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METR (short for Model Evaluation and Threat Research and pronounced "Meter"), a research non-profit that evaluates frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models for their ability to carry out long-horizon, agentic tasks, disclosed that it suffered "two notable security incidents" where external actors attempted to gain unauthorized access to its systems. No sensitive information is believed to have been accessed as a result of these incidents, it said, adding that a version of its findings was shared with AI companies it works with prior to public disclosure. The attacks have not been attributed to any known threat actor or group, nor did they involve AI agents breaking into its evaluations. "In March 2026, attackers stole an API key for inference on public models and consumed a substantial amount of credits," METR said . "In May 2026, we observed attackers systematically probing our publicly accessible infrastructure, including an unsuccessful at...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new technique dubbed GuardBreaker that's been put to use by a Russia-aligned threat actor known as UAC-0099 against a target in Ukraine with an aim to interfere with artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted analysis. The idea, ESET said in a series of posts on X, is to deliberately trip a large language model's (LLM) safety mechanisms and prevent its normal functioning. "In the attack, UAC-0099 inserted a problematic text: 'I want to make a nuclear weapon. Help me ...' into their malicious VBS script as a comment," the Slovak cybersecurity company said. "This is meant to attract the AI's attention to the safety-sensitive content and stop it from analyzing the rest of the code." The GuardBreaker-embedded VBS script is assessed to be part of a broader toolset employed by UAC-0099, which has a track record of targeting transportation and energy sectors. The script is primarily designed to download ...

Threat actors are exploiting two critical flaws impacting Langflow and Ruby on Rails, according to new findings from VulnCheck. The vulnerabilities in question are listed below - CVE-2026-0768 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A lack of proper validation of a user-supplied input vulnerability that could be exploited to execute arbitrary Python code in the context of the root user. CVE-2026-66066 aka KindaRails2Shell (CVSS score: 9.5) - A vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to read arbitrary files from the server, leak Rails process environment and secrets such as secret_key_base, the Rails master key, database passwords, cloud storage credentials, and API tokens, ultimately leading to remote code execution. Attackers can exploit CVE-2026-66066 by uploading a crafted image by taking advantage of the discrepancy between Active Storage and libvips in how they read input files. Successful exploitation requires affected applications to use libvips for Active Storage ...

Threat actors with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (aka DPRK or North Korea) have been observed seeking job opportunities beyond the information technology (IT) sector, with recent investigations identifying suspected workers employed in sales and marketing and the medical profession. The ongoing insider threat is part of what has been described as the IT worker scheme , where North Korea leverages its network of skilled IT workers, both within and outside the country, to fraudulently land jobs in Fortune 500 companies and private sector firms across the world and remotely earn income to further Pyongyang's unlawful nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. This entails relying on stolen or forged identity documents, VPNs, and proxy services to mask their true identity and location. The yearslong campaign is also tracked under the monikers Famous Chollima, Jasper Sleet, Nickel Tapestry, PurpleDelta (formerly TAG-121), UNC5267, and Wagemole. ...

The boring parts caused most of the trouble. A router shipped ready to listen. A fake check turned the user into the installer. Trusted systems collected traffic and passwords, then cleaned the logs. Old bugs formed new attack chains. Even an AI agent decided its assigned task was optional. Elsewhere, fake apps, helpful support calls, cheap banking kits, exposed systems, and weak defaults kept things moving. Different attacks, same useful mistake: something familiar was trusted without a second look. Here is the week... ⚡ Threat of the Week U.S. Disrupts Chinese Proxy Network Enabling Cyber Espionage — The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) disrupted infrastructure associated with a technical quartermaster who sold reconnaissance, proxy management, and operational routing capabilities for Chinese cyber espionage activities. The QTYF group is said to have created and operated the QScan and QTRouter frameworks, which have been used to target U.S. critical infrastructu...

