It won’t work:

My suspicion was that GPT 5.6-Cyber would succeed, but the frequency and manner of its success removed all doubt. We have to reassess sandboxing quality for capable AI agents, and in general the software stack with which they interact.

An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a modern, cyber-capable AI agent. There is simply too much attack surface. Even innocuous features (like running with a display) add extra, exploitable attack surface.

This is interesting:

The records describe a force-generation mechanism for several General Staff components, including the GRU, Main Operational Directorate, and 8th Directorate, which is associated with protected communications, cryptography, and information security.

[…]

The reporting also linked a 2024 Department No. 4 graduate, Aleksei Kondrashov, to Military Unit 74455, widely known as Sandworm.

That unit has been associated with destructive cyber activity against Ukraine and other targets, including the 2017 NotPetya attack.

The reports do not establish that every listed graduate participated in a named operation; assignments should therefore be described as reported unit placements, not proof of individual operational involvement.

The Bauman material reframes Russia’s cyber capability as an institutional system, not merely a collection of well-known threat groups.

It suggests that Moscow has formalized a recurring pathway from university recruitment to military service, where students receive supervised technical and ideological preparation before entering intelligence, cyber, and security roles.

For defenders, the leak reinforces the need to track Russian operations as a combined threat: espionage, destructive activity, military reconnaissance, technical surveillance, and influence campaigns may draw on related personnel pipelines and overlapping doctrine.

The exposure of Department No. 4 also provides researchers with a clearer lens for understanding how the GRU sustains cyber capacity beyond the familiar APT28 and Sandworm brand names.

Tracked as CVE-2026-32475 (CVSS score of 9.8), the bug described as an arbitrary file upload issue in the function that handles form submissions.

The post Elementor Pro WordPress Plugin Vulnerability Exploited to Hack Sites appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar: Microsoft rolled out patches for cloud services, hackers compromised 5,000 Dropbox accounts, and Guardio is now valued at $1.1 billion.

The post In Other News: Microsoft’s Cloud Patches, Hacked Dropbox Accounts, Guardio’s $1.1B Valuation appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Nearly two dozen issues, tracked collectively as CVE-2026-73749 (CVSS score of 9.8), were addressed with the updates.

The post HPE Patches Critical RCE Vulnerabilities in AOS-CX appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Authorities in Australia have arrested two men believed to be members of TeamPCP, a prolific cybercrime and data extortion group blamed for perpetrating the longest running spree of software supply chain attacks ever.

In a statement released today, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said two men from Western Australia, aged 21 and 23, were arrested in connection with a “sophisticated cybercrime syndicate that allegedly created malicious open-source software to rob thousands of global businesses.”

The AFP did not name the defendants, but KrebsOnSecurity learned the 21-year-old suspect’s real identity in June, and has been communicating with him ever since. This story includes interviews with TeamPCP’s self-described spokesperson, and examines clues left behind by the TeamPCP leader that likely led to his undoing.

TeamPCP vaulted onto the cybercrime scene in late 2025, embedding malicious code in hundreds of open source software tools and extorting victims for profit. Members of the group made headlines by compromising corporate cloud environments using a self-propagating worm dubbed Shai-Hulud, which added malicious code to open source programs maintained by developers whose credentials at public code repositories like GitHub or NPM were phished or stolen.

Writing for Wired, journalist Andy Greenberg described TeamPCP’s core tactic as a kind of cyclical exploitation of software developers.

“The hackers gain access to a network where an open source tool commonly used by coders is being developed,” Greenberg wrote in May. “The hackers plant malware in the tool that ends up on other software developers’ machines, including some who are writing other tools intended to be used by coders. The malware allows TeamPCP’s hackers to steal credentials that let them publish malicious versions of those software development tools, too. The cycle repeats, and TeamPCP’s collection of breached networks grows.”

TeamPCP also has practiced something akin to cyclical recruitment. In May, the source code for the third iteration of Shai-Hulud was published online, and TeamPCP soon after launched a contest offering $1,000 in virtual currency to whichever participant could conduct the largest supply chain operation using the worm’s code. According to the contest rules, participants were scored based on the number of weekly and monthly downloads of packages they compromised — directly incentivizing them to target the most popular code libraries.

“TeamPCP has stated the competition is a recruiting opportunity and they intend to purchase all meaningful access harvested from participants’ campaigns,” the security firm Dataminr wrote. “The $1,000 XMR (Monero) prize is a recruitment floor and has been dismissed by the actor as ‘just like participation trophy,’ adding ‘if you find something good you will be paid way more,’ confirming the contest’s true function as talent identification and malicious access acquisition at scale.”

In March, TeamPCP executed a supply chain attack targeting AI infrastructure by compromising the code for LiteLLM, an open source AI gateway that connects users to more than 100 different large language models. A recent analysis by the security firm CloudSEK found TeamPCPs attack on LiteLLM harvested cloud service keys and other secrets from more than 2,500 organizations, including many of the world’s top technology companies.

In May, TeamPCP claimed credit for compromising at least 3,800 code repositories at the Microsoft-owned GitHub, after a GitHub developer installed a code extension that was compromised by TeamPCP’s malware.

MEET THE CYBERCATS

Security experts say TeamPCP is less of a hacker group than an amalgamation of threat actors from multiple cybercriminal gangs who sometimes work together toward similar goals.

“It is not a structured criminal crew with a single operator,” said Austin Larsen, a principal threat analyst with the Google Threat Intelligence Group. “It is a peer community of individually-skilled actors, with one clear center of gravity.”

That center of gravity is George Prepakis, an accomplished security researcher and self-described exploit developer who operates the Twitter/X profile @kernelstub. Earlier this year, @kernelstub tweeted a public invite link to a Matrix chat server he created and dubbed “Cybercats,” and TeamPCP and several other cybercrime entities have been using this server to communicate daily for the past several months.

Kernelstub, like other administrators in the Cybercats chat, has been using his Twitter/X profile name as his handle in these Matrix communications, frequently tweeting references to other members and to conversations taking place in the Cybercats chat. In a number of cases, the corresponding X accounts for members of the Cybercats chat taunted cybercrime victims publicly before the incidents were reported in the news media.

The Cybercats administrator listed at the top of the screenshot above — “Boxturtle” — is a close associate of TeamPCP who has been tweeting about the group’s conquests under the name @xpl0itrsturtle. This handle corresponds to a data breach broker active on Breachforums and Darkforums who has been selling data stolen in a wave of recent breaches at automobile manufacturers, including BMW Group, Audi, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and Toyota, as well as data allegedly taken from Snapchat and SportRadar.

The Cybercats administrator “SeesawSec” in the screenshot above is the alias of whoever is behind the cybercrime group known as Fulcrumsec, which recently claimed credit for data extortion attacks against the pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, the data broker LexisNexis, and Avnet, a Fortune 500 distributor of electronic components.

