While AI is supposed to help defenders, it’s now creating more than twice as much noise as human-triggered incidents CrowdStrike detects as potentially malicious. The company’s threat hunting team and systems triaged an average of 14 million detection leads daily, resulting in about 36,000 customer alerts during the one-year period ending in June.

“AI agent-driven behaviors have surged past human triggers,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike. “AI has driven the detections significantly above what humans are causing, and this gives you a sense of how frequently AI is being used, and really just that it’s being used everywhere.”

The threat posed by AI showed up incessantly during the past year, sparking alarming shifts and heightened targeting across software defects, open-source supply chains and AI tools themselves — all of which create greater difficulties for defenders, CrowdStrike said in its annual threat hunting report. 

“The AI tools that are being implemented by every enterprise across the globe right now are also creating an extended attack surface,” Meyers said during a press briefing. 

“AI is now a tool, a target, and a force multiplier for adversaries,” researchers wrote in the report, adding that AI-enabled malicious activity surged 89% during the past year as attackers used the technology to scale operations, hasten tradecraft and target AI infrastructure.

Attackers are using frontier AI models to uncover vulnerabilities and develop resources, including AI-generated scripts, payloads and commands that increase their effectiveness and efficiency. The technology also allows threat groups to design more creative ways to run automated attacks and boost impact by manipulating, interrupting or sabotaging AI systems and data.

“AI is both the weapon and the target,” Meyers said. 

Most organizations don’t view it as such, and thus far haven’t secured or put proper guardrails around the AI tools they use or address the ways attackers can use AI against them, he added. 

AI’s mark on vulnerabilities is particularly concerning, as reflected by what Meyers described as “one of the scarier stats” in this year’s report: 88% of vulnerabilities were weaponized through AI within 48 hours. 

“This is creating a rich ecosystem of vulnerabilities for attackers to use against various systems,” he said. It also renders the 30-day patch window obsolete, forcing organizations to struggle under a new baseline patch cycle of 24 to 48 hours, according to Meyers.

The AI ecosystem also became the next software supply chain battleground during the past year, as evidenced by TeamPCP’s rampage through open-source software in the first half of this year. 

The threat cluster compromised more than 300 software dependencies in one day, Meyers said. 

AI tools are already in the crosshairs and the attack surface will continue to grow as agentic systems, AI application integrations and dependency managers for AI agents proliferate, the report concluded.

“The same AI tools driving modern businesses are creating under-defended attack surfaces that adversaries are exploiting,” Meyers said. “We have to secure AI. This is absolutely critical.”

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If you are a CISO, here is a new problem for the pile: Do I worry more about Sandworm Relic or Strawberry Tempest?

Last week, Google Threat Intelligence Group joined a list of rivals in changing how it names hackers, replacing years of split naming systems with a single set of code names built around memorable word pairs.

The company said in a blog post that the change merges two systems that had grown apart for years inside Google: Mandiant, the security firm Google bought in 2022, and its in-house Threat Analysis Group. Combining those units left Google with overlapping names for the same hacking groups, a problem the new system aims to fix.

“Threat tracking shouldn’t be an exercise in memorization, but rather one of intuition,” the post reads.

Each tracked group will now get a two-word name. The first word is a distinct term meant to be easy to recall, often pulled from names already used in past reporting on a specific group. When no such name exists, researchers will generate one at random and have analysts check it before use. The second word sorts each group by category, such as country of origin or motive. In Google’s published examples, CASTLE pairs with groups tied to China, ION with Iran, NEPTUNE with North Korea, RELIC with Russia, and COMET with financially motivated threat actors not tied to a nation-state.

The approach echoes one CrowdStrike has long been known for. CrowdStrike pairs a specific term with an animal tied to a country or motive: PANDA for China, BEAR for Russia, SPIDER for cybercriminals, JACKAL for hacktivists. Google’s system swaps the animals for words like CASTLE and NEPTUNE but follows the same basic structure, down to the argument for why it works: A two-part name carries more information than a bare country label or number, and it can change as attribution is fine-tuned.

Microsoft took its own turn at a naming overhaul in April 2023, dropping a system built on chemical elements, trees and volcanoes in favor of weather terms. Under that system, Typhoon marked China, Blizzard marked Russia, Sandstorm marked Iran, and Tempest marked financially motivated cybercriminals. The switch produced names that drew as much attention for their sound as their substance, among them Strawberry Tempest, Pumpkin Sandstorm and Pistachio Tempest. Industry experts bristled over the change, saying the names compared the groups to ice cream flavors or cocktails.

