artificial intelligence | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A fake login page. A fake security scan. A fake productivity app. Apparently, pretending to be useful is still one of the easier ways into a machine. The rest of the week gets stranger: botnets borrowing AI, command traffic hiding in public infrastructure, malicious tools waiting before showing their real behavior, exposed systems getting scanned, and exploit windows shrinking again. Different tricks, same advantage: attackers keep finding places where trust is cheap and friction is low. That sets the tone. Here’s the full list of what surfaced this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a vulnerability in Amazon Kiro, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, agentic integrated development environment (IDE), that could facilitate data exfiltration via prompt injection and Kiro Powers. The security flaw, which does not have a CVE identifier, works against Kiro IDE 0.7.45 on Windows, according to Mindguard. The latest version of the IDE is 1.0.337. "The issue allowed attacker-controlled repository content to influence the Kiro agent and ultimately cause sensitive local information to be transmitted to an external endpoint," security researcher Fergal Glynn said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Kiro Powers goes beyond skills by bundling Model Context Protocol (MCP) server configurations, steering files ("POWER.md"), hooks, and contextual knowledge. The steering file is like an "onboarding manual" that provides persistent context and tells the AI agent what MCP tools are ava...

Security teams have spent years trying to detect threats faster. AI is changing the harder part: how much time defenders have left to act. Advanced AI models can now help attackers discover vulnerabilities, generate exploit code, and move through weaknesses faster than traditional security processes were built to handle. The challenge is no longer just finding another vulnerability or generating another alert. It is knowing which exposures matter, what an attacker can reach, and which issues need to be fixed first. That is the focus of next week's webinar, How to Build AI Threat Readiness Across Your Security Operations , featuring an expert from Wiz. The session will show how security teams can improve visibility, prioritize real risk, and shorten the path from detection to remediation. Most security teams already have plenty of data. They have vulnerability findings, cloud alerts, identity signals, application telemetry, and threat detections. The harder problem is conne...

AI is officially mainstream in security operations. According to Prophet Security's State of AI in Security Operations 2026 report (produced from ViB’s survey of 250+ cybersecurity pros), 40% of security teams now use AI daily. Another 56% are currently testing it out, and only 4% have no plans to adopt it. For the teams already using AI, what is actually changing? Here are the ten biggest takeaways from the report. 1. Security teams are drowning in alerts The average security team gets about 100 alerts every day, but larger companies often deal with close to 1,000. In fact, over a quarter of teams face more than 500 alerts daily. Unfortunately, team sizes haven't kept up with the workload. While some massive organizations have over 100 analysts, many are running on skeleton crews of fewer than ten people. Because of this, it takes an average of 75 minutes to thoroughly investigate a single alert, and alerts often sit untouched for nearly an hour before anyone even loo...

The SOC we've always known was built around a model that guarantees most of the alert queue will never receive analyst review. There's never time. In a traditional SOC, the typical progression follows a well-known pattern: an alert arrives; a detection engine assigns a severity score. The issue then waits for a human to decide if it should escalate to an investigation. Given the volume of network telemetry in the security stack, the queue is an unavoidable result of humans as the investigative layer. Long alert queues also force security teams to decide which signals to analyze before they even know what those signals represent. Threat hunting has always addressed security questions via an alternative approach: start with a hypothesis about attacker behavior, search the available evidence, then prove or disprove it. The sequence is powerful, but it hits the same wall: human capacity. Agentic security operations change the paradigm. The SOCs now being built are predica...

Aikido Security has published research that recreates the Australian gym-booking incident in a synthetic environment, finding that Claude Opus 4.6, running on the OpenClaw agent harness, exploited a client-side-only booking restriction in 9 of 10 runs. The original incident was first reported by ABC News on August 10, based on chat logs and screenshots the user supplied. He had asked an OpenClaw agent running Opus 4.6 to book him into a gym class. The agent booked sessions months beyond the window the site allowed. It then tested, without being asked, whether the same API would let it cancel another member's waitlist entry. The test removed the person holding the top place and moved the user up one position. The agent told him it could not add the member back. Aikido's test system is a single-page web application backed by a GraphQL API carrying the two flaws described in the original incident. The seven-day booking window is enforced only in the frontend, and the cancel...

