500 organizations including NVIDIA, Cisco, Deloitte, Volkswagen, FedEx, Siemens, and X Corp. The campaign is part of TeamPCP (tracked by Google as UNC6780), linked to the Aqua Security Trivy scanner compromise tracked as CVE-2026-33634 and added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on March 26. The payload used a litellm_init.pth file executed at Python interpreter startup and exfiltrated secrets to models.litellm[.]cloud; the FBI's FLASH-20260702-01 advisory urged rotation of CI/CD, publishing, and cloud credentials.

The Hacker News · Aug 12, 2026Data breach in the wildCVE-2026-33634

AI agents carried out every step of this ransomware attack – then left the victim an 80-page security audit

Unit 42 says a human attacker used AI agents to execute a full ransomware intrusion in under 10 hours, leaving the victim an 80-page security audit.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 incident responders report a human ransomware operator used frontier AI models and agentic attack frameworks to breach an enterprise in under 10 hours, work that normally takes human operators around two weeks. AI agents performed reconnaissance, breached a public API endpoint to tunnel into the network, scraped code repositories for hard-coded tokens and service passwords, then used them to steal master administrative credentials from the secret-management system for root access. Specialist pivot agents validated access to cloud, identity, CI/CD, container and SaaS environments, and the attacker hijacked CI/CD workflows to steal cloud keys and turn the victim's cloud AI services into post-compromise infrastructure. The agents left an 80-page audit detailing dozens of exploited findings.

The Register · Security · 14d agoRansomware in the wild

Hackers Weaponize Agentic AI to Automate Reconnaissance, Exploitation and Post-Exploitation

Google GTIG reports threat actors using agentic AI to automate reconnaissance, exploit selection, and credential harvesting, compromising thousands of secrets.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's Q3 2026 AI Threat Tracker documents threat actors operationalizing agentic AI: in one Mandiant investigation, a financially motivated actor built and executed a credential-harvesting operation in under six hours, with an exposed 'Recon' framework managing more than 23,800 harvested secrets including cloud and AI-service API keys. A Chinese-speaking actor tracked as knaithe used a DeepSeek-powered Hermes Agent for automated reconnaissance and vulnerability enumeration, pivoting from Langflow to n8n and enabling manual exploitation of exposed Citrix NetScaler, Marimo, Apache Tomcat, and VPN infrastructure. Operators harvested Citrix session cookies from process memory to bypass MFA, obtained AWS credentials from compromised Marimo instances, and deployed the Go-based NKAbuse backdoor, with reported RCE and data exfiltration. Google notes fully autonomous end-to-end AI attack pipelines have not yet been observed in the wild.

GBHackers · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild2

AI Coding Tools Now a Prime Target for Threat Actors, Google Warns

Google Threat Intelligence Group warns threat actors increasingly target AI coding tools and proprietary AI data, with UNC6780's Dustmaker enabling large-scale supply chain compromises.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's September 8 report says AI-assisted coding tools have become prime targets, contributing to large-scale software supply chain compromises in 2025 and early 2026. Financially motivated group UNC6780 used its Dustmaker credential stealer to extract tokens from GitHub Actions runner memory and compromise packages across PyPI, npm, and Docker Hub, then sold harvested AI tool credentials to other criminals. Chinese nation-state actor UNC6508 conducted espionage against proprietary AI research at North American academic, medical, and military institutions, while extortion gangs stole models, prompts, and source code in Q2 2026. GTIG also documented agentic attacker experimentation, including an autonomous multi-agent credential harvesting campaign built in under six hours and a 'Recon' C2 framework managing over 23,800 harvested secrets.

Infosecurity Magazine · 8d agoThreat actor in the wild 2 sources1

An AI-Assisted Cyber Attack: Inside a Unit 42 Investigation

Unit 42 investigated a ransom attack in which frontier AI agents autonomously breached an enterprise network, compressing weeks of tradecraft into under 10 hours.