The Cybercats administrator “@pcpcasper” also has been using a similar name on X to discuss TeamPCP’s attacks and victims. This person has an extensive message history on Telegram, where their messages and shared videos show @pcpcasper is an active and vocal member of the National Socialist Network, a neo-Nazi political organization based in Australia.

At one point in these chats, @pcpcasper shared videos and images of what they claimed was their cat, and several of those videos place this user in Western Australia. One source close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity that @pcpcasper was one of the two arrested, a claim supported by messages that @kernelstub posted online this morning.

The Cybercats member roster pictured above also features an administrator with the username “T,” which is short for the now-banned Twitter/X profile @pcpcats, the account operated by the self-described TeamPCP spokesperson who was arrested today. As we’ll see in a moment, @pcpcats also is from Western Australia.

By the time @kernelstub tweeted a public invite link to the Cybercats Matrix server, T/@pcpcats was posting only infrequently to the group chat, with other members often inquiring as to his whereabouts and well-being. The group’s collective concern related to @pcpcats’s tendency to blame his increasingly extended absences on the use of hallucinogens and other narcotics that kept him awake for days on end, but also caused him to crash in bed for several days after the highs wore off.

WHO IS THE TEAMPCP LEADER?

The Cybercats member @pcpcats has used multiple nicknames on the cybercrime forums, including EllisD25/LSD on Darkforums, BulkDMT on Breachstars, and Express on Breachforums. These accounts are linked because they all advertised the same Tox ID and/or Session ID as instant message contact handles in their cybercrime forum posts. BulkDMT was also known on the forums as DMT Host, which was a virtual private server (VPS) hosting service that was peddled on Darkforums and Breachstars.

According to the cyber intelligence firm Intel 471, Express registered on Breachforums using the email address shitstickpp@gmail.com. Intel 471 finds Express posted on Breachforums across a two-month period in 2025 using four different Internet addresses located in South Africa. On July 30, 2025, Express announced on Breachforums they were selling access to 14 gigabytes of data stolen from South Africa’s State Information Technology Agency.

The threat intelligence platform Flashpoint recorded more than a year’s worth of messages from the TeamPCP leader’s alter ego on Telegram — Persy_PCP —  who claimed they split their life living between two countries [full disclosure: Flashpoint is an advertiser on this blog]. “I have these [files] as well, problem is these are in another country,” Persy_PCP explained to another user inquiring about a stolen data set in November 2025.

Later that month, Persy_PCP complained, “My whole country is racist and they want people like me dead.” Flashpoint records show BulkDMT shared in September 2025 that “this country is going to fucking starve when they take the farmers land,” a likely reference to white landowners in South Africa who claim to be targeted by an ongoing genocide campaign.

This tracks with public reporting on TeamPCP. Cyberscoop reported in June that Google had traced TeamPCP’s residential and mobile Internet address connections to South Africa, “indicating the primary operator was located there during at least some of its attacks.”

BulkDMT also shared on the group chat at Breachforums that they were recovering from an addiction to methamphetamine. “My life is kinda fucked rn [right now], but that’s fine and there isn’t really a point in pouring so much emotional energy into that fact, my parents had money but I unfortunately got really addicted to some things so I don’t get to benefit from that. As long as I continue to survive, stay sober, and move closer towards my goals that’s enough drive and meaning.”

The identity threat protection company SpyCloud finds shitstickpp@gmail.com shows up in the registration of an account called ChristmasSnow on the cybercrime community Raidforums in 2022. Nearly all of the Internet addresses used to access that account came from ISPs in Perth, Australia, SpyCloud found.

KrebsOnSecurity looked up all of those Perth IP addresses in passive DNS records maintained by DomainTools.com, and found one of them — 211.27.196.111 — for several years was used as a private file server by a family in Perth with the last name of Thomson. Those records show at least three hosts — ithomson.direct.quickconnect.to (a remote Synology server), kthomson0061.direct.quickconnect.to, and joshuawthomson39.myqnapcloud.com (a QNAP network storage device) — persisted at that address between 2022 and 2025.

Searching on “joshuathomson39” in the breach tracking service Constella Intelligence reveals an account at the freight forwarding company kwe.com created in the name of Joshua Thomson from Perth, Australia. The open source intelligence platform Epieos finds the phone number attached to that kwe.com account was used to register a Facebook profile for Josh Thomson, which says his family includes a brother named Ruben, his father Ian, and his mom Cindy.

That Facebook profile also says Josh and his family are originally from Pietermaritzburg, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, but currently living in Cottesloe, a beach-side suburb of Perth. A search in DomainTools for Ian Thomson and Australia unearthed five domains by the same registrant, including securecomputing.au, thomson.org.au, and thomsonfamily.net.au. Ian Thomson is a dentist in Cottesloe, and a biography says he graduated from The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Constella finds a joshua@thomson.org.au registered a number of accounts online, but Josh doesn’t seem to have much of a connection to dodgy cybercrime forums. His brother Ruben, on the other hand, has quite the presence on these communities, dating back to at least 2018. Constella reports ruben@thomson.org.au frequently reused the password “joshuathomson1,” and Constella further finds that password was used by just a handful of accounts, including yolosolo17@gmail.com and surfinup8@gmail.com.

According to Intel 471, surfinup8@gmail.com was used to register the user Yolosolo17 on the crime forum Altenen in 2018, and that user account was registered from the Perth address 110.141.230.15. On Altenen, Yolosolo17 advertised free web proxies, as well as the domain rubenthomson.com, which was at one point used to sell steeply discounted iPhones. DomainTools says rubenthomson.com was hosted at 110.141.230.15 and registered to surfinup8@gmail.com.

SpyCloud reports 10.141.230.15 was used by the email address sheepstealing@gmail.com on Raidforums and surfinup8@gmail.com on Nulled, and that the same IP was used by the email addresses ian@thomsonfamily.net.au, jasper@yakuza.cc, and rubenthomson1@gmail.com. SpyCloud also shows that sheepstealing Gmail address is tied to the accounts Sheep420, YoloSolo117 and Yakuza.cc on Raidforums, and to the account “Sheep Stealing” on Hackforums. Intel 471 says sheepstealing@gmail.com was used to register the account DingoFlour on Breachforums in October 2023, as well Sheepx on Altenen.

Epieos reports that ruben@securecomputing.au is tied to an Airbnb account for Ruben, who described himself as a Web developer who went to school at the University of Western Australia and was living outside the country. “Hey, I’m Ruben, my friends call me Ellis. I’m a Perth creative who occasionally books rooms when visiting family and for photography.”

Epieos also finds sheepstealing@gmail.com registered an upwork.com profile under the name Ruben, who said his main skills are setting up secure server hosting solutions and PHP full-stack Web development.

