A hacktivist group with links to Iran’s intelligence agencies is claiming responsibility for a data-wiping attack against Stryker, a global medical technology company based in Michigan. News reports out of Ireland, Stryker’s largest hub outside of the United States, said the company sent home more than 5,000 workers there today. Meanwhile, a voicemail message at Stryker’s main U.S. headquarters says the company is currently experiencing a building emergency.
Based in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Stryker [NYSE:SYK] is a medical and surgical equipment maker that reported $25 billion in global sales last year. In a lengthy statement posted to Telegram, an Iranian hacktivist group known as Handala (a.k.a. Handala Hack Team) claimed that Stryker’s offices in 79 countries have been forced to shut down after the group erased data from more than 200,000 systems, servers and mobile devices.
A manifesto posted by the Iran-backed hacktivist group Handala, claiming a mass data-wiping attack against medical technology maker Stryker.
“All the acquired data is now in the hands of the free people of the world, ready to be used for the true advancement of humanity and the exposure of injustice and corruption,” a portion of the Handala statement reads.
The group said the wiper attack was in retaliation for a Feb. 28 missile strike that hit an Iranian school and killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The New York Times reports today that an ongoing military investigation has determined the United States is responsible for the deadly Tomahawk missile strike.
Handala was one of several Iran-linked hacker groups recently profiled by Palo Alto Networks, which links it to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). Palo Alto says Handala surfaced in late 2023 and is assessed as one of several online personas maintained by Void Manticore, a MOIS-affiliated actor.
Stryker’s website says the company has 56,000 employees in 61 countries. A phone call placed Wednesday morning to the media line at Stryker’s Michigan headquarters sent this author to a voicemail message that stated, “We are currently experiencing a building emergency. Please try your call again later.”
A report Wednesday morning from the Irish Examiner said Stryker staff are now communicating via WhatsApp for any updates on when they can return to work. The story quoted an unnamed employee saying anything connected to the network is down, and that “anyone with Microsoft Outlook on their personal phones had their devices wiped.”
“Multiple sources have said that systems in the Cork headquarters have been ‘shut down’ and that Stryker devices held by employees have been wiped out,” the Examiner reported. “The login pages coming up on these devices have been defaced with the Handala logo.”
Wiper attacks usually involve malicious software designed to overwrite any existing data on infected devices. But a trusted source with knowledge of the attack who spoke on condition of anonymity told KrebsOnSecurity the perpetrators in this case appear to have used a Microsoft service called Microsoft Intune to issue a ‘remote wipe’ command against all connected devices.
Intune is a cloud-based solution built for IT teams to enforce security and data compliance policies, and it provides a single, web-based administrative console to monitor and control devices regardless of location. The Intune connection is supported by this Reddit discussion on the Stryker outage, where several users who claimed to be Stryker employees said they were told to uninstall Intune urgently.
Palo Alto says Handala’s hack-and-leak activity is primarily focused on Israel, with occasional targeting outside that scope when it serves a specific agenda. The security firm said Handala also has taken credit for recent attacks against fuel systems in Jordan and an Israeli energy exploration company.
“Recent observed activities are opportunistic and ‘quick and dirty,’ with a noticeable focus on supply-chain footholds (e.g., IT/service providers) to reach downstream victims, followed by ‘proof’ posts to amplify credibility and intimidate targets,” Palo Alto researchers wrote.
The Handala manifesto posted to Telegram referred to Stryker as a “Zionist-rooted corporation,” which may be a reference to the company’s 2019 acquisition of the Israeli company OrthoSpace.
Stryker is a major supplier of medical devices, and the ongoing attack is already affecting healthcare providers. One healthcare professional at a major university medical system in the United States told KrebsOnSecurity they are currently unable to order surgical supplies that they normally source through Stryker.
“This is a real-world supply chain attack,” the expert said, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “Pretty much every hospital in the U.S. that performs surgeries uses their supplies.”
John Riggi, national advisor for the American Hospital Association (AHA), said the AHA is not aware of any supply-chain disruptions as of yet.
“We are aware of reports of the cyber attack against Stryker and are actively exchanging information with the hospital field and the federal government to understand the nature of the threat and assess any impact to hospital operations,” Riggi said in an email. “As of this time, we are not aware of any direct impacts or disruptions to U.S. hospitals as a result of this attack. That may change as hospitals evaluate services, technology and supply chain related to Stryker and if the duration of the attack extends.”
