There’s mounting evidence of spyware attacks growing more indiscriminate, leading to more everyday citizens being hit as opposed to traditionally “high-value” targets.

The AdFection spyware attacks, which could infect anyone visiting a website that had advertising on it, represented the most recent revelation. And iVerify published a report Tuesday analyzing customer infections and threat notifications from Apple that contributes to the trend. 

“Conventional guidance on spyware risk focused on people with a public profile, a sensitive job or a role that put them on a government’s radar,” the company said. “Some Apple Threat Notification cases iVerify saw this year don’t fit that pattern.”

“In Ottawa, Apple Threat Notifications reached the children of a city bus driver and a stay-at-home mom,” it continued. “In Australia, one went to a limousine driver. None of them had a public profile, a sensitive job or an obvious connection to anyone worth spying on. These cases matter because they show the threat reaching people who had no reason to expect it.  For an enterprise, the employees most likely to be hit look much more like the limousine driver than like the CEO.”

Part of that is that when spyware attacks are less targeted, they might be more likely to hit those who aren’t as diligently focused on routine cyber hygiene, as opposed to CEOs who are probably regularly upgrading their defenses, iVerify told CyberScoop.

Rocky Cole, co-founder of the company, said the change reflects a shift in who’s using spyware.

“The vast majority of our detections were mass attacks by criminal groups looking to do purely criminal things,” Cole said. “For the purposes of stealing credentials and selling them on the black market, an executive credential is not necessarily more valuable than a system administrator or even an average employee.”

iVerify’s report looked at other trends as well. Among the findings:

• iVerify didn’t see any devices that were infected by the DarkSword or Coruna iOS exploit kits where users received Apple threat notifications, suggesting that the tech giant might be overly focused on nation-state threats and well-known commercial mercenary spyware like NSO Group’s Pegasus.
• The rate of spyware infections held relatively steady in 2026, at 1.07 infections per 1,000 iOS consumer scans.
• “Three in four of this year’s detections were criminal adversaries stealing credentials and cryptocurrency, not state-sponsored actors,” the report said.

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Turla, a notorious cyberespionage group aligned with the Russian government, has been wielding a new, customizable toolset to compromise governments around the world over the past year, including Kazakhstan.

The toolset was first discovered in November 2025 by cybersecurity firm ESET, which named it “Turla’s Cereal” as a play on its highly modular, interconnected and “serialized” design. It chains and exploits different legitimate functions across Microsoft Exchange, Windows, and .NET assemblies, which Microsoft has described as “the fundamental units of deployment, version control, reuse, activation scoping, and security permissions for .NET-based applications.”

“One of the most interesting aspects of this toolset is what we did not find: external command and control infrastructure,” ESET researcher Matías Porolli wrote in the report, released Tuesday. “Instead — adding insult to injury — the victim’s compromised Exchange server is co-opted to act as the C&C infrastructure.”

Multiple Western governments and threat intelligence firms have attributed Turla as a part of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), which is tasked with gathering intelligence on foreign governments, businesses and organizations. According to MITRE, the group has compromised victims in more than 50 countries, spanning governments, militaries, private-sector companies and research organizations.  

Porolli said the toolset was found on a compromised Exchange server used by the government of Kazakhstan on Nov. 28, 2025, where it could receive commands, execute in memory, gather intel on the organization and collect certain email messages.

Another version found inside a Romanian government agency a month later was configured to target emails sent to or received by the Western powers — the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — adversarial with Russia. At the time, Romanian politicians were calling for a NATO mission in the Black Sea to deter what they viewed as Russian aggression. In July, the EU announced sanctions against Russian individuals and organizations, citing a yearslong cyberespionage campaign from Turla and other Russian groups against European nations as well as the targeting of Poland’s energy grid and European businesses by Russia-aligned hacking groups.

According to ESET, the toolset lacks many features used to identify malware, such as implants, beaconing back to command-and-control infrastructure or built-in command lists. Most executables are performed in-memory using temporary storage to avoid leaving evidence, while commands written to permanent memory are delivered via encrypted payloads.

One component, dubbed CerealNeuron, operates as the main backdoor but does not beacon back to its operator the way many pieces of malware do. Instead, it runs on the compromised server and “passively listens for incoming web requests on paths that look like ordinary Exchange traffic.” The result is an attack that leaves no domain, IP address, hosting provider or timing patterns for defenders to find and block.

“The Cereal toolset demonstrates that, for Turla, Exchange servers are not just mail servers — they are durable collection points, internal execution hubs, and a suitable environment for hiding sophisticated .NET tradecraft,” Porolli wrote.

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The government needs to invest in digital forensics to keep pace with incidents and threats in cyberspace, the principal cyber adviser for the Department of the Air Force said Thursday.

“In order to detect, help us hunt and find where the incident started… the digital forensics, I believe we need to do, and focus, and invest in that world,” said Wanda Jones-Heath, speaking at the Datadog Threat Response Forum, produced by FedScoop.

The forensics role is vital even though “they’re after the fact,” she said.

“They go and look what happened weeks and months after the incident has occurred, and so I think we need to figure out: ‘How do we keep pace with incidents as they are occurring?’” Jones-Heath said. “Once we identify it, then you start looking at the forensics of what happened, who did it, where they are, where it originated from and then how you partition the areas that are still under fire while you continue to operate in that environment.” 

Jeffrey Hunt, global operations branch chief for the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, which provides digital forensic investigations, said at the same event that the divide between operations and security on getting visibility into networks about threats is an issue that needs to be addressed early.

But Hunt said combining the teams into one big unit is a “disaster” that doesn’t work.

“It means that you at least want to have sort of a liaison relationship where somebody from security is in the room as part of the planning team from the beginning of where your operational plan starts,” he said.

Another recommendation Jones-Heath made is changing how cyber exercises are conducted. The goal is not to be in “reactive mode” when an incident happens and knowing what to do with the “data is poisoned.” 

“They’re not designed typically of how we would operate if we have engagement,” she said. “So we have to change the lens to be more outside of the box — let the cyber team actually be engaged on the offensive and defensive side.”