“I’m familiar with Linux, working with relational databases (SQL),” the Upwork profile reads. “I also script in Python mainly for writing social media bots.”

Epieos further discovered sheepstealing@gmail.com is connected to a Microsoft account for Ruben Thomson, and to a now-defunct GitHub account called XmasSnow/XmasSnowisBack that scammed people on the forums in 2022 by claiming to sell exclusive exploits for recently-released software patches (recall that shitstickpp@gmail.com was used to register a forum account named ChristmasSnow).

This same sheepstealing email address registered a Twitter/X account in 2026 called “Gone Fishing” that lists its location as South Africa. That Gmail account also left several reviews for businesses listed on Google Maps over the past seven years, but all of those establishments are located on the west coast of Australia.

The people search service Pipl finds a 21-year-old Ruben Thomson in Western Australia who has a phone number ending in 979. A lookup on that number at Epieos reveals it is connected to a TikTok account under the name Ellis, and to a PayPal account in the name of Ruben Thomson.

Finally, a search on the name Ruben Thomson from Cottesloe at the Australian government’s record of registered businesses finds he has incorporated or served as an official in multiple companies created since 2024, including Secure Computing Solutions, Tensor Industries, and another entity ironically named OPSEC Express. Recall that Express was BulkDMT’s nickname on Breachforums.

It’s ironic because OPSEC is short for the term “operational security,” which refers to techniques and behaviors used to obfuscate and compartmentalize one’s real-life identity online, and using your cybercrime handle as part of your own company name is very much the antithesis of that practice.

There is at least one other major opsec failure by Ruben that exposed a link to TeamPCP. In June 2025, someone using the name Ruben Thomson registered on HackerOne, a popular “bug bounty” program that seeks to reward and recognize researchers who agree to work with affected software vendors to help fix the flaws before publishing about their findings. What was Ruben Thomson’s chosen HackerOne username? Deadcatx3, a nickname that has been flagged by multiple security firms as an alias used by TeamPCP.

INTERVIEW WITH ELLIS

In early July 2026, not long after having discovered clues about Ellis’s real life identity, KrebsOnSecurity interviewed the TeamPCP leader via Signal, where he was remarkably open about his activities and personal struggles [for the sake of simplicity, the TeamPCP spokesperson will be referred to from here on as Ellis].

Ellis claims he stopped doing cybercrime for TeamPCP in March 2026 — just before the attacks that compromised LiteLLM — and that at least one other individual has taken over the group’s leadership since then. Ellis shared that a year earlier he had just completed the latest in a series of detox and sobriety programs, and was two months sober when he reconnected with some old friends from the malware development scene.

“One year ago I needed help monetizing some [GitHub credentials], I was two months sober and needed a distraction and something to keep busy as well as people to speak to,” Ellis said. “I had largely disconnected from my old circle, they had become very toxic and I needed to get away from the substances. Previously I had done some mass exploitation campaigns and grew up doing [malware development] and [capture the flag] contests. There were some friends who were also vending but had stopped a while, and one of them introduced me to some chats where I posted access for sale.”

Prior to that, Ellis said, he was homeless and hopping between “some very unstable places.”

“Blackhatting is fun,” he said. “There are actual rewards and incentives to learn and you grow with your team. Without qualifications, no employer will even take the time to hear you out.”

Ellis claims he’s earned a grand total of about $20,000 for his activities with TeamPCP, and that it was never about the money or fame for him. Asked whether his experiences with TeamPCP might prepare him for gainful employment in a legitimate IT job, Ellis said he doubted it.

“I am nowhere close to a skill level where I am comfortable, and this would take maybe half a decade of further experience,” he said. “I no longer have to choose between rent and food for that I’m grateful and so are the team members.”

Ellis expressed no remorse over his cybercrime activities, and said he was grateful for the friendships and relationships built throughout his engagement with TeamPCP. The young hacker also seemed resigned to his fate, and told KrebsOnSecurity that he’ll accept the consequences if he’s ever arrested.

“If I’ve already been found out then its out of my control, I’ll make peace with that,” he said. “Honestly, I think someone like me needs a lot of help that prison just can’t provide. If I had the funds to study different parts of the field and closer guidance, this would have turned out differently. But that’s a pipe dream and we both know this.”

It is clear from reading Ellis’s posts to the group’s Matrix server chats that his struggles with sobriety are ongoing. On Thursday, June 25, Ellis told @kernelstub he was about to “trip” with his “homie.”

“What kind,” @kernelstub inquired.

“Ketty and some DMT,” Ellis replied, referring to the dissociative anesthetic ketamine and dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful psychedelic compound that is found naturally in some plants but is also synthetically produced in underground lab environments. “There’s a little 2cb so we might throw that in the mix,” he continued, referring to another psychedelic compound by its chemical shorthand.

Roughly two weeks before his arrest, Ellis told KrebsOnSecurity he was ready to leave his life of crime behind and was prepared to turn himself in, but that in the meantime he was making plans to tie up loose ends.

Less than 24 hours later, the TeamPCP leader posted an image on Telegram showing a yellowish powdered substance in a baggie and on a scale, possibly synthetic DMT. The image shows the powder being weighed next to a series of small vape cartridges, two of which are open on the table in front of the photographer.

The two defendants were arrested Wednesday morning. The AFP said the men face a combined 14 cybercrime offenses and are scheduled to appear in Perth Magistrates Court today.

Charlie Eriksen is a security researcher at Aikido Security who has closely followed TeamPCP’s cybercrime campaigns. Eriksen said TeamPCP are a good example of a new kind of threat actor that does not fit neatly into the usual categories.

“They are not a state actor, not quite organized cybercrime, and not purely ideological,” he said. “Their motivations seem to mix money, disruption, attention, and ideology.”

Eriksen said that historically there has always been a meaningful gap between reading about an attack technique and being able to reliably turn it into an operational campaign, but that large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence increasingly are helping threat actors to bypass that knowledge gap.

“You had to understand the research, adapt the code, troubleshoot it, build infrastructure around it, and then repeat that process across different targets,” he said. “LLMs have compressed that gap significantly.”

According to Eriksen, this creates an environment where threat actors suddenly have the ability to operate at significant scale without having developed the operational discipline that traditionally accompanies that level of capability. Put another way, it sets the stage for cybercriminals who are capable enough to cause significant damage, but not necessarily careful enough to understand or care about the consequences.

“They can be noisy, they can make mistakes,” he said. “They can leave evidence everywhere. They can take risks that a professional criminal group or intelligence service would consider completely unacceptable. But that does not necessarily make them less dangerous. In some ways, it can make them more dangerous.”

In a recent blog post, Eriksen called TeamPCP’s Shai-Hulud worm the “best thing to happen to supply chain security,” because it forced GitHub and other public coding platforms to erect new security safeguards.