This is a developing story. Updates will be noted with a timestamp.
Update, 2:54 p.m. ET: Added comment from Riggi and perspectives on this attack’s potential to turn into a supply-chain problem for the healthcare system.
In January 2026, we announced the general availability of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, a new, independent cloud for Europe entirely located within the European Union (EU), and physically and logically separate from all other AWS Regions. The unique approach of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud provides the only fully featured, independently operated sovereign cloud backed by strong technical controls, sovereign assurances, and legal protections designed to meet the sensitive data needs of European governments and enterprises.
One of the foundational components of how AWS European Sovereign Cloud enables verifiable trust of technical controls and delivers assurance is through our compliance programs and assurance frameworks. These programs help customers understand the robust controls in place at AWS European Sovereign Cloud to maintain security and compliance of the cloud. To meet the needs of our customers, we committed that the AWS European Sovereign Cloud will maintain key certifications such as ISO/IEC 27001:2022, System and Organization Controls (SOC) reports, and Cloud Computing Compliance Criteria Catalogue (C5) attestation, all validated regularly by independent auditors to assure our controls are designed appropriately, operate effectively, and can help customers satisfy their compliance obligations.
Today, AWS European Sovereign Cloud is pleased to announce that SOC 2 and C5 Type 1 attestation reports, along with seven key ISO certifications (ISO 27001:2022, 27017:2015, 27018:2019, 27701:2019, 22301:2019, 20000-1:2018, and 9001:2015) are now available. These attestation reports and certifications cover 69 AWS services operating within the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, and this achievement marks a pivotal first step in our journey to establish the AWS European Sovereign Cloud as a trusted and compliant cloud for European organizations. By securing these foundational certifications and attestation reports early in our implementation, we are demonstrating our commitment to earning customer trust. AWS European Sovereign Cloud customers in Germany and across Europe can now run their applications with enhanced assurance and confidence that our infrastructure aligns with internationally recognized security standards and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud: Sovereign Reference Framework (ESC-SRF). These certifications and attestation reports provide independent validation of our security controls and operational practices, demonstrating our commitment to meeting the heightened expectations towards cloud service providers. Beyond compliance, these certifications and reports help customers meet regulatory requirements and innovate with confidence.
SOC reports are independent third-party examinations that show how AWS European Sovereign Cloud meets compliance controls and sovereignty objectives. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud SOC 2 report addresses three critical AICPA Trust Services Criteria: Security, Availability, and Confidentiality and includes internal controls mapped to the ESC-SRF. The ESC-SRF establishes sovereignty criteria across key domains including governance independence, operational control, data residency, and technical isolation. As part of the SOC 2 Type 1 attestation, independent third-party auditors have validated suitability of the design and implementation of our controls addressing measures such as independent European Union (EU) corporate structures, operation by EU-resident AWS personnel, strict residency requirements for Customer Content and Customer-Created Metadata, and separation from all other AWS Regions. The ESC-SRF controls in our SOC 2 report show customers how AWS delivers on its sovereignty commitments.
C5 is a German Government-backed attestation scheme introduced in Germany by the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and represents one of the most comprehensive cloud security standards in Europe. The AWS European Sovereign Cloud C5 Type 1 report provides customers with independent third-party attestation on the suitability of the design and implementation of our controls to meet both C5 basic criteria and C5 additional criteria.
The basic criteria establish fundamental security requirements for cloud service providers, covering areas such as organization of information security, human resources security, asset management, access control, cryptography, physical security, operations security, communications security, system acquisition and development, supplier relationships, incident management, business continuity, and compliance. The additional criteria address enhanced requirements for handling sensitive data and critical applications, making this attestation particularly valuable for AWS European Sovereign Cloud customers with stringent data security and sovereignty requirements.
AWS European Sovereign Cloud has achieved seven key ISO certifications that collectively demonstrate comprehensive operational excellence:
These certifications confirm that AWS European Sovereign Cloud has integrated rigorous security, privacy, continuity, service delivery, and quality programs into a comprehensive framework, helping to ensure sensitive information remains secure, services remain available, and operations meet the highest standards through systematic risk management processes and continuous improvement practices.
To access SOC 2, C5 reports and ISO certifications, customers should sign in to their AWS European Sovereign Cloud account and navigate to AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console. AWS Artifact is a self-service portal that provides on-demand access to AWS compliance reports and certifications.