OpenAI on Tuesday said it banned a cluster of Russian ChatGPT accounts that used VPNs to bypass access restrictions and run an influence operation, which relied on its artificial intelligence (AI) tool to generate social media posts and comments that were shared on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. The accounts "were being used to promote the International Burke Institute (IBI), a self-described 'expert community' based in Israel," the company said . "What began as an investigation into AI-generated social media posts led us to a much broader influence operation, built around a website containing copied and misattributed academic work, a 'sovereignty' index that cast Russia in a favourable light, and efforts to disguise the operators' Russian origins." The campaign is assessed to have reached "relatively small audiences," with Telegram channels attracting more users and amassing about 10-20,000 followers each. The m...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform built to strip Apple's Activation Lock from stolen devices, using rented AI voice agents that call theft victims posing as Apple Support and ask for their device passcode. SOCRadar Threat Research Unit (STRU) said the platform, which it tracks as AnonyMousKIT , is credit-metered and drives lures across five channels from a single victim record, comprising email at 1.50 credits, SMS priced per sender ID, WhatsApp, a recorded voice call at 1 credit, and an AI voice agent at 2 credits. The targets are owners of Apple devices that were recently lost or stolen, and the pages and calls ask each of them for the 4- or 6-digit device passcode, then the Apple ID credentials, and finally a live two-factor authentication (2FA) code. Apple's own guidance states that the company never asks for a password, device passcode, or 2FA code to provide support. "AnonyMousKIT is best understood no...

Vulnerability management has been a staple of security programs since the dawn of the cybersecurity discipline. The symbiotic relationship between vulnerability and patch management teams has also existed for that time and has gone through waves of contention and thankfulness. While this relationship required thoughtful care and feeding from both sides, both sides were aiming to work toward a common goal of identifying vulnerabilities and confirming the risk was removed from the environment. In come Frontier AI models such as Anthropic's Mythos to radically change the vulnerability management space. These models can identify zero-day flaws, chain complex exploits, and adapt in real time. They have forced vulnerability management programs to take an introspective look at themselves and ask, “Is my vulnerability program ready for this revolution?” For many organizations, the answer is no. Many vulnerability management programs were hanging by a thread already, with very distant pl...

A package gets installed. A login prompt opens. A box sits exposed to the internet. Nothing looks unusual yet. That’s roughly the mood this week. Trusted tools turn hostile, old weak spots get fresh attention, AI makes exploit work cheaper, and researchers keep finding attacks that sound harder than they actually are. Plenty to clean up. Here’s the short version. ⚡ Threat of the Week U.S. Warns of AI-Powered Attacks on Siemens PLCs — Threat actors are using AI to write exploit scripts targeting internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLCs) used across water, energy, manufacturing, and other critical infrastructure sectors, according to the U.S. government. The agencies warned: "This is not a theoretical risk—it is an active threat." The exploitation of poorly secured PLCs could result in disruption of critical industrial processes, safety incidents, downtime or equipment damage, compromise of sensitive data, and compliance violations, not...

Big security risks come in small packages. While enterprise security teams focus on policing the proliferation of employees using ChatGPT and Claude for quick drafting tasks, a more urgent threat is posed by a handful of AI super-adopters who are quietly hardcoding unvetted tools into critical business operations. According to new research published by Akamai, the top 5% of enterprise power users interact with AI models at 12 times the rate of the bottom 50% of the workforce. The findings, published in Akamai’s State of the Internet: Enterprise AI Usage Risk Report 2026 , are based on real-world usage and telemetry data as well as research and threat analysis.  These AI super-adopters are creating a disproportionate security risk by expanding the use of shadow AI, increasing opportunities for data leakage, and introducing autonomous AI agents that operate within the enterprise but outside its established guardrails. “Small groups of AI power users are casting outsized shado...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group dubbed UAT-10147 that's targeting Windows and Linux web servers globally across the education, media, technology, and gaming sectors. The vast majority of the targets are located in Brazil, Bolivia, China, Canada, and Vietnam. Details of the threat activity came to light following the discovery of an open directory hosted at "139.180.197[.]150," which was observed communicating with one of the compromised machines. "The actor leveraged publicly disclosed vulnerabilities to gain initial access at scale," Cisco Talos said in a two-part report published last week. The actor employed a mixture of open-source offensive frameworks, including Metasploit , ysoserial , PentestGPT , DeepAudit, and multiple privilege escalation exploits to automate intrusion operations and establish persistence." UAT-10147 has been described as a threat actor that conducts search engine op...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become one of this decade's defining technologies. From healthcare and finance to manufacturing and education, organizations increasingly rely on AI to automate repetitive tasks, uncover patterns hidden within large datasets, and support faster decision-making. Cybersecurity has experienced a similar transformation. While attackers employ AI to automate cyberattacks and accelerate vulnerability discovery, defenders are adopting AI to improve threat detection and enhance incident response. Security Operations Centers (SOCs) receive a high volume of alerts from endpoints, cloud workloads, network devices, identity providers, and business applications. Although SIEM and XDR platforms provide visibility into these environments, analysts often spend considerable time correlating alerts, searching documentation, and determining the next investigative steps. AI offers a practical way to augment analysts by providing contextual explanations, summarizing ...