In direct response to TeamPCP’s broad success at pushing poisoned versions of popular software packages, GitHub in late July introduced a three-day “cooldown” mechanism for Dependabot, the platform’s tool for auto-fetching newly shipped updates for any package dependencies. Cooldown periods are designed to help buy time for security tools and package maintainers to identify and remove any compromised versions. Other coding ecosystems like Python and various JavaScript platforms also added support for cooldown periods this year amid growing calls from security experts about the need for more widespread adoption of the safety feature.

Eriksen said TeamPCP’s legacy is that they achieved in the span of a few months what the supply chain security community has been unable to do for years.

“They managed to wake up Microsoft to the fact that they had become negligent in terms of security,” Eriksen said. “By compromising GitHub and stealing their source code, they humiliated Microsoft into action, making them finally act on what we had been asking them to do and take seriously for a while now.”

Update, 10:08 a.m. ET: A story this morning from ABC News in Australia confirms Ruben Ian Thomson of Cottesloe was one of the two arrested. The 23-year-old suspect thought to be @pcpcasper, Michael Gaebler, also was arrested in Perth. ABC News reports that Thomson was denied bail (Mr. Gaebler’s attorney reportedly did not request bail for his client), and that both men will be held in custody until their next court appearance on September 18.

Running a website means a single unpatched vulnerability can take it offline, harm your reputation, or require cleanup. Most compromises begin with automated attacks exploiting known software flaws, usually reported and disclosed already.

To keep you protected from these threats, we’ve compiled this month’s key security updates and vulnerability patches for the WordPress ecosystem.

If you’re already using the Sucuri Firewall, you’re protected. These vulnerabilities are virtually patched for all clients.

Continue reading Vulnerability & Patch Roundup — July 2026 at Sucuri Blog.

A leading name in home and business physical security, Brinks Home, recently said it identified unauthorized access to a portion of its IT systems, an intrusion ShinyHunters claims it carried out to steal millions of records from the security provider's Salesforce instance. Brinks Home hasn’t named the intruder or identified the affected system, but said the responsible party has threatened to leak information it claims to have taken. “Brinks Home is working diligently to determine what information was involved and who may be affected,” the company statement said. “If the Company determines that personal information has been affected, it will notify those individuals as required and as appropriate.” An FAQ page for the incident said that Brinks Home products and services weren’t affected, as far as the company knows at this point, so alarms and other security tools should be working without issue. While Brinks may not have been very forthcoming with information, and lacks any sort of official way for media to communicate with it outside of sending a LinkedIn message it didn’t answer, the party that’s claimed responsibility has gone public with some details, and it’s none other than ShinyHunters with another claimed Salesforce breach. According to leak site monitoring outfit Ransomware.live, ShinyHunters claimed to have obtained more than 4.9 million Salesforce records from Brinks Home “containing some PII.” The group threatened this week to leak the data along with causing “several annoying digital problems” if Brinks Home didn’t reach out by Thursday, July 30, to negotiate a ransom payment. It’s not clear if Brinks Home has contacted ShinyHunters; Brinks Home didn’t respond to messages, and contacts The Register has for ShinyHunters appear to have changed, causing message and email rejections. ShinyHunters has been a prolific Salesforce intruder of late, with the group claiming earlier this year to have stolen data from around 100 high-profile companies’ Salesforce instances. Salesforce has previously warned that an unnamed known threat actor group was actively scanning for public-facing Salesforce instances and abusing misconfigured guest accounts to break in. Brinks Home is no longer part of the larger Brinks brand, with The Brinks Company telling us it sold the home security arm in 2010. Brinks Home’s parent company, Monitronics, has filed for bankruptcy twice since 2019; for customers’ sake, we hope its physical security services are better than its financial management and infosec. ®

One company's inventive campaign for an unreleased product has become a contest between Anthropic and OpenAI to see which can shout the loudest about its own failures. Readers who tuned in earlier today saw the latest episode in the drama – or sitcom – as Anthropic tried to outdo OpenAI's appropriation of the Mythos marketing playbook and made itself the punchline. Since first teasing Mythos in April, Anthropic has marketed the model through fear – declaring its cybersecurity models too dangerous for public release and offering access only to a select few trusted organizations via Project Glasswing. To its credit, the strategy has paid off. Anthropic has closely associated the Mythos name with cybersecurity, which may explain why OpenAI appeared to borrow its competitor's proven PR strategy last week. OpenAI agents exploited a zero-day to escape their sandbox, leading to the autonomous cyberattack on Hugging Face. The episode duly secured sensational headlines playing on the long-held fear that AI will one day go rogue and take over the world. Anthropic responded this week by lathering on even more clown makeup, squandering an opportunity in the process. The Claude maker sent its models into a testing environment to capture a flag. Their prompts said they had no internet access, but because of what Anthropic called "a misunderstanding" with evaluation partner Irregular, the connection was live. Anthropic's models then followed OpenAI's script: they reached the public internet and attacked systems belonging to outside organizations. This time, three were affected rather than one, the company admitted. In one scenario, Mythos 5 persuaded developers to download a poisoned PyPI package. It was installed on 15 machines, including one at a cybersecurity company that routinely scans such packages for malware. In Anthropic's words: "When that company's scanner installed the package, Claude's hidden code executed. We believe the company's security scanner treated PyPI packages as safe to install, and as a result, Claude was able to exfiltrate the company’s credentials to a collection point it had set up. Claude then used these credentials to access further infrastructure from this company." Worse still, the first of the three incidents occurred in April. Anthropic discovered them only months later, during a retrospective manual review prompted by OpenAI's disclosure. Had it not gone looking, they might never have been discovered, let alone disclosed. There are some caveats. Opus 4.7, the oldest model tested, attacked production systems despite apparently recognizing what it was doing. Mythos 5 recognized that accessing the internet violated its instructions, then reasoned its way into continuing anyway. It was also responsible for publishing the poisoned PyPI package. Only an unnamed research model stopped itself from attacking external organizations. Anthropic also said the models were not running with the production safeguards and monitoring that would normally surround a deployment. Most damningly, Anthropic ran Mythos 5 – the model it had deemed too dangerous for public release – without safeguards in an environment that unexpectedly had internet access. Following OpenAI's admission that it failed so badly in its responsibility to control its technology, Anthropic could have easily spun the story in its favor. You don't have to be fictional tapdancing political PR antihero Malcolm Tucker to see how Anthropic could have used the episode to make its case as the safer, more trustworthy AI company. Instead, realizing its own marketing playbook was being used to help a competitor, it went head-to-head with OpenAI, willingly admitted that it made similar sandbox-based blunders, and disclosed that the results were even more calamitous. Three companies hacked, not just one. So, while the AI biz has attempted to eclipse OpenAI's "rogue agent" story with its own, what's left behind is a new reputation for irresponsible handling of technology. Failed superheroes The incident does not instill a great deal of trust in either Anthropic or OpenAi to safeguard the world from its AI. Dr Ilia Kolochenko, founder of ImmuniWeb and practising cybersecurity and data protection lawyer, likened the two companies to failed superheroes. "While making conclusions would be a bit premature at this point in time, the incidents certainly do not increase confidence in the AI vendor's ability to safely deploy AI, let alone to assure their customers that the so-called frontier models are safe to use," he told The Register. "It is akin to hiring a superhero to protect you but being afraid that the superhero may suddenly go rogue and kill you and your family. Nobody needs such a superhero." Likewise, security pro Jake Williams, VP at HunterStrategy and IANS faculty member, said: "I'm not going to mince words: the major AI labs are negligent in protecting the public from their agents. "We need government regulation now or at the very least a private cause of action with guaranteed punitive damages for agents damaging others." By trying to reclaim a marketing trope that served it well, Anthropic has invited scrutiny of its own safety record and accusations that it is chasing attention above all else. Other experts we spoke to shared the concern that both companies are mishandling their agents, with potentially greater consequences as the systems become more capable. The common thread is recklessness, which Anthropic and OpenAI seem oddly eager to advertise. ®