“We have to get over the fact that it could never happen,” she continued. “So sharing that intel about what the adversary is doing, real world, may convince those who are not in our community to let us be a part of the exercise, show them and demonstrate what the adversary is actually doing, so that if we are in formation and you get disconnected. You know exactly what to do.

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Google and an assortment of partners shut down a botnet that an approved Android device manufacturer purposefully deployed across more than 1.3 million TV set-top boxes, the company said Monday. 

Videostrong Technology Co., a China-based Android original equipment and device manufacturer, implanted a backdoor into multiple devices it sold. Those backdoors established XCPE, an expansive botnet that cybercriminals used to conduct ad fraud, steal data and route malicious traffic through residential proxy networks, according to a Google Threat Intelligence Group report.

Google took legal action to shut down the domains and servers Videostrong used to control the botnet. The company also took down command-and-control domains that more than a dozen malware families ran as modules through the XCPE backdoor, claiming it disrupted access to at least 10 million additional compromised devices from various manufacturers.

Videostrong sold Android devices with pre-installed malware for years, slipping by Google’s security tests by loading the malicious code after the device’s first boot. “The XCPE operators constantly evolved its configurations to evade Google’s pre and post-launch detections,” Charley Snyder, head of disruption operations at GTIG, told CyberScoop.

Snyder declined to say when or how Google first became aware of the approved vendor running a botnet on Android-powered devices. 

“We found this malicious software built directly into many different device models and brands over multiple years, supported by dedicated infrastructure and constantly evolving configurations to evade detection and manage their affiliates,” Google researchers wrote in the report. “We believe this campaign wasn’t an isolated rogue insider or a development oversight.”

Google banned Videostrong and any future subsidiaries from building or selling certified Android devices, and said it changed its review process to detect and stop similar activities in the future. Yet, Snyder said the company isn’t sharing specifics on these changes because it doesn’t want to provide threat actors insights that might help them circumvent these additional protections.

Most of the devices comprising the XCPE botnet were Android TV set-top boxes, but researchers also observed infected Android-based telehealth devices, karaoke machines and digital signs. 

“Without users’ knowledge or consent, infected devices were offered as a distribution mechanism for a wide array of criminal actors,” researchers wrote in the report. “This led to a variety of malicious activities being conducted on and through the devices, including ad-fraud, data exfiltration, and routing malicious network traffic through the devices.”

The botnet spanned more than 170 countries, with the largest concentration of infected devices based in Malaysia, Brazil, Iraq, Mexico and Taiwan, according to TrendAI researchers. Nearly 44,000 infected devices were based in the United States between June and October.

Google also partnered with Japan’s National Police Agency, Lumen Technologies, Human Security, Plume and Synthient to study and disrupt the botnet. 

The company said the dismantling of XCPE “seriously impacted over a dozen malicious actors,” yet it warned that the underlying market for backdoors, ad fraud and residential proxy networks are resilient and operating as an interconnected supply chain.

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Major industry groups are clamoring for Congress to include a 10-year extension of a law that they say is essential to cyber threat information sharing in the annual defense policy bill.

Congress has mixed a series of short-term renewals and lapses of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA 2015) — which provides legal protections for threat data exchanges between the government and private sector as well as between companies — since its previous 10-year sunset came and went last year. It’s now set to expire again on Dec. 11.

On Sunday, 35 business groups sent a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services panels, asking them to renew the law for 10 years as part of their final negotiations for the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.

“The case for a long-term reauthorization has only grown more urgent,” they wrote. “Recent incidents have demonstrated that advanced AI systems can identify and exploit software vulnerabilities at machine speed, collapsing the window between the discovery of a weakness and its use in an attack.”

“AI tools are also making sophisticated cyber capabilities cheaper, faster and easier to use, allowing threats to spread and adapt in real time,” they continued. “In this environment, the speed and breadth with which defenders share information determines whether they keep pace with adversaries. That speed depends on the legal certainty CISA 2015 provides.”

The letter’s signatories include overarching business groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, the latter of which led the letter, as well as groups representing critical infrastructure sectors such as aviation, telecommunications and technology.

The House version of the fiscal 2027 defense bill includes a 10-year extension. The Senate version notably does not, and past efforts to include a long-term extension in the defense bill, which has been signed into law every year for decades, have encountered objections from Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky.

Paul has hinged his support for any long-term extension of CISA 2015 on adoption of provisions designed to curtail past practices at the other CISA — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — that he maintains threaten free speech.

Top Trump administration cyber officials have pressed Congress for a straightforward extension of the CISA 2015 laws. The Trump administration has also touted its efforts to crack down on what they said was the free-speech-limiting disinformation work of the agency CISA, which the Biden administration denied impinged on free speech and that it had ended anyway.

The annual defense policy bill often passes at the end of each calendar year or beginning of the next. A potential congressional committee leadership shuffle could change the equation for CISA 2015 in 2027, but the Dec. 11 expiration looms in 2026.

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A China state-backed threat group is using ARTEX, the automated agentic AI penetration testing framework, to achieve remarkable speed, scale and success in a campaign that already compromised about 140 sensitive targets in 11 days, according to CrowdStrike. 

The threat group, which CrowdStrike tracks as Vapor Panda, targeted more than 200 organizations in at least 14 countries since Oct. 17, the security company said in a threat report Thursday. Targets and confirmed victims include foreign ministries, a European country’s presidency and prime minister’s office, defense and intelligence agencies; 19 U.S.-based organizations in the pharmaceutical, semiconductor, defense, nuclear and financial sectors; and telecom providers in the United States, Belgium and the Philippines. 

CrowdStrike told CyberScoop about 70% of Vapor Panda’s targets were confirmed compromised or had evidence indicating moderate confidence of a successful intrusion. 

Vapor Panda’s use of ARTEX, paired with DeepSeek, allowed it to accomplish more tasks with shocking speed — requests occurring as often as every 10 seconds — and pursue multiple attack paths concurrently. 