We recognize that compliance is not a destination but a continuous journey, and these initial SOC 2, C5 reports and ISO certifications represent the beginning of our certification portfolio. They lay the essential groundwork upon which we will continue to build to meet AWS European Sovereign Cloud customers’ compliance needs as they continue to evolve. As we expand our compliance coverage in the months ahead, customers can be confident that security, transparency, and regulatory alignment have been part of the very DNA of the AWS European Sovereign Cloud design from day one. To learn more about our compliance and security programs, visit AWS European Sovereign Cloud Compliance, or reach out to your AWS European Sovereign Cloud account team.
Security and compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS European Sovereign Cloud and the customer. For more information, see the AWS Shared Security Responsibility Model.
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The RSAC 2026 Conference brings together thousands of professionals, practitioners, vendors, and associations to discuss issues covering the entire spectrum of cybersecurity—a place where innovation meets collaboration and the industry’s brightest minds converge to shape its future. This March, Amazon Web Services (AWS) returns to the annual RSAC Conference in San Francisco to share how unifying security and data empowers teams to protect AI-driven workloads while maximizing existing security investments.
Visit us at booth S-0466 in South Expo to experience three interactive demo kiosks:
Partner Passport program: Stop by the AWS booth to pick up your playbook to start exploring integrated AWS Partner security solutions across the show floor. Visit participating partner booths throughout the conference to learn about joint solutions that combine AWS infrastructure with partner innovations. After you’ve received all partner booth visit stamps, you’ll receive AWS swag and entry into a daily raffle to win an exclusive prize.
AWS security experts will be sharing insights across four sessions throughout RSAC 2026 Conference. These sessions cover the most pressing challenges in AI security, from privacy-by-design principles to preparing for AI-native incidents. Don’t miss learning directly from AWS experts in these sessions.
Privacy by Design in the AI Era | Reserve a seat
Monday, March 23, 2026 | 8:30 AM–9:20 AM PDT
Attendees will learn how to design AI systems with privacy embedded from the start. This session will cover data minimization strategies, architectural patterns for consent-aware decision-making, and practical approaches for building privacy-respecting AI in dynamic environments. Speakers: Juan David Alvares Builes, Senior Security Consultant, Amazon Web Services and Zully Romero, Security and Solutions Architect, Bancolombia.
Trusted Identity Propagation for Autonomous Agents Across Cloud & SaaS | Reserve a seat
Monday, March 23, 2026 | 9:40 AM–10:30 AM PDT
This session will explore trusted identity propagation for autonomous agents across cloud, SaaS, and multi-domain environments. Compare AWS, Azure, Apple, and Cloudflare approaches, focusing on identity continuity, credential management, and privacy-aware designs for secure, agent-driven enterprise systems. Speakers: Swara Gandhi, Senior Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services and Vijeth Lomada, Lead AI Engineer, Adobe.
How to Secure Containerized Applications from Supply Chain Attacks | Reserve a seat
Monday, March 23, 2026 | 1:10 PM–2:00 PM PDT
Software supply chain attacks target development pipelines to inject malicious code into container images and dependencies. This session demonstrates how to secure containerized applications through automated scanning, Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) generation, and image signing. Learn to implement security controls in CI/CD pipelines using open-source and commercial solutions. Speakers: Patrick Palmer, Principal Security, Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services and Monika Vu Minh, Quantitative Technologist, Qube Research & Technologies
From Prompt to Pager: Preparing for AI-Native Incidents Now | Reserve a seat
Wednesday, March 25, 2026 | 1:15 PM–2:05 PM PDT
AI incidents start as prompts and end as actions like code edits, SQL writes, workflow changes, yet most playbooks are not ready. This talk will explain why AI incidents differ, show where classic guardrails miss, and share field-tested steps to prepare now: log model-generated actions, add pre/post-conditions, capture provenance, limit blast radius, and rehearse one AI-native scenario. Speaker: Aviral Srivastava, Security Engineer, Amazon
AWS will host events at Cloud Village, an interactive community space where security practitioners explore offensive and defensive cloud security through hands-on activities, technical talks, and collaborative discussions. AWS is hosting two technical workshops that provide hands-on practical skills security teams can implement immediately. AWS has also crafted multiple capture the flag (CTF) community challenges at both RSAC 2026 Conference and BSidesSF that advance the broader security community’s capabilities – built by the same team behind the AWS Vulnerability Disclosure Program, where researchers can responsibly report security concerns directly to AWS. Cloud Village will be located in Moscone South, Level 2, Room 204 and is open to All Access Pass and Expo Plus Pass holders.