A week after suspending online banking, CAF Bank still has no timetable for restoring access to its 14,000 UK charity customers. The bank updated customers on Thursday about the outage, which has disrupted payments to staff and suppliers. Little had changed. In a message seen by The Register, CAF Bank said it was not yet able to restore the service safely. As it had earlier in the week, the bank said it detected attempted fraud on some accounts and acted quickly to stop it. Its investigation uncovered a previously unknown vulnerability in the connection between its systems and third-party software. CAF Bank said its technical team was working around the clock with suppliers and external experts on a fix. The Register understands that no timetable has been set for restoring online banking. Earlier this week, CAF Bank CEO Alison Taylor apologized for the disruption. "The core bank is not affected. We are acutely aware of the impact this has on our customers and want this to be fixed as soon as possible, but we cannot restore access to the online service until we are assured the issue is safely resolved," she said. Since The Register first reported the story earlier this week, the BBC has spoken to charities struggling to make essential payments, including payroll. Kevan Hodges, chief executive of Down's syndrome charity 21 Together, told the BBC the outage was "appalling." "People are concerned that wages won't get paid because of this, and that's just stressful when they have bills to pay. My team have wasted days trying to get through to [CAF Bank], but all in vain," he said. Bali Rodgers, chief executive of Safer Communities Alliance, told the BBC the grassroots organizations it represents were slowly losing trust in the bank. CAF Bank also came under fire last year after the introduction of a new banking platform left customers unable to log in or make transactions. The bank later apologized but has not disclosed how much it spent on the system. CAF Bank held £1.45 billion ($1.93 billion) in customer deposits at the end of its 2024/25 financial year. ®

If your agency is planning how to use remaining Fiscal Year funding, now is the time to build a stronger cybersecurity workforce.

The post How Federal Agencies Can Turn Year-End Funding Into Long-Term Cyber Capability appeared first on OffSec.

Named CosmosEscape, the vulnerability exposed the primary key for Cosmos DB accounts, granting full read and write access.

The post Critical Flaw Allowed to Azure Cosmos DB Pwnage appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Note to privacy-conscious vandals: If you're going to destroy Flock license plate readers, make sure you also take out the other CCTV cameras in the area that could catch you in your crime. Otherwise, you'll end up like one unlucky Californian. Marcus Bee, 40, was arrested by the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday, accused of joining the ever-growing band of US citizens damaging the controversial cameras popping up across the country. A police report filed this week stated that Bee, of Pismo Beach, was arrested on suspicion of attacking at least three Flock cameras in Lockwood and Bradley. According to the deflock.org website, which maps Flock camera deployments, there are only three of the automated license plate readers (ALPRs) running in the two communities – one in Lockwood and two in Bradley, roughly 25 miles away. Police allege Bee caused thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to “public safety infrastructure.” Monterey County Sheriff’s Office added that Bee was caught after “his actions were captured by other surveillance cameras located nearby,” along with other investigative leads. "This arrest sends a clear message that anyone who intentionally damages public safety equipment will be identified, arrested, and held accountable," said Monterey County Sheriff Tina Nieto. "These cameras have become an invaluable investigative resource that helps us solve crimes, recover stolen vehicles and ag equipment, locate missing persons, and protect our communities. Any attempts to disable these systems will not prevent us from doing our job. “In this case, the suspect's own actions were captured on surveillance cameras, leading directly to his arrest. We will continue to aggressively investigate these crimes and seek prosecution against anyone who targets public safety infrastructure." Bee was jailed with bail set at $30,000. The case follows a similar one in Georgia last week, although local police were unable to identify the suspect(s) behind the two attacks, which involved setting two ALPRs on fire. The two attacks were timed fairly close together, although the phenomenon of inflicting criminal damage onto Flock cameras is something of a long-running trend. Several US police forces have been tasked with arresting alleged Flock vandals, including Jeffrey Scott Sovern, 41, who authorities believe was behind a spate of attacks on ALPR cameras in North Suffolk, Virginia, between April and October 2025. He said, at a hearing in June, that he believed the technology was unconstitutional. Flock cameras: A problem or simply misunderstood? The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office said Flock’s cameras “are an important investigative tool” used to help solve various types of crimes, including missing persons cases, car thefts, and violent crimes such as shootings and homicides where suspect vehicles are involved. Contrary to the opinions held by many, it went on to say, the cameras “are used exclusively to support legitimate criminal investigations,” not to support the US government’s anti-immigration efforts. Likewise, Flock has repeatedly denied offering contracts to agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), although reports suggest police were instead carrying out searches on ICE's behalf. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has also allegedly used Flock data in its own immigration investigations. Other critiques of the technology used by thousands of police departments across the US include problematic abuses, such as police officers using it to stalk romantic interests. The Institute of Justice is aware of at least 26 cases of this behavior, it reported earlier this month, with the majority taking place since 2024. Additionally, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) takes issue with the scale of data gathering by ALPRs. It claims that less than 1 percent of the cars scanned are connected to crime, yet they still have details added to a database, such as vehicle manufacturer, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and scratches. Flock CEO Garrett Langley claimed this week in an interview with The Drive that the company’s cameras were used to solve around 1 million crimes across the US last year. Responding to claims such as Sovern’s – that the cameras are unconstitutional, specifically that they violate Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights – Langley said there are no legal issues, and he doesn’t foresee any arising in the future. Flock’s spokespeople have repeatedly condemned the cases of camera vandalism, highlighting the risk of losing evidence that could be crucial to solving ongoing criminal cases. ®

