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Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malware artifact generated using DeepSeek that constructed a novel attack path combining "unrealistic browser-malware concepts with a real browser capability" to turn it into a working ransomware technique that runs entirely inside the browser on both Windows and Android devices. "This is the first documented case where a frontier AI model independently bridged the gap between a theoretical browser-only ransomware risk and a practical, working attack chain – surfacing a novel attack path that defenders had previously dismissed as unfeasible due to browser sandboxing limits," Check Point said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "The expertise needed to discover a new attack path is no longer the bottleneck, and defenders need to account for that shift now — before threat actors operationalize it at scale." The identified sample is a Python Flask application named " deepseek_python_20260125_da...

Organizations have never had greater awareness of cyber risk. Yet turning that awareness into operational resilience has never been more challenging. The 2026 Bitdefender Cybersecurity Assessment confirms this is the case, as this year's findings reveal a series of surprising contradictions. Here are a few examples, based on the independent survey of 1,200 IT and cybersecurity professionals across six countries. IT & security leaders believe they have sufficient visibility into employee AI usage, while many frontline practitioners disagree .  Security teams understand the importance of reducing the attack surface, yet they often lack the skills, resources, or strategy to do so.  AI dominates cybersecurity conversations, but in some cases, it is drawing attention away from more prevalent attack techniques already causing significant damage.  Although organizations say they recognize the importance of transparency after a breach, many professionals st...

Microsoft on Tuesday said it's accelerating its quantum safe security roadmap, stating technology advances in quantum computing are making it essential to replace existing encryption standards sooner than previously expected. "Advances in quantum research and development have shifted the risk horizon," Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer of Microsoft Azure, said . "We believe cryptographically relevant quantum computers could arrive sooner than previously expected – and the work required to prepare is significant, so organizations need to start now." To that end, the Windows maker is speeding up the Microsoft Quantum Safe Program ( QSP ) timeline with the goal of transitioning critical products and services to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) by 2029. The company is also planning to incorporate PQC requirements into its Secure Future Initiative ( SFI ). Some key focus areas include upgrading network cryptography by adopting TLS 1.3, building crypt...

Large language models keep inventing web addresses that do not exist. Attackers have started buying those made-up domains before anyone else can, then hosting phishing pages on them to catch traffic that AI tools point their way. Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 calls the trick phantom squatting , and its new research shows it is already happening in the wild. The reason it matters is trust. Developers and AI assistants increasingly treat the links a model hands back as real. When a model invents a domain that does not exist yet, whoever registers it first inherits all of that misplaced trust, with no phishing email and no malicious ad required. To measure the problem, Unit 42 asked two AI models 685,339 questions about 913 well-known brands across technology, finance, healthcare, government, gambling, and other sectors. The models produced 2.1 million links. Threat intelligence already flagged 13,229 of them as outright malicious, meaning the AI was handing out known-ba...

Anthropic is putting Claude Fable 5 back online worldwide. On  June 30 , the U.S. Commerce Department lifted the export controls it had imposed on Fable and its more tightly controlled sibling Mythos 5 about two and a half weeks earlier. Fable 5 returns to users on Wednesday, July 1, across Claude.ai, the Claude Platform, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. Export controls restrict who can receive or use a technology. The  June 12 order  told Anthropic to cut off both models for any foreign national, inside or outside the United States, including its own non-citizen staff. The rule took effect at once, and the company had no reliable way to check every user's nationality in real time, so it shut both models down for everyone. The trigger was a jailbreak: a prompt that gets a model to bypass its safety rules. Amazon researchers found one in Fable 5. By Anthropic's account, the prompt got the model to flag a few software flaws and, in one case, to write code showing h...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a "massive, ongoing, automated password spray attack" aimed at Microsoft's Azure command-line interface (CLI), compromising dozens of accounts in the process. The activity, per Huntress , originates from an IPv6 address range ( 2a0a:d683::/32 ) controlled by internet infrastructure provider LSHIY LLC (AS32167). "Between June 12 and June 26, the threat actor behind it made more than 81 million login attempts and successfully compromised at least 78 Microsoft accounts across 64 organizations," the company said in a statement. "The targeting of these attacks seems to be based entirely on password prevalence on compromised password combo lists, and is not specific to business type or industry." What makes the password spray attack noteworthy is not only the scale, but also the fact that many of the compromised organizations had Conditional Access policies enabled. Specifically, the campaign has been found to...

ClickFix , the trick that fools people into running malware by hand, has quietly grown a back office. New research shows the malicious commands behind its fake "prove you're human" pages are now handed out by API-driven servers that give each visitor the same malware in a different disguise. The same research also turned up a new delivery method built to slip past Windows' script scanning. Security researcher Bert-Jan Pals took apart several ClickFix platforms and analyzed roughly 3,000 payloads from live campaigns. He presented the findings at  OrangeCon  in early June and  published the details  on June 30. ClickFix is simple by design. A booby-trapped page shows a fake CAPTCHA or error, hidden JavaScript drops a command into your clipboard, and the page tells you to press a key combo, paste, and hit Enter. You run the malware yourself. There's usually no exploit at the first step and often no file for traditional antivirus to flag, so conventional emai...