Finally, you can also join us at a customer soiree AWS is co-hosting with CrowdStrike, on Wednesday, March 25 at The Mint, for an evening of discovery, where artists, thinkers, and leaders gather to challenge convention, shape the future and have some fun. Register to join us
If you’re looking for opportunities for meaningful connections across the security community, AWS is hosting several events including;
Whether you’re exploring how to secure AI workloads, seeking to unify security across distributed environments, or looking to optimize your security data strategy, the AWS team at RSAC 2026 Conference is ready to collaborate. Visit booth S-0466 in South Expo, attend our technical workshops at the Cloud Village, or join AWS-led sessions. You can also schedule time to meet with AWS experts for more in-depth discussions. Together, we’ll demonstrate that when it comes to cybersecurity, we’re all on the same team.
Learn more about AWS Security solutions at aws.amazon.com/security
See you in San Francisco, March 23–26, 2026.
Since the headline-grabbing outages of 2021, we’ve had recurring conversations with large enterprises asking some version of the same question.
This issue of control has become more urgent after a series of well‑publicized, multi‑hour outages across major cloud‑based DDoS protection and security platforms. These incidents are rare but appear to be increasing in frequency. And when they happen, they expose architectural decisions many organisations haven’t revisited in years. The fact is that architectures assumed providers would never fail. Reality proved them wrong.
The concern isn’t whether cloud DDoS mitigation works. At scale, it does. The issue is control: whether customers retain the ability to reroute traffic independently if the provider itself goes down.
Many DDoS protection services simplify onboarding by originating customer prefixes and returning traffic via static paths. Under normal conditions, this works. During a provider outage, especially one affecting routing or orchestration, customers may lose the ability to reroute traffic
independently. Recovery depends on provider‑side changes at the worst possible moment.
That’s when a DDoS mitigation service can become a single point of failure.
One thing we consistently hear from network and security teams is that DDoS attack mitigation and traffic control are often treated as the same problem. They aren’t.
Resilient architectures separate them:
| Function | Who Should Control It |
|---|---|
| Attack mitigation | DDoS provider |
| Traffic routing decisions | Customer network |
The Internet already provides a mechanism to enforce this separation: the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). This is the Internet’s routing protocol; it determines how traffic is directed between the networks.
So, the real question isn’t whether to use cloud‑based DDoS protection. It’s whether that protection operates with your routing policy, or instead of it.
Resilient architectures treat attack mitigation and traffic control as separate concerns. Providers absorb DDoS attacks. Customers retain routing authority using BGP, enabling them to decide how traffic flows during failures.
When customers control BGP, outages take on a different character. They become routing events, not service outages. Traffic can be redirected faster, the blast radius is reduced, and network teams respond using familiar controls instead of escalation paths.
No provider is immune to failure. CDNs, hyperscalers, and DDoS mitigation services all operate complex, global control planes.
Resilience doesn’t come from assuming outages won’t happen. It comes from designing so that when they do, customers still control the outcome.
That’s why more organizations are adopting architectures where:
This approach preserves the benefits of cloud‑scale mitigation while avoiding the creation of new single points of failure.
If you’re rethinking your DDoS architecture, your best starting point isn’t a product demo; it’s an architectural review. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
Those answers usually reveal more than any outage postmortem.
On the Internet, control of routing is control of availability, and we think that control should always remain in customer’s hands.
Want to discuss what customer‑controlled DDoS protection looks like in practice? Get in touch with Thales to review your architecture.
The post When your DDoS mitigation provider goes down: Why traffic control can’t be outsourced appeared first on Blog.
After talking with many customers, one thing is clear: the security challenge has not gotten easier. Enterprises today operate across a complex mix of environments, including on-premises infrastructure, private data centers, and multiple clouds, often with tools that were never designed to work together. The result is enterprise security teams spend more time managing tools than managing risk, making it harder to stay ahead of threats across an increasingly complex environment.
At Amazon Web Service (AWS), we believe security should be simple, integrated, and built for the way enterprises actually operate. This belief is what drove us to reimagine AWS Security Hub, delivering full-stack security through a single experience, and this vision is driving our next chapter.