The Russian espionage crew that turned simply reading an email into a security risk has expanded beyond Zimbra, with Proofpoint saying it's now pulling the same half-click trick against Microsoft Outlook Web Access. Proofpoint says the cyber group it tracks as TA488, or "Laundry Bear," began exploiting CVE-2026-42897, a cross-site scripting flaw in the Outlook Web Access (OWA) component of on-premises Exchange Server, a day before researchers and government agencies exposed the group's abuse of a zero-day in Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Unlike conventional phishing attacks, this one doesn't depend on persuading the victim to follow a link or download a file. If a target opens the booby-trapped message in OWA, the browser executes attacker-controlled JavaScript inside the victim's authenticated mail session. Exchange Online is not affected. According to Proofpoint, TA488 abused the OWA flaw to target government organizations in the US and Europe, along with telecommunications, financial services, hospitality, and aerospace companies. The researchers said the unusually broad campaign may have been intended to hide among the background noise of everyday email traffic rather than the tightly focused operations more commonly associated with espionage groups. "TA488 appears to demonstrate interest in a wide range of sectors while maintaining priorities for intelligence collection against government and defense," Proofpoint said. "Lure themes remain generic and unremarkable, so the target is more inclined to open and skim the email but ultimately overlook it." Instead of dropping conventional malware onto the endpoint, the attackers deploy a browser implant dubbed OWAReaper that lives entirely inside OWA. Proofpoint says it leaves virtually no host artifacts, communicates over two command-and-control channels, supports multiple methods of exfiltrating data, and survives browser restarts, password changes, and even a complete device rebuild because the foothold resides in the compromised mailbox rather than on Windows itself. CVE-2026-42897 isn't making its debut on The Register. Microsoft disclosed the bug in May following reports that attackers were using it in the wild. Proofpoint's latest report fills in more of the picture, showing the activity formed part of a broader espionage campaign rather than isolated exploitation. Proofpoint believes TA488 may actually have been exploiting the flaw as a zero-day, citing attacker infrastructure that dates back to March, roughly two months before Microsoft's out-of-band patch. If accurate, that would suggest the campaign was underway well before defenders knew there was a vulnerability to fix. "If this is the case, the combined improvement of the malware and the exploit development against a harder target in Outlook Web Access signal a leap in capability by TA488," Proofpoint said. Microsoft did not immediately respond to The Register's questions, but if Proofpoint's assessment holds up, TA488 isn't just recycling an old trick. It's refining one that has already proven capable of slipping past one of the oldest pieces of security advice in the book: don't click suspicious links. ®

PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we show you how not to use your computer or your network. In this week’s fable of fecklessness, we talk about a teacher who had a lot to learn about security. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our story comes courtesy of Kevin Walker, a seasoned IT veteran from the UK. At one point, he was providing his services to a school when he came across the headteacher’s (aka principal’s) laptop. At the bottom of the laptop there was a sticker with the woman’s username and password. Even if they had been complicated, the post-it would have given them away, but in fact, the combination was: Username: headteacher Password: headteacher Using that laptop, a malefactor could have had access to pupils’ personal information, internal conversations, emails, and all kinds of private school files. There could be serious problems for everyone who worked for or attended the school. “A headteacher’s laptop is not just a laptop; it's an entry point to the most sensitive information a school holds,” Walker told us. If a cybercriminal got access, they could effectively break into the school without ever setting foot in the building. This wasn’t the only instance of poor security Walker saw in his time doing IT for schools. He also saw an institution create an Excel file called Passwords.xlsx, then put it on a shared drive that students could get to. As its name suggests, Passwords.xlsx was filled with login credentials that any bad actor could take advantage of. Walker also saw leaver accounts that remained active, a server that had its backup drive permanently plugged in so hackers could potentially wipe the backup as well, a Wi-Fi password written on a whiteboard in reception, and one critical system that users could only access from an ancient laptop. There was also a machine with a “Do Not Turn Off” note posted to it sitting in a corner that everyone was afraid to touch. And, years after Windows XP was no longer the current platform, the school had a CCTV monitor with that ancient OS running on it. And, a supposedly secure server room doubled as a storage closet for stationery and Christmas decorations. Walker told us that, in his experience, the schools he worked with had priorities other than cybersecurity and they didn’t understand its importance. One boss even denied the importance of keeping data safe at all. “We don’t need to worry about cybersecurity. They're only a primary school,” his manager told him when Walker tried to get them to use cloud backups. The problem, Walker opines, is that schools often have to work with outdated gear and the teachers and school administrators have other concerns. His solution: keep it simple. “Make the safe thing the easy thing,” Walker said. “Give staff password managers. Use multi-factor authentication. Review accounts properly. Test backups. Remove shared admin logins. Keep systems updated. Enforce proper passwords and block the ones that have already turned up in data breaches. If a password is already doing the rounds online, it has no business protecting a school system. None of that is as exciting as rolling out a fleet of shiny new iPads, but it works.” ®

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

In July, Hugging Face, a company that hosts much of the world’s AI software and open-source AI models, was hacked. A malicious dataset had been used to run code on one of its servers. Whoever was behind it captured internal security credentials and moved through systems over a weekend, running thousands of actions from a swarm of temporary server environments. It looked like the work of a sophisticated criminal group.

It was not. It was one of OpenAI’s new, still unreleased GPT models.

Their science experiment had escaped the lab. OpenAI was running the unreleased AI model through a benchmark that tests how well AI can successfully hack systems. To push the limits and evaluate the AI’s true capability, the company switched off the safety filters that normally stop it from doing this kind of hacking. Aware that this could go wrong, they confined the AI to an isolated environment and denied it access to the internet.

But the new AI cheated. It took literally its goal to get as high of a score as possible. It broke out on to the open internet. It inferred, probably from its training data, that it could “solve” the task by getting the answers from Hugging Face’s servers. So it chained together stolen credentials and further unknown security exploits to hack the company’s network.

Nobody instructed the AI to do any of this. It was, in OpenAI’s words, “hyperfocused on finding a solution” to the test it was being given. And while this might seem like something new with AI, it’s really very old. This is how a genie behaves, and it is a key challenge with AI agents in general.

In folklore, genies—and other magical beings—grant wishes literally, not how the wisher intended. King Midas asked that everything he touched turn to gold, and starved. The sorcerer’s apprentice wanted the broom to fill the cistern, and it performed its task so well that it flooded the house.

We now have machines that do this. Ask a modern AI agent to save money on your phone plan and it might simply cancel the plan. Tell it to book a flight, and it might hack the airline website to override restrictions. Or, like OpenAI, ask it to do well on a test and it might break into another company to steal the answers. Each time, it recognizably completed the task you set, but it didn’t do what you would have wanted.