“This is the first time that we’re seeing an agentic adversary nation-state threat actor at this scale, and I think that this is probably, unfortunately, something we’ll see more of,” Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop.

Hands-on-keyboard activity tracked by CrowdStrike for the past 15 years typically involved up to 40 commands per hour. “Now, with ARTEX, we could see it exceed 1,500 commands an hour,” Meyers said.

“If you diversify that across 200 targets, it costs them very little to run a mass-exploitation campaign and drop a websell,” he added. “They can hit more targets in a faster period of time.”

Vapor Panda’s broad-access campaign, which remains active, has targeted think tanks and government agencies spanning defense, justice, finance and diplomacy.

“I would characterize it as a diverse operational mission that tends to focus on sectors and geographies that Beijing considers economically or politically important,” Meyers said.

The active campaign attributed to Vapor Panda is separate from the ARTEX activity Microsoft Threat Intelligence attributed to Storm-0940 earlier this month, including a supply-chain attack targeting ConnectWise customers. 

Adversarial use of AI is relatively new, yet also quickly becoming the new normal, Meyers said. “We’re scrambling because we’re seeing so many of these agentic adversaries.”

Agentic AI use for malicious purposes is growing month-over-month at a rate of almost threefold. CrowdStrike observed roughly 45 agentic adversary attacks in September and it’s already at 126 for October, and climbing.

Adversarial use of agentic AI isn’t an intractable problem, but rather another reminder that organizations need visibility into their endpoints, identities and cross-domain capabilities, Meyers said. 

These attacks aren’t showcasing anything new, “it’s just doing it at a speed and scale that we’re unaccustomed to,” he said. “It’s not hopeless, but you’ve got to take action. You can’t put your head in the sand.”

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A defense contractor with top secret security clearance pleaded guilty to aiding North Korea’s remote worker scheme by allowing co-conspirators to use his identity to apply for jobs, including positions with national security implications, the Justice Department said Wednesday. 

John Allen Kurrle Jr. participated in a short-lived but prolific conspiracy that spanned at least 88 job applications at U.S.-based companies, resulting in nine job offers, according to court records.

The 62-year-old allowed co-conspirators to use his identity and government clearance for prospective sensitive work, often with U.S. government contractors. The nine job offers Kurrle’s co-conspirators received between June and October 2025 had annual salary ranges of $120,000 to $190,000.

The scheme had a limited success rate. The longest and most lucrative job a co-conspirator landed under Kurrle’s identity lasted about three weeks, netting a total pay of $4,800.

His identity was also used to gain employment as a software engineer at a Ventura, California-based company to work on a generative AI project for a component of the U.S. military. The company sent a laptop to Kurrle’s residence in Gainesville, Virginia, where he received and hosted laptops shipped by multiple victim companies, enabling co-conspirators to remotely access the devices from outside the United States.

Yet, during a video call to verify employment eligibility, the company noticed that the person who appeared on the video call did not match Kurrle’s age or physical characteristics, according to court records. The unnamed company terminated the employment of Kurrle’s co-conspirator before he did any work on the military contract and Kurrle shipped the laptop back to the company. 

The company paid Kurrle’s co-conspirator almost $2,200 for 32 hours of onboarding, which Kurrle is now ordered to pay in restitution along with the $4,800 received from the other company. 

Kurrle also, as part of his plea agreement, admitted to using the identity of a third person, without their consent, to apply for some remote work positions. He doesn’t dispute that the scheme likely benefitted North Korea, but claims he wasn’t aware of the connections to North Korea during the duration of his involvement in the conspiracy.

Michael Barnhart, nation state investigator at DTEX, said researchers previously identified Kurrle as a facilitator for North Korea’s remote worker scheme. Yet, until recently, he wasn’t sure if Kurrle was a victim or impersonated. 

The case underscores North Korea’s efforts to gain access to roles with a strategic intelligence requirement, as it focuses on contractor roles because those present the path of least resistance.

Kurrle joins a growing list of people who have been charged or jailed for supporting the North Korea regime’s scheme that generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually for the country’s military and organizations involved in its weapons programs.

Authorities have been cracking down on the malicious insider activity by seizing cryptocurrency linked to the theft, and targeting U.S.-based facilitators who provided forged or stolen identities and hosted laptop farms for North Korean operatives. 

Some of that money is also funneling through a web of front companies and intermediaries, including sanctioned entities, that partly fund Russia’s war effort against Ukraine, DTEX said in a report in July. This includes manufacturing weapons and supplying them to Russia’s military, according to the security firm.

The countermeasures are stacking up, but the scheme is widespread and has infiltrated an undetermined number of businesses, including hundreds of Fortune 500 companies.

Federal judges previously sentenced other people to prison for their involvement in the scheme, including Matthew Issac Knoot and Erick Ntekereze Prince; Keija Wang and Zhenxing Wang; Audricus Phagnasay, Jason Salazar and Alexander Paul Travis; Oleksandr Didenko and Christina Chapman. 

Kurrle pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison upon sentencing, which is currently scheduled for Jan. 28, 2027.

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Volt Typhoon, a China-government backed hacking group that has infiltrated America’s critical infrastructure networks for years, has consistently built and dismantled ephemeral malicious infrastructure to burrow into hundreds of sensitive systems undetected, Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs said in a Wednesday report.

The covert access operation that researchers call “Silent Train” isn’t a standalone network, but rather a series of compromised small office home office (SOHO) routers, internet of things (IoT) devices and enterprise infrastructure that Volt Typhoon has rapidly rotated through since late 2023. 

The Chinese threat group has used this chain of short-lived compromised infrastructure to exploit additional vulnerabilities, including zero-days, in network edge devices and gain deeper, persistent access into victim networks, researchers said. 

“Individual chains are assembled and dismantled every day, with infrastructure continually refreshed,” Michael Horka, principal information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop. “Volt Typhoon demonstrated a repeatable capability to rebuild a new chain with different infrastructure in less than two minutes, making the number of nodes at any one moment effectively close to zero.”