We transformed Security Hub into a unified security operations solution by bringing together AWS security services, including Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, AWS Security Hub Cloud Security Posture Management (Security Hub CSPM), and Amazon Macie, into a single experience that automatically and continuously analyzes security signals across threats, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and sensitive data. Security Hub delivers a common foundation, bringing together findings from across your AWS environment so your security team spends less time translating signals and more time acting on them. Built on top of that foundation, a unified operations layer gives security teams near real-time risk analytics, automated analysis, and prioritized insights, helping them focus on what matters most, at scale.
We also introduced new capabilities (the Extended plan) that simplify how enterprises procure, deploy, and integrate a full-stack security solution across endpoint, identity, email, network, data, browser, cloud, AI, and security operations. Now, customers can use Security Hub to expand their security portfolio through a curated selection of AWS Partner solutions (at launch: 7AI, Britive, CrowdStrike, Cyera, Island, Noma, Okta, Oligo, Opti, Proofpoint, SailPoint, Splunk (a Cisco company), Upwind, and Zscaler), all through one unified experience. With AWS as the seller of record, you benefit from pay-as-you-go pricing, a single bill, and no long-term commitments. Our goal is simple: unified security, everywhere your enterprise operates.
At AWS, interoperability means giving customers the freedom to choose solutions that best suit their needs, and the ability to use them wherever their workloads run. But freedom to innovate across multicloud environments also means that it is critical to secure them consistently, and without adding operational complexity.
In the coming months, we are expanding Security Hub with new multicloud capabilities that extend unified security operations beyond AWS. The foundation of this expansion is a common data layer that unifies security signals from wherever your workloads run. On top of that, a unified policy and operations layer delivers consistent posture management, exposure analysis, and risk prioritization, so your security team operates from a single view of risk rather than a fragmented collection of consoles.
Security Hub will deliver unified risk analytics that surface critical risks across your multicloud estate. You’ll be able to manage cloud security posture with Security Hub CSPM checks that give you consistent posture visibility, and extend vulnerability management with expanded Amazon Inspector capabilities, including virtual machine scanning, container image scanning, and serverless scanning. Security Hub will also deliver external network scanning that enriches security findings with context about internet-facing exposure across your multicloud environment, including for resources not running in AWS.
The result is more comprehensive risk coverage across your enterprise. It’s about giving your security team a single, unified experience to detect and respond to risks, wherever you operate.
The security leaders I speak with aren’t just asking for better tools. They’re asking for a way to get ahead of risk, not just manage it. They want security that keeps pace with the business, not security that slows it down.
That’s the vision behind AWS Security Hub: unified security through a single, integrated security operations experience, built on a common data foundation, powered by intelligent analytics, and delivered through a consistent operations layer, to help reduce security risk, improve team productivity, and strengthen security operations across AWS and beyond.
Our multicloud expansion is underway, and we are just getting started.
You can learn more at aws.amazon.com/security-hub, or visit us at the AWS booth (S-0466) at RSA Conference, March 23–26 in San Francisco.
AI-based assistants or “agents” — autonomous programs that have access to the user’s computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task — are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful and assertive new tools are rapidly shifting the security priorities for organizations, while blurring the lines between data and code, trusted co-worker and insider threat, ninja hacker and novice code jockey.
The new hotness in AI-based assistants — OpenClaw (formerly known as ClawdBot and Moltbot) — has seen rapid adoption since its release in November 2025. OpenClaw is an open-source autonomous AI agent designed to run locally on your computer and proactively take actions on your behalf without needing to be prompted.
The OpenClaw logo.
If that sounds like a risky proposition or a dare, consider that OpenClaw is most useful when it has complete access to your digital life, where it can then manage your inbox and calendar, execute programs and tools, browse the Internet for information, and integrate with chat apps like Discord, Signal, Teams or WhatsApp.
Other more established AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Copilot also can do these things, but OpenClaw isn’t just a passive digital butler waiting for commands. Rather, it’s designed to take the initiative on your behalf based on what it knows about your life and its understanding of what you want done.
“The testimonials are remarkable,” the AI security firm Snyk observed. “Developers building websites from their phones while putting babies to sleep; users running entire companies through a lobster-themed AI; engineers who’ve set up autonomous code loops that fix tests, capture errors through webhooks, and open pull requests, all while they’re away from their desks.”
You can probably already see how this experimental technology could go sideways in a hurry. In late February, Summer Yue, the director of safety and alignment at Meta’s “superintelligence” lab, recounted on Twitter/X how she was fiddling with OpenClaw when the AI assistant suddenly began mass-deleting messages in her email inbox. The thread included screenshots of Yue frantically pleading with the preoccupied bot via instant message and ordering it to stop.
“Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw ‘confirm before acting’ and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox,” Yue said. “I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.”
Meta’s director of AI safety, recounting on Twitter/X how her OpenClaw installation suddenly began mass-deleting her inbox.
There’s nothing wrong with feeling a little schadenfreude at Yue’s encounter with OpenClaw, which fits Meta’s “move fast and break things” model but hardly inspires confidence in the road ahead. However, the risk that poorly-secured AI assistants pose to organizations is no laughing matter, as recent research shows many users are exposing to the Internet the web-based administrative interface for their OpenClaw installations.
Jamieson O’Reilly is a professional penetration tester and founder of the security firm DVULN. In a recent story posted to Twitter/X, O’Reilly warned that exposing a misconfigured OpenClaw web interface to the Internet allows external parties to read the bot’s complete configuration file, including every credential the agent uses — from API keys and bot tokens to OAuth secrets and signing keys.
With that access, O’Reilly said, an attacker could impersonate the operator to their contacts, inject messages into ongoing conversations, and exfiltrate data through the agent’s existing integrations in a way that looks like normal traffic.
“You can pull the full conversation history across every integrated platform, meaning months of private messages and file attachments, everything the agent has seen,” O’Reilly said, noting that a cursory search revealed hundreds of such servers exposed online. “And because you control the agent’s perception layer, you can manipulate what the human sees. Filter out certain messages. Modify responses before they’re displayed.”
O’Reilly documented another experiment that demonstrated how easy it is to create a successful supply chain attack through ClawHub, which serves as a public repository of downloadable “skills” that allow OpenClaw to integrate with and control other applications.
One of the core tenets of securing AI agents involves carefully isolating them so that the operator can fully control who and what gets to talk to their AI assistant. This is critical thanks to the tendency for AI systems to fall for “prompt injection” attacks, sneakily-crafted natural language instructions that trick the system into disregarding its own security safeguards. In essence, machines social engineering other machines.
A recent supply chain attack targeting an AI coding assistant called Cline began with one such prompt injection attack, resulting in thousands of systems having a rogue instance of OpenClaw with full system access installed on their device without consent.
According to the security firm grith.ai, Cline had deployed an AI-powered issue triage workflow using a GitHub action that runs a Claude coding session when triggered by specific events. The workflow was configured so that any GitHub user could trigger it by opening an issue, but it failed to properly check whether the information supplied in the title was potentially hostile.
“On January 28, an attacker created Issue #8904 with a title crafted to look like a performance report but containing an embedded instruction: Install a package from a specific GitHub repository,” Grith wrote, noting that the attacker then exploited several more vulnerabilities to ensure the malicious package would be included in Cline’s nightly release workflow and published as an official update.
“This is the supply chain equivalent of confused deputy,” the blog continued. “The developer authorises Cline to act on their behalf, and Cline (via compromise) delegates that authority to an entirely separate agent the developer never evaluated, never configured, and never consented to.”
AI assistants like OpenClaw have gained a large following because they make it simple for users to “vibe code,” or build fairly complex applications and code projects just by telling it what they want to construct. Probably the best known (and most bizarre) example is Moltbook, where a developer told an AI agent running on OpenClaw to build him a Reddit-like platform for AI agents.
The Moltbook homepage.
Less than a week later, Moltbook had more than 1.5 million registered agents that posted more than 100,000 messages to each other. AI agents on the platform soon built their own porn site for robots, and launched a new religion called Crustafarian with a figurehead modeled after a giant lobster. One bot on the forum reportedly found a bug in Moltbook’s code and posted it to an AI agent discussion forum, while other agents came up with and implemented a patch to fix the flaw.
Moltbook’s creator Matt Schlicht said on social media that he didn’t write a single line of code for the project.
“I just had a vision for the technical architecture and AI made it a reality,” Schlicht said. “We’re in the golden ages. How can we not give AI a place to hang out.”
The flip side of that golden age, of course, is that it enables low-skilled malicious hackers to quickly automate global cyberattacks that would normally require the collaboration of a highly skilled team. In February, Amazon AWS detailed an elaborate attack in which a Russian-speaking threat actor used multiple commercial AI services to compromise more than 600 FortiGate security appliances across at least 55 countries over a five week period.