Unit 42 incident responders documented an intrusion where a single human operator directed frontier AI agents to breach an enterprise network autonomously as part of a ransom attack. The agents executed more than 50 MITRE ATT&CK techniques in under 10 hours, work that would normally require roughly two weeks of human red-team effort. They breached a public-facing web service, mapped internal microservices, scraped hard-coded secrets from code repositories, harvested root credentials from the secrets manager, and hijacked CI/CD builds to exfiltrate cloud access keys. The attacker also used stolen cloud keys to repurpose the victim's AI endpoints as post-compromise infrastructure and left behind an 80-page AI-generated security audit documenting dozens of exploited findings.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 14d agoThreat actor in the wild

Threat actors are coming for your AI assets to operationalize their use of AI

Google GTIG reports espionage and crime groups stealing AI models, prompts, and API credentials, plus distillation campaigns and agentic AI attack automation.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's quarterly AI Threat Tracker reports adversaries stealing proprietary models, source code, prompts, and API credentials from government, healthcare, and media targets, including China-based UNC6508 compromising clouds to run unauthorized LLM workloads. Distillation campaigns against Google's models exceeded 100 million prompts launched via thousands of stolen account credentials through proxy networks. Mandiant also observed a financially motivated actor deploy an autonomous multi-agent framework that harvested thousands of third-party credentials in under 6 hours, and a 'Recon' framework on a live C2 server managing over 23,000 stolen credentials including cloud and AI API keys.

CSO Online · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

AI-Generated Exploit Scripts Target Siemens S7 PLCs in U.S. Critical Infrastructure

NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE and EPA warn that actors use AI-generated Python scripts to exploit internet-exposed Siemens S7 PLCs at U.S. critical infrastructure.

A joint advisory from NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE and EPA describes an active threat in which AI-generated exploit scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools target Siemens S7 Series PLCs (S7-200 through S7-1500, including F-series safety controllers). The actors use Censys and ZoomEye scanning to find internet-exposed, outdated PLCs and a custom Python script using snap7 libraries over the S7comm protocol for initial access, credential access and denial of service; no attribution was given. Targeted sectors include Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Water and Wastewater, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities, with potential for process disruption and cascading impacts. A related Dream report details a near-autonomous AI-agent campaign (July 1-4, 2026, 12 waves) against Taiwan government entities, using Hermes and OpenClaw agents with eight parallel sub-agents to crack 85 accounts via password spraying and exfiltrate over 2,564 personnel records, SSO client secrets and database credentials.

The Hacker News · 26d agoExploit / PoC in the wild1

Risky Bulletin: Two TeamPCP members arrested in Australia

Australian Federal Police arrested two alleged TeamPCP members behind supply-chain worm attacks that stole over 500,000 credentials from compromised open-source libraries.

The AFP arrested alleged TeamPCP leader Ruben Thomson, 21, and Louis Gaebler, 23, near Perth; both were charged and remain in custody. The group inserted a self-spreading credential-stealing worm into open-source projects including Trivy, KICS, LiteLLM, and Telnyx, harvesting more than 500,000 credentials used for network access, ransomware, extortion, and sales. About 78,000 tokens and secrets from nearly 2,200 organizations leaked online last month, and the FBI supported the investigation that began in April.

Risky Business News · 19d agoPolicy & legal in the wild1

Researchers observe first ‘near-autonomous’ AI attack on government target in Taiwan

Dream researchers observed the first near-autonomous AI attack on a government target, with suspected Chinese hackers stealing 2,500+ Taiwan records.

Israeli firm Dream reported that suspected Chinese hackers used open-source AI models to run a near-autonomous cyberattack against Taiwan's government, extracting over 2,500 personnel records. The framework, built on Hermes and OpenClaw, adapted mid-operation without human intervention, ran autonomous 'Learning Cycles' researching applicable vulnerabilities, and expanded to supply chain vendors, a nuclear safety agency, a government email system, and seven-plus energy companies. Attackers bypassed safety guardrails by framing the work as authorized penetration testing. Dream discovered the operation via a 160MB online archive of nearly 1,400 files.

CyberScoop · Aug 12, 2026Threat actor in the wild

14 Trojanized npm Packages Drop RedC2 4.0 Linux Backdoor With AI

Trend Micro found 14 trojanized npm calendar utilities delivering RedC2 4.0, an AI-powered cross-platform backdoor sold for $99.99.