Black Lotus Labs has notified hundreds of victims since it first identified Silent Train activity, including telecom providers, government entities, defense contractors, communication services, universities and IT firms. Other victims spanning critical infrastructure include organizations in the water, energy, transportation, maritime, rail, aviation and emergency services sectors.

“The ephemeral nature of the framework means our observations should not be interpreted as a complete census of Volt Typhoon activity,” said Horka, who also was the lead researcher on the report.

The nation-state group’s investment in operational security and preserving access is remarkable, according to Black Lotus Labs.

“We observed infrastructure assembled in under two minutes, sessions averaging roughly four hours, extensive cleanup, compartmentalization and continued development of new access vectors,” Horka said. “That is considerable effort devoted not even to get into their end targets, but purely to making important operations difficult to discover and trace.”

Volt Typhoon relied more heavily on Silent Train after the FBI and Justice Department disrupted the KV Botnet in early 2024, researchers said. Earlier this year, U.S. and global authorities warned about a widespread shift in Chinese hacking groups’ use of covert networks riding on compromised common devices.

The reach of those efforts is extensive and ongoing. Volt Typhoon has exploited and abused more than 27 device classes in Silent Train operations, including edge devices, enterprise management tools, identity and access management systems, networking infrastructure and other technologies. 

“The diversity matters, but the discipline matters even more,” Horka said. “Specific device types were consistently reserved for particular positions in the chain. It operated less like a collection of randomly compromised devices and more like an organized inventory of capabilities.”

The threat group has successfully compromised devices and technologies from Fortinet, Cisco, ManageEngine, Ivanti, F5, Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, TP-Link, Netgear and ArcGIS, researchers said. Black Lotus Labs also observed confirmed zero-day campaigns targeting Versa Director, N-Able N-Central, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and VeloCloud Orchestrator. 

“The exploitation patterns, victimology, and geographic targeting observed throughout our investigation point to a sustained focus on communications, defense, government, and critical infrastructure environments of enduring strategic value,” Black Lotus Labs researchers wrote in the report. “Through repeated targeting of centralized management platforms and control-plane technologies, Silent Train shows how Volt Typhoon systematically pursues and preserves access to some of the most consequential networks in the United States.”

Silent Train’s ephemerality and operational discipline means it can’t be measured in size. These attributes also make it “fundamentally difficult to disrupt because there isn’t one network to take down,” Horka said. 

“What exists today will be completely different tomorrow,” he added. “You can try to remove individual pieces, but removing the actor’s ability to continuously rebuild them is a much harder problem to solve.”

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Prosecutors announced charges against six alleged scammers based out of Africa who targeted Americans with fake non-fungible token (NFT) investment scams by posing as women on dating websites, netting hundreds of victims.

According to an affidavit for the arrest of of the six people — Chui Kok Wa, Gislen Neukeu, Shamusa Ninsiima, Clement Mugiraneza, Merveille Mudacumura and Nicodemus Hingima Monyancha — the criminal group with connections to China and Malaysia opened a scam compound in Madagascar early last year.

“In the scheme, scammers posed as beautiful women who met victims on dating websites, eventually enlisting them to connect their cryptocurrency wallets to fraudulent websites associated with the NFT investments,” the Justice Department said in a news release Tuesday. “Once connected, the scammers willed the victims to continue to fund their cryptocurrency wallets, and then surreptitiously pulled money from the victims’ wallets without their knowledge.”

The FBI identified approximately 74 cryptocurrency wallets associated with approximately 800 victims in the scheme, for an estimated loss of at least approximately $516,695, according to the affidavit and news release.

The U.S. District of Columbia’s Scam Center Task Force, the FBI’s field office in Honolulu and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Alaska made a trip to Madagascar in August to review electronic devices seized from scam compounds. Interviews with scam compound workers there revealed that Cambodian police activity and armed conflict between Thailand and Cambodia led to operations at a Cambodian scam compound being moved to Madagascar.

Phones for the alleged scheme leader, Wa, contained employment contracts and scripts for what scammers should say to victims, which said they would be committing “an emotional scam.” The devices that officials reviewed and the interviews also established further connections between the scammers and Southeast Asia and China.

After the initial interviews, though, Madagascar repatriated some suspects to China before the investigation was complete, according to the Justice Department.

“Today, [D.C.] U.S. Attorney Pirro called on the Madagascar government to cooperate with the United States, extradite the six charged defendants, and further noted that the government had obtained a material witness warrant to interview 15 employees of the scheme, who claimed they were human trafficked and abused by Wa, but are believed to be held in jail in Madagascar,” the release stated.

In the same release, DOJ said that the Scam Center Strike Force had crossed the $1 billion threshold in cryptocurrency recovered in its first year. 

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Alarm bells ratcheted up yet again about an AI-discovered vulnerability that could — if exploited in the wild — destabilize vast stretches of the internet. 

The critical defect — CVE-2026-111497 — affects the Google-developed Brotli decompression library that’s bundled into many components, applications and cloud services riding on open-source software. The buffer overflow vulnerability, which OpenAI Codex Security discovered and Node.js disclosed in a Oct. 21 security advisory, can trigger system crashes and remote code execution. 

Researchers haven’t observed any active exploitation of the defect in real networks, but concerns are mounting. Multiple vendors and software packages, including Microsoft and Python, that rely on vulnerable versions of Brotli have rushed emergency patches out to address the risk of exploitation in their respective systems.

Wiz researchers warned that “91% of cloud environments have resources vulnerable to CVE-2026-111497 and 82% of cloud environments have publicly exposed Node.js instances.”

The attack surface is “extremely broad and vast, but much of the impact of exploitation depends entirely on its implementation and how it is used within that piece of software,” said Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at watchTowr.

Christiaan Beek, vice president at Rapid7 Intelligence, said the Brotli vulnerability is especially concerning because it’s effectively hiding out in the open, as are many open-source software libraries.

“Most businesses have no idea how deeply components like Brotli are embedded in their technology. A vulnerability in a compression library sounds almost boring until you realize it could affect applications your business depends on every day,” he said. “That’s the uncomfortable reality of modern software: a small component can create a very large business risk.”