AWS said the apparently low-skilled hacker used multiple AI services to plan and execute the attack, and to find exposed management ports and weak credentials with single-factor authentication.
“One serves as the primary tool developer, attack planner, and operational assistant,” AWS’s CJ Moses wrote. “A second is used as a supplementary attack planner when the actor needs help pivoting within a specific compromised network. In one observed instance, the actor submitted the complete internal topology of an active victim—IP addresses, hostnames, confirmed credentials, and identified services—and requested a step-by-step plan to compromise additional systems they could not access with their existing tools.”
“This activity is distinguished by the threat actor’s use of multiple commercial GenAI services to implement and scale well-known attack techniques throughout every phase of their operations, despite their limited technical capabilities,” Moses continued. “Notably, when this actor encountered hardened environments or more sophisticated defensive measures, they simply moved on to softer targets rather than persisting, underscoring that their advantage lies in AI-augmented efficiency and scale, not in deeper technical skill.”
For attackers, gaining that initial access or foothold into a target network is typically not the difficult part of the intrusion; the tougher bit involves finding ways to move laterally within the victim’s network and plunder important servers and databases. But experts at Orca Security warn that as organizations come to rely more on AI assistants, those agents potentially offer attackers a simpler way to move laterally inside a victim organization’s network post-compromise — by manipulating the AI agents that already have trusted access and some degree of autonomy within the victim’s network.
“By injecting prompt injections in overlooked fields that are fetched by AI agents, hackers can trick LLMs, abuse Agentic tools, and carry significant security incidents,” Orca’s Roi Nisimi and Saurav Hiremath wrote. “Organizations should now add a third pillar to their defense strategy: limiting AI fragility, the ability of agentic systems to be influenced, misled, or quietly weaponized across workflows. While AI boosts productivity and efficiency, it also creates one of the largest attack surfaces the internet has ever seen.”
This gradual dissolution of the traditional boundaries between data and code is one of the more troubling aspects of the AI era, said James Wilson, enterprise technology editor for the security news show Risky Business. Wilson said far too many OpenClaw users are installing the assistant on their personal devices without first placing any security or isolation boundaries around it, such as running it inside of a virtual machine, on an isolated network, with strict firewall rules dictating what kinds of traffic can go in and out.
“I’m a relatively highly skilled practitioner in the software and network engineering and computery space,” Wilson said. “I know I’m not comfortable using these agents unless I’ve done these things, but I think a lot of people are just spinning this up on their laptop and off it runs.”
One important model for managing risk with AI agents involves a concept dubbed the “lethal trifecta” by Simon Willison, co-creator of the Django Web framework. The lethal trifecta holds that if your system has access to private data, exposure to untrusted content, and a way to communicate externally, then it’s vulnerable to private data being stolen.
Image: simonwillison.net.
“If your agent combines these three features, an attacker can easily trick it into accessing your private data and sending it to the attacker,” Willison warned in a frequently cited blog post from June 2025.
As more companies and their employees begin using AI to vibe code software and applications, the volume of machine-generated code is likely to soon overwhelm any manual security reviews. In recognition of this reality, Anthropic recently debuted Claude Code Security, a beta feature that scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review.
The U.S. stock market, which is currently heavily weighted toward seven tech giants that are all-in on AI, reacted swiftly to Anthropic’s announcement, wiping roughly $15 billion in market value from major cybersecurity companies in a single day. Laura Ellis, vice president of data and AI at the security firm Rapid7, said the market’s response reflects the growing role of AI in accelerating software development and improving developer productivity.
“The narrative moved quickly: AI is replacing AppSec,” Ellis wrote in a recent blog post. “AI is automating vulnerability detection. AI will make legacy security tooling redundant. The reality is more nuanced. Claude Code Security is a legitimate signal that AI is reshaping parts of the security landscape. The question is what parts, and what it means for the rest of the stack.”
DVULN founder O’Reilly said AI assistants are likely to become a common fixture in corporate environments — whether or not organizations are prepared to manage the new risks introduced by these tools, he said.
“The robot butlers are useful, they’re not going away and the economics of AI agents make widespread adoption inevitable regardless of the security tradeoffs involved,” O’Reilly wrote. “The question isn’t whether we’ll deploy them – we will – but whether we can adapt our security posture fast enough to survive doing so.”