Trend Micro's TrendAI identified 14 functional but trojanized npm packages (streak-*, kit-map-vim, map-streak-kit) that load a bundled Linux implant, the RedShell beacon of RedC2 4.0, without requiring install hooks. RedC2 4.0, sold by Red Offsec for $99.99 and advertised on Hack Forums by actor MarlboroMan in June 2026, offers shell access, credential theft, SOCKS5 proxying, in-memory execution, and an LLM-driven component called Red Agent for natural-language post-exploitation. The framework has evolved from version 2.0 in August 2025 through 4.0, with the Linux beacon introduced in the latest release.

The Hacker News · 23d agoMalware in the wild

Microsoft's August 2026 Patch Tuesday addresses 398 CVEs (CVE-2026-68820)

Tenable reports Microsoft's August 2026 Patch Tuesday addresses 398 CVEs including three zero-days, one exploited in the wild (CVE-2026-68820).

Microsoft patched 398 CVEs in its August 2026 Patch Tuesday release, with 42 rated critical, 355 important, and one moderate, and three zero-days among them. One zero-day is confirmed as exploited in the wild. The release covers components including .NET, .NET Framework, Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS), Azure services, and Windows. Tenable's count omits two CVEs assigned by MITRE, CVE-2026-6726 and CVE-2026-6727.

Tenable Blog · Aug 11, 2026Vulnerability in the wildCVE-2026-68820CVE-2026-6726CVE-2026-67271

OpenAI Agents Linked to RubyGems Campaign That Gained RCE on RubyDoc Servers

Researchers attribute the May 2026 RubyGems spam campaign to OpenAI agents that gained RCE on RubyDoc.info servers and exfiltrated UK government data.

Researchers report the May 2026 RubyGems campaign, in which over 2,000 junk packages were uploaded between May 11-12, 2026, was driven by a swarm of OpenAI agents, evidenced by 'oai' package names and shared tooling with earlier DseWiki-hijacking agents. The agents abused the .yardopts evaluation in RubyDoc.info's documentation builds to achieve arbitrary remote code execution, scraped public data from ModernGov portals used by Lambeth, Wandsworth, and Southwark, and exfiltrated it by publishing gems back to the registry. They also attempted to steal other users' API keys and exploited an unpatched CDN caching bug (CVSS 7.3, no CVE) on May 12, 2026, which RubyGems fixed in July 2026. Six packages used the CDN flaw, with no confirmed successful key theft reported.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 22h agofirst · 4d agoThreat actor in the wild 8 sources1

Hackers Mass-Scan Exposed Vite Servers to Steal AWS and Azure Cloud Credentials

F5 honeypots record mass scanning of exposed Vite dev servers exploiting CVE-2026-39364 to harvest AWS and Azure cloud credentials.

F5 honeypots recorded 807 session-grouped attacks and roughly 32,000 raw events in August 2026 against internet-exposed Vite development servers, up from 1,732 events in the previous three months. Scanners abused CVE-2026-39364 (Vite 7.1.0-7.3.1, 8.0.0-8.0.4), bypassing server.fs.deny via @fs routes with ?raw/?import query parameters and double encoding to read .env files, AWS SSO caches, Azure tokens, and Terraform state. The same infrastructure also probed CVE-2025-29927 (Next.js), CVE-2025-30208, CVE-2025-31125 (KEV-listed January 2026), and CVE-2024-45811. Most traffic originated from Google Cloud IP ranges, with the US accounting for 17,297 events.

Cyber Security Newsupdated · 1d agofirst · 2d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 4 sourcesCVE-2026-39364CVE-2025-29927CVE-2025-30208+2 CVEs1

Chinese AI firms are siphoning capabilities from American models, CISA warns

CISA, NSA and FBI warn Chinese AI firms including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI extracted billions of tokens from US frontier models via distillation campaigns.

A joint CISA, NSA and FBI advisory says China-based firms including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI have run industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns against US frontier models such as Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since at least late 2024, likely with Chinese government knowledge. The campaigns used gray-market API proxies called transfer stations, premium account pools and traffic routing to bypass restrictions, evade safeguards and exfiltrate billions of tokens used to train models like DeepSeek R1/V3 and Kimi. The agencies challenge DeepSeek's reported $5.6 million training cost and recommend identity verification, usage monitoring, response variation, differential privacy and indicator sharing as defenses.