This isn’t malicious behavior. No one asked for, or wanted, Hugging Face to be hacked. OpenAI and Hugging Face and the AI were ostensibly on the same side, and the AI was trying to do what it had been asked. That’s what makes it so difficult to guard against: you can’t filter for bad instructions because the instructions were fine.

The gap is between the words we use and what we mean by them. We call that gap the Genie coefficient.

AI labs know this is a problem, and they’re quietly saying so. For example, the Chinese lab Moonshot recently warned that its latest AI model may have “excessive proactiveness” and “make unexpected decisions on the user’s behalf”. The UK’s AI Security Institute has started tracking “cheating behavior in frontier model evaluations”. We wouldn’t tolerate a car that is excessively proactive or ruthlessly efficient, and yet that’s the reality of AI today.

Improvement is possible. Just as AIs have gotten much better at resisting prompt injection attacks over the last few years, we can safely predict that they will get better at avoiding genie-like behavior. The point of the Genie coefficient is to track progress. AI companies like benchmarks, and they all work to compete to be the best.

Dozens of benchmarks and leaderboards tell us how well these AI models write code, perform logical reasoning, and pass standardized legal and medical exams. But there is nothing that scores whether a system does what you actually meant. We need to develop a measure for this, test it regularly, and push for improvement. We’re not going to have trustworthy AI agents without it.

UPDATED Watch out for untrusted documents. According to research, an attacker can hide malicious instructions in a Word document that, when included in Copilot for Word’s context, may alter document output and copy the instructions into newly created files that use the affected document as source material, without the victim noticing. Håkon Måløy, a Norwegian data scientist with a PhD in applied AI and ML, publicly disclosed the issue in a blog post Tuesday. Måløy describes the issue in considerable detail while withholding the specific prompt payload, arguing that, because no robust mitigation exists, it would be irresponsible to disclose anything beyond the class of the vulnerability. “To my knowledge, this is among the first public demonstrations of document-borne AI-worm self-propagation through normal workflows in a mainstream commercial productivity suite,” Måløy noted. Måløy said that he has been working with Microsoft since March 2026 on addressing the vulnerability, but after multiple updates to Copilot, this new class of Copilot worm is still viable. Microsoft mitigated the exploit demonstrated by his original proof-of-concept prompt, but Måløy said rewording the payload allowed him to successfully propagate the worm and alter financial data in a target document. Måløy and Microsoft twice delayed public disclosure of the issue, but, after 144 days, he said in his report that people needed to be made aware. “The coordination period agreed with Microsoft has been exhausted, and testing shows that no robust mitigation for the broader vulnerability class is currently available,” Måløy wrote. “Two mitigation attempts, including a model upgrade, did not close the class.” How Copilot propagates a Word worm Måløy explained the worm’s execution with an example involving an employee preparing a financial report for their company. The employee downloads a market analysis from a trusted website to help with the preparation of a financial report in Copilot, unaware that the source had been compromised and the document they downloaded contains hidden malicious instructions. The hidden instructions (inserted as small white text in his proof of concept) tell Copilot to alter figures in the report the employee generates and to copy the worm into the report they create with Copilot. If another employee later adds that report to their own work, the whole process begins again, and documents generated from it also contain the worm, and, as it spreads, it makes tracing the infection to its source extremely difficult. “The attack can therefore continue without further involvement from either the compromised website or the original malicious document,” Måløy said. “The attacker does not need access to the victim’s Microsoft 365 tenant. The attacker only needs to share a malicious document with the victim.” Copilot should use information in documents a user includes in its context for a project without treating instructions embedded in a document as additional prompts, Måløy said, but his research suggests it doesn't always do that. A fundamental flaw Måløy argues that he’s essentially dug up a new type of cross-domain prompt injection attack that abuses a fundamental part of modern LLM architecture. “For AI-assistants to be useful, they often must process emails, documents, webpages, memories, tool outputs, and other information that may be controlled by an attacker,” the researcher said. But if an LLM has to process data in order to determine it contains an attack, the attack could already be influencing that determination. “Relying on the model to detect XPIAs therefore resembles asking an interpreter to execute an untrusted program to determine whether that program is safe to execute,” Måløy asserted. Were Microsoft or some other company to pop another model in front of that model to check for malicious content, it only moves the problem outward, Måløy said, creating a “LLMs all the way down” scenario. “The long-term challenge likely lies in designing systems in which goals and intentions also exist independently of the information being processed,” he said. Until that time, Måløy argues, “any system that integrates an LLM into a trusted workflow today must assume that attacker-controlled content entering the model’s context will result in compromise at some rate.” What can Copilot customers do to reduce the risk? Short of ditching Copilot, there’s not much. “No customer-side remediation fully addresses the issue at the time of publication,” Måløy said, but he does have a few tips. Treat externally sourced documents as untrusted when using them in Copilot, he recommends, and fully review every single document before sending it to Copilot, and fully review any Copilot-generated or edited documents before distributing them. Sheesh - if you’re going to have to actually read that stuff, you might as well just cut Copilot out of the loop and do the thinking yourself. Microsoft has been in touch to confirm the research, but the company's statement doesn't do anything to allay fears this is an unsolved issue. “We have addressed the findings reported by the researcher and thank them for working with us through coordinated vulnerability disclosure. To address this class of risk, we use a defense-in-depth strategy with safeguards that block malicious instructions at multiple points and help keep tasks aligned with users’ requests. We are continuously strengthening these safeguards as the technology and threat landscape evolve. We encourage customers to install the latest updates, use multiple layers of security protection, treat content from unknown sources with caution, and review AI-generated content before using or sharing it.” We also reached out to Måløy, but didn’t hear back before publication. ® Updated at 1841 GMT on July 29 to add Microsoft's statement.