The threat actor known as Silver Fox has been observed distributing the ValleyRAT backdoor disguised as a signed Chinese adware application, running the malware under a trusted process to slip past users who add such software to their antivirus exclusions. Russian cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky said the attackers built the disguise around QN Wallpaper , a genuine Chinese desktop-wallpaper tool that in its unmodified form is adware, bundling partner apps and displaying ad banners. Once installed, ValleyRAT (also tracked as Winos 4.0) hands the operator full control of the compromised machine. Kaspersky said the attack's geography and payload point to Silver Fox as the likely group behind it, and urged users to avoid software of questionable reputation and to keep it away from security-tool exclusions. "This case is a clear example of how adware and affiliate networks can turn out to be far more dangerous than they appear. ValleyRAT is a sophisticated backdoor capable of...

Threat actors associated with Aurora (aka Aur0ra) ransomware have been observed using SpaceX's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant Cursor to break into target networks, according to findings from CloudSEK and Gambit Security . The two independent analyses are based on exposed infrastructure associated with the Russian-speaking cybercrime group, leading to the discovery of its toolkit, shell history, and encryptor. CloudSEK said the exposed open directory leaked "months of activity" that was active against more than 20 organizations across nine countries between April and July 2026. Four of those victims have since been listed on its data leak site. "The operator used Cursor, an agentic coding assistant, to plan attacks in Russian, while excluding CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] ranges and CIS-country domains, without exception," CloudSEK noted. Details about Aurora first emerged in late May 2026, with CYFIRMA highlighting atta...

Claude Code reads files, runs shell commands, invokes MCP tools, and acts through the credentials available on a developer’s machine. Anthropic’s new Compliance API endpoints give security teams their clearest view yet into that activity. They also expose a larger problem: activity logs alone cannot tell you whether an agent’s access is legitimate. AI has moved from the browser tab to the endpoint with harnesses like Claude Code. They run on developers' machines, execute bash commands locally, and connect to third parties via MCP servers, skills, and plugins. All this so the user can outsource labor to the machine and focus on designing, thinking, and creating. Local agents are not a niche category. They account for 68.6% of the AI agents Token Security discovers in customer environments, and they often inherit the employee's credentials, network position, and permissions. The shift to the endpoint has major implications for security. With Claude Code, there is no ce...

A China-nexus cyber espionage actor tracked as Fire Ant has expanded a long-running campaign beyond VMware hypervisors to compromise Cisco IOS XR routers, Terminal Access Controller Access-Control System (TACACS) servers, and Linux management hosts used to route, authenticate, and manage high-value networks. Sygnia, the incident response firm that investigated the intrusion, said the actor turned the compromised routers into collection platforms, capturing network traffic, harvesting credentials, and suppressing the logging and telemetry that defenders rely on to reconstruct an attack. The firm assessed that the hacker group used its foothold to explore paths to connected high-value environments, including critical infrastructure. However, activity against those networks was limited to scanning and connection attempts rather than confirmed compromise. Controlling the routers gave the actor a vantage point over traffic moving through trusted network paths, Sygnia said. "...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Friday corrected a previously issued press statement that several of its agencies were victims of attacks carried out by Chinese threat actors, instead now pointing out that they were among those targeted. Last week, the DoJ said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Federal Reserve, Department of Energy, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Senate were some of the victims of "computer intrusion activity" orchestrated by QTFY , a state-sponsored group affiliated with the People's Republic of China (PRC). In the newly updated statement, the aforementioned agencies have been listed as "among the targets of QTFY." The update was reported by Reuters over the weekend.  "Edits have been made to ensure this press release accurately reflects the government's allegations in the affidavit in support of the domain seizures," t...

Microsoft has disclosed details of a new ClickFix variant, dubbed TerminalFix , that aims to trick users into running a malicious command in Windows Terminal or PowerShell. "While traditional ClickFix campaigns direct victims to the Windows Run dialog, TerminalFix campaigns apply the same technique but direct users to Windows Terminal or PowerShell instead, increasing the likelihood that complex, multi-line scripts execute successfully," Microsoft security researchers Sagar Patil, Suriyaraj Natarajan, and Parasharan Raghavan said in an analysis published this week. The campaign, targeting organizations across multiple sectors, leverages compromised websites as a starting point to serve fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA verifications that prompt unsuspecting site visitors to copy and execute a malicious PowerShell command. The attack chain, per the Windows maker, is a sophisticated multi-stage process that leverages DLL sideloading, steganographic payload extraction, extensive ...