Help Net Security · 7d agoAdvisory in the wild1

PaperCut Attacker Uses Hundreds of AI Agents to Compromise 440+ Instances

GreyNoise and Blackpoint tracked an AI-assisted actor using OpenAI Codex and DeepSeek agents to exploit PaperCut flaws across 440+ instances in 48 countries.

A suspected Russian-speaking actor exploited the CVE-2026-81578 authentication bypass and CVE-2026-82078 RCE chain in PaperCut NG/MF, compromising at least 440 instances across 395 organizations in 48 countries, heavily targeting education in the US, UK, France, and elsewhere. The actor used hundreds of AI agents powered by OpenAI Codex and DeepSeek plus tools like Mimikatz, SharpHound, Certipy, Rubeus, and Impacket, reaching domain admin at 12 victims and full domain admin at a US high school within seven minutes. Post-exploitation included registry hive collection and Metasploit/Meterpreter payloads, with origin traced to IP 45.142.193.132.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild 7 sourcesCVE-2026-81578CVE-2026-820781

One Attacker Has Scraped Both Salesforce and ServiceNow Portals Since 2025

Reco tracks the City Forum campaign: one Contabo VPS has scraped Salesforce and ServiceNow guest portals across finance, telecom and public sector since March 2025.

Reco researchers identified infrastructure at 158.220.87.79, a Contabo VPS using Go's default net/http user agent, that has harvested records from Salesforce Experience Cloud and ServiceNow customer portals across telecom, financial services, enterprise software and public sector targets for over a year. The tool abuses over-privileged persistent guest users, enumerating Salesforce Aura sites (560,000+ events at one target), probing Lightning Web Runtime via the UI-API across API versions v56.0-v66.0, and hitting the poorly documented ServiceNow Service Portal search endpoint. No named victims or actor attribution yet, and activity is ongoing with rising volume. Defenders are advised to hunt the Go-http-client user agent and specific IP in Salesforce Event Monitoring logs and syslog_transaction on ServiceNow, then tighten guest sharing rules and Knowledge Base read criteria.

The Hacker News · 29d agoThreat actor in the wild1

APT36 Suspected in PATCHCORD Espionage Campaign Using Google Sheets C2

Acronis links the PATCHCORD espionage campaign targeting Afghan telecom and South Asian critical infrastructure to APT36 with moderate confidence.

Acronis Threat Research Unit documented PATCHCORD, a previously undocumented C/C++ backdoor delivered via fake VPN installers impersonating Afghan Telecom (AFTEL), which hijacks Edge, Chrome and Firefox shortcuts for persistence and executes in-memory shellcode. A related Go implant, SHEETCORD, abuses the Google Sheets API for per-victim C2 and was distributed via a domain impersonating India's National Informatics Centre, while a third tool, HACKERAI C2 Agent, uses GitHub Gists and shows signs of LLM-assisted coding. An exposed staging server revealed SuperShell, RAT frameworks, credential-harvesting tools and OpenSSH exploit code, and the researchers attribute the activity to APT36/Transparent Tribe at moderate confidence.

Security Affairs · Aug 16, 2026Threat actor in the wild

Red Heron Exploits Gitea RCE to Compromise 13 Organizations Across Six Countries

China-linked Red Heron exploited Gitea RCE CVE-2026-60004 to compromise 13 organizations across six countries, stealing source code.

Acronis Threat Research Unit attributes a China-nexus actor tracked as Red Heron to rapid exploitation of Gitea RCE CVE-2026-60004, scanning 1,386 instances across seven countries plus 477 Taiwan-based systems, with confirmed compromises of 13 organizations in Canada, Argentina, Taiwan, the U.S., Qatar, and Sri Lanka. Within days of the July 2026 disclosure, the actor weaponized a public PoC into an automated Python framework registering accounts, exploiting servers, stealing repositories, and removing traces, then deployed the JITTERLY C++ Linux implant (30+ post-exploitation commands) and the undocumented SIXZUT LD_PRELOAD rootkit. In one Taiwanese environment the actor reached root-level access across a three-node Proxmox cluster, targeting defense, elections, energy, aerospace, telecom, government, and research sectors.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 1d agofirst · 2d agoThreat actor in the wild 3 sourcesCVE-2026-60004