By 2025, the industry’s naming sprawl had become enough of a shared headache that two of the biggest players in it agreed to try to sort it out together. Microsoft and CrowdStrike announced a joint mapping effort in June of that year, pairing Microsoft’s weather names with CrowdStrike’s animal names for the same tracked groups, with Google, Mandiant and Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 also signed on to contribute. Both companies were careful to say the project was not an attempt to force the industry onto one naming system, just to make the existing ones easier to translate between.

Google‘s rollout starts with several dozen of the most actively tracked hacking groups, with more to follow over time. Older names will stay searchable within Google’s threat intelligence platform, alongside mappings to the MITRE ATT&CK framework and to the naming systems used by other vendors. 

The company says groups will keep carrying “UNC,” for uncategorized, if it is still too early to identify exactly where a group fits in this taxonomy.

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Malware targeting AI coding assistants and software developers’ automated workflows is spreading into more environments with more capabilities, placing defenders at a growing disadvantage.

A malware strain dubbed Sandworm_Mode, first discovered by Socket in February, represents a growing threat to software development. According to a CrowdStrike report, the self-propagating worm can spread through code repositories with minimal detection, raising alarms about software supply chains.

The malware’s capabilities are extensive, but not especially unique compared to the series of supply-chain worms known as Shai-Hulud, and more recently Mini Shai-Hulud.

“This is the new trend,” Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. “This is something we’re seeing more and more. It’s the new hotness right now.”

Sandworm_Mode targets and steals sensitive data, including credentials, keys and secrets that unlock paths to additional services and dependencies throughout the AI toolchain. This includes AI assistants, cloud providers, API keys for nine major LLM providers, CI/CD pipelines and automated systems that build, test and publish code.

These actions blend in with tens of thousands of other commands occurring daily in any given environment infused with AI development tools. 

“Trying to find the signal of something malicious happening is very difficult because there’s so much noise out there,” Meyers said. 

The worm also paces itself, setting multi-day delays to separate initial access from follow-on malicious activity — creating a gap in victims’ telemetry windows, which makes it even more challenging for defenders to detect and attribute the chain of infection properly. 

“AI agents are pulling down all of these different dependencies continuously throughout the day,” Meyers said. “When you’re looking downrange from the perspective of the security operations team, you’re just seeing everybody pulling down these dependencies, and these dependencies self-unpacking and executing, so it just gets really, really noisy to try to find something bad happening.”

The malware covers its tracks further with a bit of a mean streak, by automatically destroying compromised environments if it can’t spread or accomplish its objectives.

“It’s well thought-through, and well developed, so somebody spent some time caring and feeding this thing,” Meyer said.

Despite CrowdStrike’s four-month review of Sandworm_Mode, the cybersecurity firm has yet to gain a firm handle on its intent, but Meyers said it is designed to attain a strong foothold, which could enable long-term access.

CrowdStrike hasn’t determined who is responsible for the malware, yet Meyers said he doesn’t think TeamPCP, a threat group that’s been on a rampage through open-source software this year, is involved. 

“It could be a nation-state threat actor, or it could be an e-crime actor that’s looking to use this to then sell access to other organizations,” he said. “We don’t really know what the intention is.”

The state of Sandworm_Mode and whether it remains active is also unclear. CrowdStrike said it continues to observe recently active malicious supply-chain packages that follow similar but technically divergent patterns.

Ultimately, “the world has changed,” Meyers said, adding that many attackers are pursuing similar paths in the AI toolchain, requiring defenders and threat hunters to place a greater focus on this burgeoning mode of aggression.

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CrowdStrike has dismantled the Glassworm botnet in an operation aided by Google and Shadowserver, stripping the operators’ access to infrastructure that helped threat actors infect hundreds of pieces of open-source software with malware since early 2025, the company said Tuesday. 

The coordinated effort involved the simultaneous takedown of four attacker-controlled servers that were designed to obscure the botnet’s operations and remain resilient against disruptions.

CrowdStrike and partners took down infrastructure, severed access to the botnet’s most critical services, impeded operation momentum and slowed the attackers’ ability to scale, Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop.

“The broader goal is sustained pressure that forces the adversary to spend time, resources, and operational energy reconstituting infrastructure instead of targeting victims,” Meyers added. “By exposing tradecraft and sharing intelligence, defenders can harden developer environments, CI/CD pipelines, and software supply chains against similar activity. That raises the operating cost for the adversary and gives defenders an advantage.”

