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Earlier this month, I spoke at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit about a blind spot most security programs are still not accounting for - how attackers are circumventing AI security programs by using legacy infrastructure to hijack AI agents. AI adoption is moving faster than security programs can account for. Roughly 71% of organizations are piloting AI agents across their enterprise applications, and 31% have already moved them into production workflows. For this reason, organizations are legitimately pouring resources into securing AI workloads against model poisoning, prompt injection, data leakage, and other emerging threats. Yet this focus misses everything underneath the AI layer. Because an unpatched server, a misconfigured Active Directory permission, or a cached credential on a developer's machine are exposures that give attackers a direct route to everything your AI agents depend on - knowledge bases, cloud storage, Lambda functions, SaaS integrati...

It’s Monday again. This week’s threat list looks painfully familiar: abused integrations, fake tools, poisoned websites, ransomware crews trying to shut down security tools, and mobile malware asking for way too much control. The annoying part is how little of this feels new. Weak credentials, sketchy downloads, browser extensions with too much access, and WordPress sites are used to push more attacks. Nothing clever. Just sloppy, cheap, and effective. Here’s the Monday recap. Let’s get into the week’s mess. ⚡ Threat of the Week FortiBleed Campaign Identifies Over 80K Targets — A large-scale campaign codenamed FortiBleed has systematically targeted and compromised Fortinet FortiGate firewall and SSL VPN gateway devices worldwide. According to SOCRadar, it has been running since at least February 2026, with over 80,000 devices identified with working usernames and passwords that have been tested by suspected Russian-speaking threat actors using automated tools running around...

Canada's spy service got a judge's permission to reach into infected servers, home routers, and IoT gear sitting on Canadian soil and neutralize two foreign-run botnets. The Federal Court released a public version of the ruling on June 15. It is the first time the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has used its threat reduction warrant powers this way. The warrant let CSIS alter, degrade, and destroy botnet data on the infected machines and cut the devices loose from the networks. The targets were Canada-based servers, small office and home office (SOHO) routers, and Internet of Things devices: Ring doorbells, security cameras, TVs, and other Wi-Fi-enabled appliances. Justice Catherine Kane granted the warrant on May 1, 2024, renewed it that August, and issued the confidential reasons in February 2026. The warrant stayed out of public view for more than two years, until this month's redacted release. CSIS needed the order because the cleanup would likely hav...

A new malware family is turning forgotten home routers into a distributed reconnaissance and proxy network, not the DDoS botnet these devices usually end up in. QiAnXin's  XLab  calls it AryStinger and counts at least 4,300 infected routers, a total it says is still rising. The distinction matters. AryStinger exists for the stage of an attack that comes before the break-in. Infected devices scan the internet, fingerprint services, enumerate subdomains, tunnel traffic, and run commands on demand, then ship the results back to the operator. Each router becomes a footprinting node and a relay that hides where the real attacker is. Old chips, older bugs The campaign goes after routers built on Realtek's RTL819X chips, hardware that was current around 2012 to 2015. XLab first saw it on March 12, 2026, spreading from a single IP, 107.150.106.14. The binary it pushed was a Linux ELF that no engine on VirusTotal flagged, exploiting two flaws from another era: CVE-2013-3307 ...

A new report from INTERPOL has revealed a "dramatic increase" in cybercrime in Asia and the South Pacific, fueled by rapid digitalization, internet penetration, new technologies, organized criminal networks, and a disparity in cybersecurity maturity. According to INTERPOL's 2025/2026 Asia and South Pacific Cyberthreat Assessment Report, phishing has emerged as the most widespread and financially damaging form of cybercrime, with a third of countries in the region reporting more than 10,000 cases between January 2024 and March 2025. In all, over half of INTERPOL member countries have reported that cybercrime accounted for no less than 30% of all crimes recorded nationally. "The findings in this report highlight a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape across Asia and the South Pacific, where cybercriminals are leveraging artificial intelligence, ransomware-as-a-service models and sophisticated social engineering techniques on an industrial scale," Neal Jett...

Threat actors are exploiting a recently patched security flaw impacting Gravity SMTP, a WordPress plugin that's installed on about 100,000 sites. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-4020 (CVSS score: 5.3), is a medium-severity information disclosure flaw that can allow unauthenticated attackers to extract sensitive data, such as configuration data, API keys, secrets, and OAuth tokens configured for the plugin's email integrations. "This is due to a REST API endpoint registered at /wp-json/gravitysmtp/v1/tests/mock-data with a permission_callback that unconditionally returns true, allowing any unauthenticated visitor to access it," Wordfence said . "When the ?page=gravitysmtp-settings query parameter is appended, the plugin's register_connector_data() method populates internal connector data, causing the endpoint to return approximately 365 KB of JSON containing the full System Report." As a result, an unauthenticated attacker can weaponize ...