The defect, dubbed “Node2Shell” or “Broccoli2Shell,” is the latest in a series of vulnerabilities that have provoked an emergency response. Defenders and researchers were on heightened alert last week over a pair of critical PHP vulnerabilities dubbed “PHP2Shell” that also have yet to be exploited in the wild as of Monday afternoon.

These cyclical and increasingly recurring so-called emergencies are putting organizations and defenders at a significant disadvantage. 

“After being part of numerous channels and message threads full of defenders trying to discern what’s real and what’s BS over the past several months — and especially the past week — I can say unequivocally that the human cost of these events is real, pronounced, and will have downstream impacts far beyond what the community can immediately predict,” Caitlin Condon, vice president of research at VulnCheck, told CyberScoop.

“None of this — high-profile vulnerability disclosures, the overblown exploitability assumptions, the community arguments, the race to weaponize — is new,” she added. 

“What’s changed now is that AI is pumping out complex — and often not clearly explained — finds at a much higher rate, exponentially increasing noise levels and making it much more difficult both to debunk overhyped vulnerability discoveries and to determine which vulnerabilities are broadly exploitable in real-world production configurations.” 

Researchers acknowledge the additional stress defenders and organizations are in because of this always-in-emergency mode.

“We’ve reached a point where everything seems to be an emergency. And when everything is critical, businesses risk losing sight of what actually matters,” Beek said. “The real cost isn’t just patching. It’s the constant disruption to operations, the diversion of resources, and the difficult decisions about which business systems deserve immediate attention.”

Experts also consider this the new normal as more high-impact vulnerabilities with far-reaching potential consequences are found. 

“We suspect in the very near future, defenders may lose the ability to tell what is a true emergency versus a loud and prevalent vulnerability in a ubiquitous product or library,” Knott said. 

Experts advise organizations to focus on their specific risk, weighing the Brotli vulnerability’s potential impact in their environment. 

“Attackers don’t care about CVSS scores,” Beek said. “They care about what they can compromise, disrupt, or monetize and that’s exactly how we should prioritize our defenses.”

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Microsoft researchers attributed the recent supply-chain attack targeting ConnectWise customers’ Microsoft 365 environments to a China-state aligned threat actor it tracks as Storm-0940.

“As early as September 2026, Storm-0940 used the agentic AI penetration testing framework ARTEX to automate attacks targeting hundreds of organizations globally across a broad range of industries,” Microsoft Security Research wrote in a blog post Wednesday. 

The nation-state group, which has been active since 2021, targeted organizations in aerospace and defense, automotive, chemicals, energy, financial services, government, legal, manufacturing, media, military, semiconductors, software, technology, think tanks and non-profits. 

Storm-0940 initiated a widespread, but ultimately unsuccessful, password-spraying campaign immediately preceding the compromise of ConnectWise’s Cloud Backup service. During a four-day stretch ending Oct. 14, Storm-0940 targeted 327 Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online accounts across eight organizations, researchers said.

During that short campaign, Microsoft observed more than 151,000 failed logon attempts, peaking at 2,900 failures per minute. Storm-0940 set its sights on ConnectWise the next day, using AI agents and the same malicious infrastructure to compromise a series of ConnectWise Cloud Backup customers’ Microsoft 365 environments. 

Storm-0940 gained significant advantages in the ConnectWise supply-chain campaign by using ARTEX to accelerate scanning, conduct password-spray attacks and abuse OAuth applications in downstream victims, according to Microsoft. 

“In some of these environments, the AI agents (on behalf of the threat actor) progressed beyond authentication to Microsoft Graph and directory operations, including reconnaissance, application credential modifications to establish persistence, and changes involving identities, groups, and privileged roles,” researchers wrote. “Microsoft identified multiple customer environments with evidence of follow-on activity, highlighting how a compromised third-party application with high privileges could provide access beyond its originally intended purpose.”

Microsoft Threat Intelligence said multiple threat actors from various regions are using ARTEX to strengthen capabilities and speed up the tempo of attacks. 

The open-source penetration testing framework works with any AI model to automate various offensive security workflows, the company said. “ARTEX is a system of LLM-driven agents that run an autonomous penetration test from reconnaissance through data exfiltration with little needed human interaction.”

In the ConnectWise campaign, Microsoft said “Storm-0940 used ARTEX to reach more than 2,250 tenants at 2,900 sign-in attempts per minute, a pace that leaves defenders with little time to detect and respond.”

Microsoft did not say how many customers were compromised, adding that successful authentication doesn’t necessarily indicate Storm-0940 accessed or stole data. Yet, researchers said the threat group’s AI agents could also gain persistent access and establish backdoors by modifying credentials in targeted victims’ environments. 

ConnectWise, which temporarily shut down services Saturday in the wake of the attacks, said it began restoring services in phases Wednesday. The company advised customers to keep connections disabled and said it expects the recovery process to take several days.

“Since early October, a wave of AI-driven cyberattacks has been ongoing,” Igor Tsyganskiy, executive vice president at Microsoft, wrote in a LinkedIn post Wednesday. The ConnectWise supply-chain attack is just “one of many,” he added.

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The PHP project released patches Wednesday for two critical vulnerabilities in a programming language used in an extremely large portion of the internet.

The patch addresses two flaws, catalogued as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, both rated 9.2 on the CVSS v4.0 severity scale, which tops out at 10. Researchers describe them as remote code execution vulnerabilities, which could let an attacker run their own code on a server and potentially take control of it. 

The vulnerabilities have been dubbed “php2shell” by researchers. While the industry has spent the past 24 hours sounding the alarm over the vulnerabilities, there has been very little in terms of reported exploitation as of Wednesday afternoon.

In a release, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said it wasn’t aware of any exploitation.

“While CISA has not observed exploitation of these vulnerabilities as of the time of publication, they pose a risk to organizations if left unpatched,” the release reads.

Multiple researchers have told CyberScoop that they have observed very little activity outside of reconnaissance that is probing to see what vulnerable systems are still connected to the internet.