Glassworm has targeted software developers in order to access source code repositories, cloud platforms, integration and delivery processes, and open-source package registries to push malware into the supply chain and trigger compromises downstream. 

The threat group behind the botnet, which is likely based in Russia, according to CrowdStrike, fed malware into VSCode extensions, npm and Python packages and more than 300 GitHub repositories, researchers said. 

Glassworm affected Windows, macOS and Linux systems with data and credential theft, and a remote-access tool called GlasswormRAT.

“What stood out about Glassworm was the operational sophistication around propagation and automation,” Meyers said. “This wasn’t just a smash-and-grab compromise of a package repository. The operation was designed to move through trusted developer workflows in a way that could expand reach very quickly if left unchecked.”

The botnet relied on four layered channels that CrowdStrike disrupted, including the Solana blockchain, BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer network, Google Calendar and virtual private servers hosted by commercial providers. 

“As part of our disruption efforts, we are working with partners to bring more pain to attackers, especially when we see them abusing our products or targeting our users,” John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said in a post on X.

Piotr Kijewski, CEO of the Shadowserver, said the non-profit organization assisted with some analysis and data sharing but noted the disruption was mostly CrowdStrike work.

The countermeasures took down “the connective tissue of the operation to create cascading operational pain,” Meyers said. “This forces the adversary to rebuild, while exposing tradecraft.”

CrowdStrike said the takedown demonstrates how the security industry can effectively thwart supply-chain threats by proactively disrupting the precise infrastructure attackers use without waiting for lengthy judicial processes. 

“When threat actors operate from jurisdictions where law enforcement cooperation is limited or nonexistent, disruption becomes one of the most effective tools available. If you can’t put handcuffs on the operator, you focus on dismantling the infrastructure, trust relationships, and operational dependencies,” Meyers added. 

The security company shared indicators of compromise to help organizations hunt for potential infections in their environments and called for other vendors, law enforcement agencies, platform operators and the open-source ecosystem to muster equal determination in responding to threats in the software supply chain.

“The more visibility and alignment you create across the ecosystem, the harder it becomes for the actor to quietly stand the operation back up,” Meyers said. “You may not eliminate the threat actor entirely, but you can absolutely reduce effectiveness, limit reach, and raise the cost of doing business.”

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Instructure, the company behind Canvas, said it reached an agreement with the cybercriminals who threatened to leak a trove of sensitive data they claim was stolen during a prolonged cyberattack on the widely used education tech platform.

Pressure was mounting on the company as widespread outages left schools, students and teachers temporarily unable to access critical data late last week when the company took Canvas offline after the attackers defaced the platform’s login page. By Friday, the company said Canvas — a central hub for K-12 and university coursework, exams, grades and communication — was back online and fully operational. 

ShinyHunters, a decentralized crew of prolific cybercriminals that researchers affiliate with The Com, claimed responsibility for the attack on its data leak site and was attempting to extort the company for an unknown ransom amount. 

Instructure didn’t outright say it paid a ransom, but insisted the agreement provided all necessary assurances. “The data was returned to us. We received digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs),” the company said in an update Monday.

“We have been informed that no Instructure customers will be extorted as a result of this incident, publicly or otherwise,” the company added. “This agreement covers all impacted Instructure customers, and there is no need for individual customers to attempt to engage with the unauthorized actor.”

The threat group initially set a deadline of May 6 — four days after Instructure previously said the incident was contained — claiming it stole 3.65 terabytes of data spanning 275 million records across 8,809 school systems. 

When that deadline passed without payment, ShinyHunters escalated its pressure on the company by “injecting an extortion message directly into the Canvas login pages of roughly 330 institutions, and pivoted to school-by-school extortion with a current deadline of May 12,” Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president of Halcyon’s Ransomware Research Center, told CyberScoop.

The additional public pressure prompted Infrastructure to take Canvas offline, disrupting schoolwork and access to critical systems nationwide. 

Instructure CEO Steve Daly apologized over the weekend for the company’s inconsistent communication and deficient public response to the cyberattack. 

“Over the past few days, many of you dealt with real disruption. Stress on your teams. Missed moments in the classroom. Questions you couldn’t get answered. You deserved more consistent communication from us, and we didn’t deliver it. I’m sorry for that,” he said in a statement.

Daly acknowledged that the attack, which remains under investigation aided by CrowdStrike, exposed usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages. He insisted that course content, submissions and credentials were not compromised.