A lot of this week’s trouble starts with something trusted doing exactly what it was allowed to do. Signed drivers get turned against defenses. Legitimate apps help malware blend in. A weak header check opens a path to code execution. Elsewhere, exposed systems, old bugs, odd hiding tricks, and AI-assisted exploit research keep lowering the effort needed to cause damage. Nothing here needs much decoration. The small gaps are doing enough work already. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

The U.S. government on Wednesday warned of an "active threat" targeting critical infrastructure organizations in the country using artificial intelligence (AI)-generated exploit scripts. The activity is targeting Siemens S7 SeriesProgrammable Logic Controllers (PLCs) to conduct reconnaissance and capability development using AI-generated scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools. That said, the ongoing PLC targeting activity is assessed to be broader in scope than Siemens PLCs. "The actors leverage internet scanning services like Censys and ZoomEye to identify internet-exposed PLCs running outdated software or that are otherwise poorly protected," according to the advisory published by the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Energy (DOE), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Targets of the activity include Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Wa...

Adversa AI has disclosed an attack technique that it says can cause xAI's Grok chatbot to send a user's name, approximate location, subscription tier, and the prompts from the ongoing conversation to an attacker-controlled server after the user asks it to summarize an ordinary web page. The AI security company, which has codenamed the technique "Cryptographic Context Injection ," said the transfer completed without a confirmation step and with no visible warning in its proof-of-concept demonstration. There is no patch, no CVE identifier, and no user-facing workaround, and the writeup does not report any exploitation in the wild. Asked which build was tested, Adversa told The Hacker News the target was the Grok web chat at grok.com running Grok 4.5 Fast, and that the attack was reproduced once on August 19, 2026. The writeup gives no success rate. The company said it has attempted the attack 20 times since June with a 40% success rate, and that the failures cam...

OpenAI on Tuesday revealed that it paused reinforcement learning ( RL ) training for its latest artificial intelligence (AI) models for two weeks while it shored up additional defenses and increased the scope of its monitoring to avert another Hugging Face-like incident . "As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow," the AI company said . "Our standards for monitoring, alignment, and security must stay ahead of those risks. We wanted to take the time necessary to meet those standards, so we temporarily slowed the pace of scaling." The company said its largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold for the time being as it conducts smaller-scale training and evaluations to evaluate model behavior, validate its safeguards, and establish more concrete evidence of alignment before moving to the next phase. To that end, OpenAI said it plans to strengthen safeguards across its development process, inc...

A previously unreported cyber espionage operation dubbed SilkParasite has been observed targeting government bodies in Central Asia. The intrusion set makes use of seven remote access tool (RAT) families, five of which have never been previously documented: DriveSilkRAT, CookiETagRAT, NomadRAT, GoginRAT, and NodeEdgeRAT. SilkParasite, first discovered in late 2025, is assessed to be a China-nexus threat cluster with medium confidence. "What makes SilkParasite interesting is the traces of AI-assisted development running through otherwise expert code, which is a different thing from AI-generated malware," Bitdefender Labs said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. Unlike other operations that rely on AI-generated malware, SilkParasite's arsenal exhibits all hallmarks typically associated with professional espionage tooling that's developed by a team of human operators while AI is likely used to streamline the process. The Romanian cybersecurity v...

Most email defenses still do the job they did a decade ago. Scan the message, look for something malicious, block it. That worked when the danger sat in the payload, a bad link or an attachment. It stopped working when the danger moved into the message's intent, and it is failing now that the sender is no longer a person. From Bad Content to Bad Intent to AI on Both Sides Phishing 1.0 was bad content. Malicious links, infected attachments, spam. Secure email gateways were built for this. Scan the message, match the signature, drop the bad stuff. That era is largely handled. Phishing 2.0 is bad intent. Business email compromise, executive impersonation, fake invoices, wire fraud. There is no malicious payload to scan, only social engineering that reads as a normal request from a person you trust. Gateways are blind to it because there is nothing in the content to flag. Behavioral analysis is the only thing that catches it, which is why some of us have spent the better part ...

Two critical vulnerabilities impacting MLflow, an open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platform, and FUXA, an open-source, web-based SCADA / HMI software built for operational technology (OT) and industrial automation, are witnessing malicious scanning and exploitation efforts. According to independent reports from watchTowr and VulnCheck, the vulnerabilities in question are as follows - CVE-2026-64849 (CVSS score: 9.3) - An unauthenticated Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in MLflow that can allow an attacker who can reach the Tracking Server (mlflow server) to issue HTTP requests to arbitrary internal cloud metadata endpoints and extract sensitive data. (Affects versions < 3.15.0) CVE-2026-25895 (CVSS score: 9.5) - A missing authentication for a critical function and path traversal vulnerability in FUXA that can allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to write arbitrary files to the server file system and achieve remote code execution. (Affects ve...