“We see clear evidence attackers are actively probing and performing reconnaissance across PHP applications,” Kelly Shortridge, chief product officer at Fastly, told CyberScoop. “The gap between disclosure and widespread, repeatable exploitation is typically hours to a few days for vulnerabilities of this severity and attack ROI.”

“We have not observed, or independently confirmed, successful in-the-wild exploitation of these vulnerabilities on live customer systems,” Jon Semon, principal security operations analyst at Huntress, told CyberScoop.

“We have checked across the Linux web servers we have visibility into for the post-exploitation behavior shown in the public proof of concept, such as a web server process spawning a shell that runs recon commands or writes a file into the web root, and did not find activity matching it.”

Neither the technical cause nor a complete list of affected versions has been officially confirmed, with the PHP team saying full details will be published with the release. An advisory from CERT-EU, the European Union’s computer emergency response team, says the flaws could affect every version of PHP from 5 onward. 

The security firm watchTowr said Tuesday the vulnerabilities had been set for release Thursday under embargo. The PHP team moved the release up a day and said it could act sooner still if details became public or exploitation appeared.

A video demonstrating an exploit chain spread online overnight via researcher Kirill Firsov, who shared it and credited researchers known as LCFR and Calif.io. watchTowr said it had reproduced one of the flaws. Code claiming to exploit the flaws is circulating but has not been verified, and security firms caution such code is sometimes laced with malware.

The potential exposure is broad. PHP runs between 70-80% of websites whose server-side language is known, according to market research, and underpins platforms including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Laravel. Researchers estimated more than 1.3 million internet-exposed hosts could be vulnerable, and a Shodan search counted about 1.9 million. Among servers that disclose their version, most run branches are no longer receiving security updates: about 758,000 run versions from 5.4 through 8.1, compared with 272,000 on supported branches, according to VirusTotal.

CERT-EU and Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre advised organizations to prepare to update systems quickly and suggested isolating internet-facing applications where immediate patching was not feasible. PHP flaws have been exploited before: the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s known-exploited vulnerability catalog lists three in PHP itself, two used in ransomware campaigns.

The vulnerability was discovered by AI cybersecurity firm Calif, using OpenAI’s cybersecurity-focused AI model GPT-5.6 Sol. Wiz, an AI security firm purchased by Google in March, also independently discovered and reported the flaw, according to a blog posted by OpenAI on Wednesday.

The discovery sparked a two-month collaborative effort between OpenAI, PHP maintainers, researchers and security providers to develop a long-term technical fix and prepare for public disclosure.

OpenAI said the priority for all organizations relying on PHP is to apply the new patches, and offered a free tool and other support to help identify vulnerable versions.

“To our knowledge, frontier AI found these vulnerabilities before attackers did, opening a Defender’s Window for maintainers and security providers to prepare fixes and protections ahead of disclosure,” OpenAI wrote in an unsigned blog.

OpenAI also said the PHP flaw is among “several significant vulnerabilities we’ve already found and are working to fix, and we expect similar findings to increase sharply in the coming months.”

In a blog posted the same day, researchers at Wiz said they had discovered “multiple critical vulnerabilities” in PHP, all related to memory safety using GPT-5.6 Sol, their own Wiz Atlas AI tool and Google’s Gemini 4 Argon to conduct their research.

Perhaps most concerning: The bug existed for decades prior to the emergence of modern AI tools, but it’s so complex and technically arduous that few attackers were likely capable of exploiting it.

According to Wiz, it required developing exploits for “notoriously complex” memory bugs that work across different PHP versions, configurations and application behaviors. It would also have to account for differences in PHP deployments that could render the exploit harmless, and each change would require more testing, analysis and debugging.

In the era of AI hacking, “this is no longer a barrier,” the Wiz researchers said.

Large language models can adapt exploits to different PHP versions, configurations or memory layouts, use third-party testing and debugging tools, and carry out a series of other functions for “reducing the specialist effort required for each target.”

“This changes the economics of both discovery and exploitation,” wrote Wiz researchers Sagi Tzadik, Shir Tamari, Nir Ohfeld and Tomer Schwartz. “As AI reduces the effort needed to develop and adapt complex exploits, vulnerabilities that once seemed impractical to exploit become viable targets.”

More information is expected over the course of the day. The PHP team is to publish the full advisory with the release, and security firms including Huntress and Tenable said they would update their analyses as technical details and proof-of-concept code emerge.

UPDATE: 10/21/2026, 3:00 p.m. ET: This article was updated to include infromation from CISA and from industry researchers.

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Russian government-connected hackers compromised two defense firms and a law enforcement agency in North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries as part of an espionage campaign, Symantec researchers said in a blog post Tuesday.

The infamous group behind hacks of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election cycle was behind the attacks that Symantec identified in recent months: Swallowtail, also known as APT28, Fancy Bear and Forest Blizzard, notorious for its links to the Russian military agency GRU.

The hackers apparently chose the targets of their attacks carefully, including a naval shipbuilder, a manufacturer of military aircraft engines and the law enforcement agency. In the attack on the shipbuilder, Symantec saw “hands-on-keyboard” activity as the hackers repeatedly returned to a compromised host over the course of a week to steal credentialed material.

“Hands-on-keyboard activity means a human operator is choosing what to do next, rather than malware running a fixed routine,” Dick O’Brien, principal intelligence analyst at the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, told CyberScoop. “It’s essentially confirmation that the organization is a genuine target for the operators, not an accidental infection. It also confirms that further exploitation beyond the initial infection was at least attempted.”

O’Brien said the campaign reflected broader intelligence collection aimed at European government and defense targets, but its motive wasn’t certain. He speculated that it could have been part of campaigns to target nations aiding Ukraine in its war against Russia.

The hackers made use of the Hookedge backdoor first identified in August by Recorded Future’s Insikt Group. That firm saw attacks dating back to September of last year by the same group using the same backdoor on defense and diplomatic targets in Romania, Spain and Turkey.

Symantec also observed the hackers deploying a previously undocumented loader.