The temporary but widespread disruption has spurred broad concern across the education sector as ransomware experts and threat hunters continue to track developments. The cyberattack also caught the attention of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. 

The House Homeland Security Committee on Monday published a letter to Daly seeking a briefing with him or a senior leader at Instructure by May 21. 

“The recurrence of an intrusion within days of an initial breach disclosure, and Instructure’s apparent failure to fully remediate the underlying vulnerabilities during that window, raise serious questions about the company’s incident response capabilities and its obligations to the institutions and individuals whose data it holds,” House Homeland Security Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., wrote in the letter to Daly.

The committee wants to learn more about the “circumstances of both intrusions, the the nature and volume of data accessed, the steps Instructure has taken and is taking to contain the threat and notify affected institutions, and the adequacy of the company’s coordination with federal law enforcement and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” he added. 

CISA did not describe the extent of its involvement in Instructure’s response. “CISA is aware of a potential cyber incident affecting Canvas. As the nation’s cyber defense agency, we provide voluntary support and cybersecurity services to organizations in responding to and recovering from incidents,” Chris Butera, the agency’s acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity, said in a statement.

Instructure’s timeline of the attack has changed and remains incomplete. The company said it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on April 29 and immediately revoked the attacker’s access and initiated an incident response. Researchers not directly involved with the formal investigation said ShinyHunters gained access to Canvas at least a few days earlier.

The follow-on malicious activity on May 7 — the defacement of public login pages — was tied to the same incident, the company said. 

“We have since confirmed that the unauthorized actor carried out this activity by exploiting an issue related to our Free-For-Teacher accounts. This is the same issue that led to the unauthorized access the prior week. As a result, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily shut down Free-For-Teacher accounts,” the company said in an updated post about the incident.

Instructure did not answer questions about the vulnerability or explain how attackers intruded its systems. The company said it also revoked privileged credentials and access tokens for affected systems, rotated internal keys, restricted token creation pathways, and deployed additional security controls and monitoring.

Canvas is fully operational and safe to use, the company said, adding that CrowdStrike has reviewed known indicators of compromise and “found no evidence that the threat actor currently has access to the platform.”

Access still remains spotty and unavailable for some Canvas users as school districts restore the platform in phases after conducting their own internal checks.

Halcyon published an alert about the attack Friday, including a screenshot of the message that some school staff, guardians and students encountered before Instructure took the learning management system offline.

ShinyHunters is a notorious data theft extortion group that previously hit major cloud platforms, including Salesforce and Snowflake, via voice phishing, credential theft and supply-chain attacks. 

Education is a recurring and consistent target for cybercriminals, accounting for more than 250 ransomware attacks globally last year, according to Halcyon. 

Yet, the scope of the attack on Canvas “makes this one of the largest single education-sector exposures we’ve tracked,” Kaiser said.

“By compromising a shared platform used across thousands of schools, ShinyHunters hit the entire education sector in one move, which is the same playbook Clop ran against Oracle EBS customers last fall,” she added. “Among 2026 incidents against critical infrastructure, this is at or near the top for education-sector impact, and it highlights a trend of third-party software vendors now being part of an attack surface, and causing cascading effects across an entire sector.”

Cybersecurity professionals focused on ransomware and data theft extortion consistently encourage victims to not pay ransoms, but they also often acknowledge that companies have to make tough decisions based on their own interests and the security of their customers or users caught up in the aftermath.

Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B, said the threat group claiming responsibility for the attack should not be trusted. 

“They are claiming they will delete the data after they are paid, and if they are not paid that they will leak the data,” she told CyberScoop. “This is in line with the past data extortion scams run by the same and related Com actors, who have made false statements to victims and to the public in the past.”

Instructure acknowledged that its agreement with the attackers isn’t ironclad. “While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cybercriminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” the company said.

Daly — a longtime security executive who was previously CEO at Ivanti — ended his mea culpa with a pledge to improve communications and provide a summary of a forensics report soon.

“Last week, we made a call to get the facts right before speaking publicly. That instinct isn’t wrong, but we got the balance wrong. We focused on fact-finding and went quiet when you needed consistent updates. You’ve been clear about that, and it’s fair feedback. We will change that moving forward,” he said. 

“Rebuilding trust takes time,” Daly added. “We’re going to earn it back through consistent action and honest communication.”

Update: May 12, 11:00 am: This story has been updated to reflect that Instructure announced they have reached a deal with ShinyHunters.

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