Security researchers at Tenable suspect the Iran-linked faux hacktivist outfit CyberAv3ngers was behind the cyberattack that disrupted more than 30 Minnesota water facilities. Neither state-level nor federal officials have made any claims regarding attribution for the attacks, however, Tenable reckons the operational pattern is consistent with the crew's previous raids, noting the timing relative to recent government warnings. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) updated an advisory on Iran-linked attackers targeting programmable logic controllers (PLCs) across critical infrastructure on July 22, four days before Minnesota said the attacks targeted its systems. The advisory warned that Iran-linked hackers were attempting to disrupt operations using tactics previously associated with CyberAv3ngers. Government facilities, water and wastewater systems, and energy providers were among those urged to remain on high alert. What happened in Minnesota? On July 26 and 27, more than 30 community water systems across Minnesota were disrupted by what officials called "a coordinated cyberattack" targeting operational technology (OT). Minnesota IT Services (MNIT), the state's IT agency, said the Department of Health is working with the affected water facilities to ensure public health is maintained. No cities have yet asked citizens to modify the amount of drinking water they consume, per MNIT's latest update. The agency did not offer many other details about the attacks, other than to mention all the different agencies, organizations, and bodies it is working with as part of the investigation. One of the first cities to report issues, Braham, warned that its water reserves were limited in its initial notice. Citizens were asked not to water their lawns or use water for recreational purposes, although the problems were resolved the same day. No such directives were issued in other affected cities. Maple Plain declared a state of emergency, allowing it greater flexibility to coordinate resources, but did not ask residents to adjust their consumption. The same was true in the Twin Cities suburb of Plymouth and in South St. Paul, which both confirmed cyber-related problems on July 27 but did not ask residents to curb water use. "Cyberattacks against critical infrastructure require a coordinated, whole-of-government response," said John Israel, MNIT assistant commissioner and Minnesota CISO. "MNIT is working side by side with our partners to share intelligence, support affected communities, and help utilities restore operations safely while strengthening defenses against future attacks. "This incident demonstrates why Minnesota has invested in strong cybersecurity capabilities and partnerships. Our response worked as intended, enabling agencies at every level of government to rapidly coordinate, contain the incident, and help prevent more serious impacts to critical services." What is CyberAv3ngers? First identified around 2020, CyberAv3ngers is widely believed to be linked to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), specifically its Cyber-Electronic Command division (IRGC-CEC). For the first two years, the group began as a "propaganda persona," as Tenable puts it, claiming disruptive attacks on Israeli infrastructure – claims that were later debunked as fabrications. Its first sustained campaign came in November 2023, when it compromised PLCs at the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, defacing them anti-Israel messages. Tenable said CyberAv3ngers compromised at least 75 Unitronics Vision Series PLCs across the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom, and Ireland as part of the campaign. They did so by exploiting default passwords. Between 2024 and 2025, the crew developed the IOCONTROL malware kit, built for attacks on OT and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. OpenAI said in 2024 that the group's members used ChatGPT in the development process. CyberAv3ngers stepped up its activity in 2026, targeting US critical infrastructure through Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley PLCs from March onward. CISA's July 22 update added Schneider Electric and Siemens equipment to the list of potential targets. In some cases, the attacks - which targeted multiple critical infrastructure sectors - disrupted operations at affected facilities, federal officials said, though they offered no specifics on what those disruptions entailed. CyberAv3ngers is known for targeting small water and municipal facilities, which experts believe are among the lowest-hanging fruit in US critical infrastructure. Many small and rural facilities lack dedicated cybersecurity resources. Tenable said some operators manage OT environments using remote-access software such as TeamViewer and AnyDesk or leave their PLCs exposed to the web. "These access methods bypass enterprise security controls entirely, creating an attack surface that is invisible to conventional security monitoring," Tenable said. Poor segmentation between IT and OT environments can also allow a single intrusion to spread across much of the network. ®

The US government has decided to effectively ban the sale of advanced robots made in other nations. The decision trickled out over two days with publication of a National Security Determination [PDF] and an update [PDF] to the list of banned devices set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The national security document observes “Advanced robotic devices will be critical to creating efficiencies in our economy, dominating on the battlefield, and securing our homeland” and notes that modern bots are now constantly connected to networks “which creates broad attack surfaces and leaves them vulnerable to data exfiltration, remote disruption of the physical robot, and dependencies on unsecure over the air updates.” One example of those vulnerabilities mentioned in the document is the UniPwn flaws that made it possible for attackers to take over humanoid robots made by Chinese company Unitree. “If the United States continues to rely on foreign sources of advanced robotic devices and critical components, it will subject the parts of the U.S. economy and national security enterprise that are reliant on these robots to the whims of foreign entities that could disrupt or degrade the supply chains at a time of their choosing,” the document states. To respond to those threats, the FCC decided the foreign-made advanced robotic devices belong on its Covered List of products for which imports are banned because they pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States and its residents. The regulator offered a single exception: if the Department of War vouches for a device, it can have it. Foreign-owned companies that make their bots in America are also exempt, an important exemption because one of the leading robot-makers is Boston Dynamics – a company backed by the USA’s DARPA that is now majority-owned by South Korea’s Hyundai, but continues to manufacture its machines stateside. The decision does, however, apply to all future foreign-made devices. Vendors of clankers already approved for sale in the USA can continue to import them, and users are also free to use any bots they already own. But the intent of the documents is clear: from now on, only robots made in America are welcome in America. One entity that stands to benefit from this decision is Tesla, which Elon Musk claims will one day produce one million humanoid robots a year. In true Muskian style he has also said Tesla will go into “high production” of the bots in 2026, but there’s no evidence of that happening although the occasional trillionaire did recently show off the production line for Tesla’s “Optimus” bot. ®

There’s new benchmark measuring AI’s ability to perform mathematical cryptanalysis. Anthropic’s frontier model actually found new attacks.

The benchmark: “CryptanalysisBench: Can LLMs do Cryptanalysis?” The idea is to benchmark the ability of LLMs to discover new mathematical cryptanalytic attacks against a series of historical algorithms.

Abstract: Cryptanalysis—the task of finding attacks against cryptographic schemes—its at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and cybersecurity, two areas where LLMs have advanced fastest. Cryptanalysis represents both a clean testbed for frontier reasoning (as practical attacks can be automatically verified) and a domain with unusually high stakes, since the primitives under study underpin our digital security. In this paper we ask whether LLMs can do cryptanalysis, and find that the answer is increasingly yes. We introduce CryptanalysisBench, 191 tasks across six families of cryptographic primitives (block ciphers, hash functions, etc.) drawn primarily from four NIST standardization competitions. Our benchmark consists of three tiers: (i) primitives with known practical breaks; (ii) primitives with no known practical break, evaluated both at full strength and as scaled-down variants; and (iii) a challenge set of production primitives at the frontier of cryptanalysis. Five frontier models (Claude Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, Mythos 5, GPT-5.5, and the open-weights GLM-5.2) break 65%­86% of Tier 1 schemes, 6­12 Tier-2 schemes at full strength, and 24­61 across all scaled-down variants. Beyond deriving known results, models produce novel cryptanalysis, such as a key-recovery attack that exploits a design flaw in the SpoC AEAD and an error in KINDI’s published CCA-security proof, both to the best of our knowledge not previously known.

We release CryptanalysisBench as a tool to help track if (or when) AI cryptanalysis becomes a serious factor and as a scaffold for stress-testing candidate schemes before deployment. The attacks that the benchmark already surfaces are an early snapshot of a fast-moving frontier that may soon match, and in places exceed, the published state of the art.

Anthropic used the benchmark to test Mythos Preview, and found new vulnerabilities in Hawk and reduced-round AES.

Still early results, but this is definitely something to watch.

SlashDot thread.