“What surprised us was that the attackers then moved their most sensitive follow-up activity onto a dedicated server, when Recorded Future had expected them to keep hopping between free services,” O’Brien said. “The loader, ld.exe, hadn’t been publicly documented. It decrypts its payload in memory, and it needs a key supplied only at runtime on the command line. Without both the encrypted file and the key, the payload can’t be recovered. We didn’t recover it, so we don’t know its function.”

This spring, researchers and U.S. government agencies said they quashed a Forest Blizzard espionage campaign. Western governments warned last year about the group targeting companies supporting Ukraine.

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A portion of ConnectWise’s customers have been adrift for days, and hundreds are compromised, as the company’s efforts to restore its Cloud Backup service remain underway with no confirmed timeline for when customers can regain access.

The company temporarily shut down multiple services Saturday after a threat actor gained access to a highly sensitive credential that allowed its customers to connect the vendor’s application with Microsoft 365 environments. 

The threat actor, which hasn’t been identified, used the application programming interface (API) secret to compromise a series of ConnectWise Cloud Backup customers’ Microsoft 365 applications, including Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Cloud Backup, MS Graph and Partner Center, according to Huntress.

Researchers observed an initial wave of attacks Friday, and by late Saturday Huntress “had seen sign-in activity from the malicious infrastructure across almost 1,000 Entra tenants, with more than 300 of those sign-ins appearing to succeed,” Jonathan Semon, principal security operations analyst at Huntress, told CyberScoop.

The cybersecurity company, which primarily supports small- to mid-sized businesses, confirmed unauthorized sign-ins in 162 tenants and said additional compromises beyond its telemetry are likely. 

ConnectWise suspended its Cloud Backup, SaaS Security and Cloud Management services about two days after researchers observed an initial wave of unauthorized sign-ins. 

“ConnectWise is continuing its investigation and remediation following unauthorized access to application identities associated with ConnectWise Cloud Backup, formerly known as SkyKick,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email.

“We are monitoring our entire environment around the clock,” the company said in a security advisory. “Since mitigations began on October 17 at 05:00 UTC, we have not observed successful threat activity in the environments we monitor. This does not establish whether individual partner or customer Microsoft 365 tenants were affected; each potentially affected tenant still requires review.”

Microsoft Threat Intelligence said it observed broad successful sign-ins from a malicious IP address on Oct. 15. “Follow-on activity included Microsoft Graph API reconnaissance and attempts to add additional credentials on the related service principal in target tenants to maintain direct access as a backdoor,” the company said in a LinkedIn post. 

The root cause of the breach and ensuing fallout remains under investigation, and the company declined to answer questions about how attackers obtained the credential for ConnectWise Cloud Backup.

Researchers at Huntress and Todyl, which conducted its own investigation, characterized the secret and its chain of command as critical.

“Because it’s a multi-tenant application, anyone holding that credential can request access tokens in any tenant where the application is installed, without any action by the customer,” Semon said.

Sign-ins, which were performed by an automated tool, also gave the attacker the technical ability to read and write mail and files across various Microsoft 365 applications, Todyl wrote in a blog post. 

Highly privileged access granted by the credential for ConnectWise Cloud Backup allowed attackers to bypass security controls, including multi-factor authentication, and establish additional access.

“In the tenants where we saw post-compromise activity, the account associated with the application elevated its own privileges and added new credentials to other applications in the tenant. That would let someone keep access even after the original application was disabled,” Semon said.

ConnectWise and researchers haven’t attributed the attacks to any known threat actors and none have publicly claimed responsibility. The company said restoration efforts remain underway, but it hasn’t provided a timeline for when customers can regain access.

ConnectWise and researchers shared indicators of compromise to help potentially exposed customers hunt for malicious activity in their systems. Yet, the vendor and third-party companies responding to confirmed attacks, encouraged customers to disable any affected applications even if they don’t see anything unusual in their logs.

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Suspected Chinese hackers with a proven knack for exploiting zero-days in security products are at it again, targeting BeyondTrust customers in attacks that researchers have traced back to late August. 

Mandiant researchers said a likely Chinese government-backed espionage group it previously tracked as UNC5221, and now calls Armory Castle, exploited the critical defect — CVE-2026-102764 — then showcased multiple tactics to escalate privileges, hop around the compromised network and evade detection. 

The same threat group has repeatedly exploited a series of defects in Ivanti products since 2023, a Citrix NetScaler zero-day widely known as CitrixBleed, and last year’s Brickstorm campaign that had an average dwell time of 400 days — all resulting in sweeping attack sprees.

“We are aware of only a small number of impacted organizations at this time, but given the stealth of the activity, and the use of a zero-day, it is possible that additional organizations were also compromised prior to the disclosure,” Kelli Vanderlee, senior analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said in an email.

Mandiant warned organizations to “prepare for potential widespread exploitation,” adding that Armory Castle and other threat groups previously conducted broad, opportunistic exploitation following public vulnerability disclosures.

Mandiant and GTIG released their analysis of Armory Castle and its latest campaign as BeyondTrust publicly disclosed the vulnerability in its Remote Support product Thursday. The company’s security said it released a patch for the exploited defect for self-hosted customers Oct. 8 and automatically applied the update to cloud-based versions of the product that same day.

BeyondTrust, which conducted its own investigation and coordinated with Mandiant on an investigation involving a self-hosted customer that was compromised, noted Armory Castle’s prowess.

“This threat actor rotates its infrastructure and tooling for every victim, so attribution here rests on behavior. The indicators from one intrusion rarely survive to the next,” the company’s security team wrote in a blog post. “The threat actor has historically demonstrated a high degree of operational security awareness, professional practices, and tradecraft.”

A BeyondTrust spokesperson declined to answer questions about how many customers are already compromised or why it didn’t publicly disclose the actively exploited zero-day sooner, and instead referred back to its security advisory. 

The company said the first known instance of zero-day exploitation occurred Aug. 29, which it detected and contained Sept. 28. 