As the digital landscape undergoes profound shifts, the recently released National Cyber Strategy provides the essential foundation for enduring American leadership. By prioritizing the disruption of hostile actors, future-proofing networks, accelerating quantum readiness, and securing the AI frontier, the strategy provides the strategic clarity necessary to protect our digital way of life from sophisticated adversaries. Palo Alto Networks commends National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross for his leadership and looks forward to working with the administration to operationalize this strategy.
Each pillar of the strategy galvanizes meaningful action to advance our collective defense:
This signals a decisive shift toward the proactive disruption of malicious actors. The Trump Administration has made clear that the U.S. Government should impose real costs on adversaries to change their behavior. While the private sector is already executing discrete disruptions against malicious actors, coordination has historically been fragmented. The strategy identifies that increased collaboration with private sector entities, who possess unique insight into adversary behavior, can in turn enable more impactful deterrence.
The strategy appropriately recognizes that complexity is the enemy of security. A focus on measurable improvements in cyber outcomes (versus check-the-box compliance exercises) collectively makes us all safer. While much attention is rightfully paid toward harmonizing incident reporting requirements, which Palo Alto Networks wholeheartedly supports, let’s not stop there. The federal government can lead by example by consolidating and streamlining federal government software compliance certifications. For example, there should be logical reciprocity between FedRAMP High and DoW IL-5 certifications.
In addition to the necessary attention on AI-powered cyber defense, cloud security and zero trust network architecture, Palo Alto Networks applauds the discrete focus on quantum-safe security ahead of “Q-Day,” the point where quantum computing capabilities will compromise legacy public key encryption that has underpinned cybersecurity for decades. As Federal CISO Mike Duffy recently stated, "Modernization without considering PQC readiness or cryptographic agility is really creating technical debt in the future, something that we don’t want to see ever.”
To address this challenge, Palo Alto Networks provides a structured quantum-safe framework organized into four stages:
The bottom line is that 2035 is too late. Quantum readiness must accelerate today, and this strategy will set a critical North Star to drive the necessary urgency.
Critical infrastructure resilience is central to our homeland security, economic security, public health and safety. Unfortunately, critical infrastructure entities are increasingly under assault from emboldened cyber adversaries.
In fact, Palo Alto Networks research shows some form of operational disruption in up to 86% of major cyber incidents. Our 2026 Global Incident Response Report underscores another sobering reality: These entities are under assault from all angles. In 87% of cyber incidents, attacks targeted multiple attack surfaces, which spanned the network, cloud, endpoints and identity.
Recognizing that you can’t secure what you can’t see, we need a national-level effort to identify, prioritize and harden the critical infrastructure that the American people depend upon. This strategy puts an important marker in the ground to revitalize those efforts.
Palo Alto Networks was pleased to see the strategy reinforces the core tenets of the AI Action Plan, emphasizing that "secure-by-design" principles for AI technologies are non-negotiable and that AI adoption and AI security can and must be inexorably linked.
Enterprises should be able to deploy AI confidently without fear of data leakage, model tampering or rogue AI agents. However, despite our research showing an 88% success rate of “jailbreaking” techniques against widely deployed AI models, only 6% of organizations currently have an AI security strategy. It’s time to flip this paradigm and put defenders back in the driver’s seat in this AI-first moment.
To support this emerging consensus around the importance of promoting AI security, we developed the Secure AI by Design Policy Roadmap. This framework provides a four-part construct to evaluate the evolving dimensions of threats to AI systems. Palo Alto Networks is also proud to make its comprehensive AI security suite, Prisma® AIRS, available to all federal agencies at substantial discounts through GSA’s OneGov Initiative.
Recognizing America’s cyber workforce as a “strategic asset,” the strategy calls for a pragmatic and accessible pipeline for developing talent. The explicit recognition that we should take advantage of existing avenues across government, industry and academia is important. For example, Palo Alto Networks is proud of the impact of its Cybersecurity Academy – that provides free, NIST Framework-aligned curricula covering essential domains, such as cybersecurity fundamentals, enterprise and network security, cloud security, security operations and the AI/cybersecurity nexus.
Resources like this, and those for other entities, can form the basis of a renewed focus on cyber talent development.
Palo Alto Networks views itself as more than a cybersecurity vendor. We see ourselves as an integrated national security partner of the federal government at a moment when defending our digital way of life demands all of us working together. To that end, we are ready to do our part to turn strategic vision into action.
This strategy should be applauded. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.
The post How the National Cyber Strategy Secures Our Digital Way of Life appeared first on Palo Alto Networks Blog.
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