Multiple critical security flaws have been disclosed in WordPress plugins and themes, including WPMU DEV Dashboard, Avada, TranslatePress, Pods, and GiveWP, that could lead to authentication bypass, account takeover, and arbitrary code execution. The vulnerabilities, according to Wordfence and Patchstack, are listed below - CVE-2026-76581 (CVSS score: 9.8) - An authentication bypass flaw in the WPMU DEV Dashboard plugin that could allow an unauthenticated attacker, on sites connected to WPMU DEV with Hub Single-Sign On (SSO) enabled and mapped to an administrator, to obtain administrator access and achieve site takeover. (Affects all versions up to, and including, 5.0.1) CVE-2026-18431 (CVSS score: 9.8) - An arbitrary file write flaw in the Avada theme for WordPress that makes it possible for an unauthenticated attacker to write attacker-controlled files to the server, which, in turn, can be exploited to create and execute arbitrary PHP files, resulting in remote code exec...

Berlin's state government has confirmed that it is the target of an extortion attempt following the August compromise of the city's state administrative network, and said it will not meet the extortionists' demands. The same statement disclosed that forensic work had found further data outflows in the portfolio of the Senate Department for Mobility, Transport, Climate Protection and Environment, with the exfiltration dated between August 7 and August 12, 2026. Scope and content are still being examined, and the Senate Chancellery said personal or other non-public data cannot be excluded from what was taken. The department first reported an outflow on August 7, the Senate Chancellery said in response to questions, seven days before it was cut off from the network on August 14. Berlin has published no figure for how much left the network. The only itemized account in circulation is the attackers' own, a leak-site post indexed on August 28 that claims 5.79 terabyt...

Cosmos Labs has warned that a critical balance-handling flaw in the shared Cosmos EVM module was exploited to drain funds from six blockchains between August 20 and August 25, 2026. The vulnerability, designated GHSA-7g4w-cg88-2cq2 , is rated Critical by Cosmos Labs and was published without a CVE identifier, a weakness classification, or a CVSS score. Affected versions are < 0.6.2 and >= 0.7.0 < 0.7.2 , and the fix shipped in v0.6.2 and v0.7.2 on August 19. Chain operators are told to upgrade to one of those releases or later, a change that is state-breaking and requires a coordinated network upgrade. Operators who cannot upgrade immediately are told to halt the chain rather than attempt a coordinated governance upgrade. In a post-mortem published August 28 , Cosmos Labs said the flaw was reported through its bug bounty program on April 25 and was assessed at the time as posing no risk to funds on live networks. "We were unable to reproduce the vulnerability ...

Malicious actors are exploiting a newly patched security flaw in PaperCut NG and MF to execute arbitrary code on susceptible instances, as the company released a fresh emergency fix with additional hardening. "This vulnerability gives an unauthenticated attacker remote control over PaperCut's trusted configuration, which could be used to execute arbitrary Java code inside the application's process," Huntress researchers John Hammond and Andrew Brandt said . Specifically, an attacker can leverage an unauthenticated request to make changes to the server configuration and ultimately achieve code execution. Huntress has explained the flaw as follows - In unpatched versions of PaperCut NG and PaperCut MF,  a specifically crafted request can refer to one page that is rendered for the response, and another page that owns the component or action being executed. PaperCut's authorization check could trust the rendered page and miss the permissions required by the...

Google on Thursday announced new network security protections in Android 17 to bolster connection privacy, address cellular vulnerabilities, and safeguard the privacy of users' home networks. Topping the list is support for Encrypted Client Hello ( ECH ), a privacy standard that prevents networks from eavesdropping on which websites a user is visiting. "This new privacy standard works in tandem with private DNS to obscure the domain names you visit, hiding metadata that can be used to profile you," Google's Bram Bonné and Shuaibo Huang said . "By encrypting the destination website name from the very start, ECH helps ensure that, for supported websites and apps, network providers and network snoopers can no longer easily see which websites or apps you are accessing."