Security researchers at Paradigm Shift have published a working exploit, dubbed  usbliter8 , that achieves arbitrary code execution inside the SecureROM of Apple's A12 and A13 chips. That code is burned into the silicon at manufacture. No software update can reach it. Affected devices will carry this flaw for as long as they stay in use. This is not a remote attack. It requires physical possession of the device, which must be in DFU mode and connected via USB to a dedicated RP2350-based microcontroller board. With that setup, the exploit finishes in under two seconds, before Apple's signed boot chain loads. The full  technical write-up  and a working  proof of concept  went public on June 18, 2026, following coordinated disclosure with Apple Product Security. Affected Devices The public PoC supports A12, A13, S4, and S5 SoCs. A12X and A12Z support is described as theoretically possible but not yet implemented. Device families in that range...

The Gentlemen ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation is actively developing and maintaining a suite of endpoint detection and response (EDR) killers that it hands out to affiliates for impairing system defenses before deploying the encryptor. This mature portfolio of EDR-terminating tools is centered around a framework that's known as GentleKiller . "They also incorporate third-party or leaked tools such as HexKiller, ThrottleBlood, and HavocKiller," ESET security researcher Jakub Souček said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "These tools are standardized through a shared defense-evasion layer, impersonating predominantly security vendors using fake version information, and copied legitimate certificates and icons." The Slovakian cybersecurity company also called out the ransomware crew for its ability to "unusually quickly operationalize" newly disclosed proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits related to an attack technique called bring your...

Microsoft researchers have detailed an exploit chain, named  AutoJack , that turns an AI browsing agent into a delivery vehicle for remote code execution. Steer the agent to load an attacker's web page, and that page's JavaScript can reach a privileged local service on the same machine and spawn a process on the host. No credentials, no sign-in screen, and no further user interaction once the agent loads the page. The attacker only has to get the agent to open it, and a planted link, a URL field, or a prompt injection will do. The flaw sits in  AutoGen Studio , the open-source prototyping interface for Microsoft Research's AutoGen multi-agent framework. This is not a bug that hits everyone who installs the package, and the packaging detail is worth getting right. A plain pip install autogenstudio pulls the current stable release, 0.4.2.2, the build Microsoft inspected, and it has no Model Context Protocol (MCP) route at all. That is the basis for Microsoft...

Dutch law enforcement authorities, along with counterparts from Canada , Germany, and the U.S., have disrupted malicious infrastructure associated with SocGholish and cleaned up nearly 15,000 infected WordPress websites. "With these actions we deprive cybercriminals of access to infected computer systems," Maikel Rollman of the Netherlands National High Tech Crime Unit said . "This prevents further damage to the digital systems of citizens, businesses and organizations worldwide and limits the spread of malware. It also reduces the risk that these systems are used for cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and other essential societal processes. This marks the beginning of further action against SocGholish." The takedown is part of Operation Endgame , an ongoing international law enforcement initiative to combat botnets and associated criminal infrastructures. It was launched in 2024. As part of the effort, 106 servers linked to SocGholish have been t...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday urged Fortinet customers with FortiGate appliances to take steps to secure against ongoing malicious activity aimed at thousands of internet-accessible devices. The sweeping campaign, believed to be the work of Russian-speaking threat actors, has been codenamed FortiBleed . The number of compromised devices stands at 86,644 as of June 19, 2026. According to data from SOCRadar, generic admin accounts (35%) and built-in Fortinet system accounts (28.3%) together make up the majority of compromised credentials. Organization-specific accounts account for 36.7% of the remaining breached credentials. "This points directly to a widespread failure to rename default accounts or rotate factory credentials, giving the attacker a highly reliable target list before any brute force was even needed," SOCRadar said. "Org-specific accounts topping the list is significant. It means the attacker is not ju...

Introduction The average enterprise security team has 40 or more security tools, giving a lot of visibility into internal telemetry and asset data. But often, these tools are working in siloes, generating (overlapping) alerts and data. And yet, breach dwell times remain stubbornly long (~43 days), response windows keep closing before teams can act, and analysts burn out triaging noise instead of stopping threats. The problem isn't effort. It's architecture. Security programs were built for a world where threats moved slowly enough for humans to coordinate responses manually. That world no longer exists. With the way AI capabilities are getting developed and used, especially with frontier AI tools, a much more proactive stance to security is needed as well as machine speed response to combat fast moving adversaries. Gartner's Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework helps this shift from reactive, point-in-time assessments to a continuous, iterative cycl...