BeyondTrust also said it detected the malicious activity after zero-days were confirmed to be exploited in another security vendor’s product Sept. 27. That timing matches a round of zero-days Citrix NetScaler disclosed, following nearly two days of rampant worry and unconfirmed rumors. 

BeyondTrust did not say if there is any link or overlap between the attacks targeting Citrix NetScaler, which went undetected for more than three weeks, and its remote access product. 

GTIG researchers said there isn’t enough evidence to assess an overall targeting trend, but encouraged all potentially vulnerable organizations to apply the patch and hunt for pre-disclosure activity. 

The threat group’s previous targets include business-process outsourcers, government, legal services, technology companies and software-as-a-service providers.

“Armory Castle remains one of the most prominent China-nexus threat actors due to its persistent targeting of various edge device technologies, use of zero-day vulnerabilities for widespread exploitation across multiple industries and regions, and its continuously expanding and evolving arsenal of tools,” said Dan Perez, technical lead at GTIG.

“This is a well-established pattern for Armory Castle,” Vanderlee said. “Targeting edge devices, which typically do not support endpoint detection and response (EDR), allows the threat actor to minimize opportunities for detection and maintain stealthy, persistent access to targeted networks.”

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That online ad you saw for earbuds, a drone or bubble gum-scented car air freshener may have been a gateway for mercenary spyware that can infect your device without you ever having to click on it.

The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto on Thursday said it was revealing the first details of zero-click spyware being delivered through targeted advertising, which it’s calling AdFection. It concluded that while the Israeli company Discover-Tech presents itself as a legitimate advertising firm, in actuality it operates as a facilitator for multiple mercenary spyware partners, including the well-known Candiru. Its ads covertly direct millions of devices to contact Candiru’s servers.

The likely goal, according to the researchers, is large-scale tracking and surveillance, enabled by accident by major industry players like Google. The campaign led to the infection of devices at media outlet Al Jazeera, they said, but Discover-Tech’s ads have also appeared on many sensitive networks around the world, including at the U.S. Department of Defense, NATO, the International Atomic Energy Agency and world cybersecurity agencies, according to partner investigators at ad security firm Confiant.

It’s a discovery that the researchers said raises uncomfortable questions for regulators, whom The Citizen Lab said need to investigate Discover-Tech and levy sanctions, and for the online advertising industry.

“The adtech industry, the digital advertising industry, has a lot of rethinking to do to reconsider how they approach these threats of surveillance and the responsibilities that they have with the data that they collect and how it might be abused,” said Jerome Dangu, chief technology officer and co-founder of Confiant. “The industry has optimized against cyber criminals, scams and malware for profit that targets people for extracting money, but not for surveillance.”

Wolfie Cristl, senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, said it was “disastrous” that ad vendors didn’t detect the operation for years. Discover-Tech was registered in 2020 and has facilitated mercenary spyware since at least 2024. The activities of a shadowy outfit that the researchers dubbed DARK CARTOGRAPHER, which involves Discover-Tech and other vendors — including an unnamed U.S. intelligence contractor — date back to 2019.

“Digital advertising is broken. The way the online advertising ecosystem works today is a security threat for states, the private sector, civil society and everyone else alike,” Cristl said. “Cybersecurity agencies, regulators and lawmakers in the U.S., Europe and other regions must urgently step in. They must investigate the involved companies and fix the systemic risks that enable malicious ad targeting.”

Earlier reports have touched on the existence of mercenary spyware that can infect users through online ads, but Thursday’s research marks the first technical demonstration of infections and distribution through targeted advertising.

The Citizen Lab can’t currently attribute the AdFection attacks to any specific party.

Discover-Tech has appeared on lists of “certified” and “approved” vendors maintained by Google and IAB Europe, an advertising industry association. In response to the research, Google has removed Discover-Tech from its vendor registries and ended its access to Google ad platforms, while IAB Europe has removed Discover-Tech from its global vendor list.

Between March and June of this year, the researchers found Discover-Tech ads displayed in over 120,000 websites and over 70,000 mobile apps.

The Citizen Lab said that at least 45 devices at Al Jazeera were targeted in zero-click attacks that it linked with high confidence to Candiru spyware delivered by Discover-Tech’s ads.

Candiru spyware has shown the ability to take over a device remotely, steal data from it, access its microphone and camera, and more. Researchers discovered that in addition to Candiru, Discover-Tech has connections to another mercenary hacking firm, Bindecy, and a mercenary ad intelligence firm, Intelos.

Furthermore, the report states, “Discover-Tech operates a platform called Controlium that enables its mercenary surveillance partners to de-anonymize, fingerprint, and automatically infect devices the moment an advertisement is rendered.”

The DARK CARTOGRAPHER role is more mysterious.

“A separate threat actor we call DARK CARTOGRAPHER is using Discover-Tech’s infrastructure to exploit vulnerabilities across numerous mobile carriers to link device advertising IDs with phone numbers, mass-deanonymizing internet users. We will detail our findings concerning this threat actor in a separate forthcoming report,” Thursday’s report states. “Notably, DARK CARTOGRAPHER infrastructure links to both a mercenary adtech vendor and a U.S. government contractor. It is rare to see such direct overlaps between mercenary vendors and U.S. government or intelligence contractors.”

Discover-Tech, Candiru, Bindecy and Intelos did not respond to The Citizen Lab’s letters seeking comment.

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Microsoft’s streak of record-breaking vulnerability disclosures continued with a mega Patch Tuesday, containing 1,413 defects affecting the company’s various enterprise products and services. 

The monthly batch of patches surpassed the company’s previous annual record of 1,261 common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) set in 2020. 

“Hundreds of CVEs in a single release used to be the exception — now it’s the baseline,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at TrendAI’s Zero Day Initiative, wrote in an email. AI is partly to blame, he added, but it “isn’t creating these bugs out of thin air; it’s just shortening the time between a vulnerability existing and someone noticing it.”

Yet, for defenders understandably overwhelmed by the surge of defects found in Microsoft products, actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities aren’t growing in kind.

“If there’s solace to be had, it’s in the fact that only one of these bugs is under active attack,” Childs wrote in a blog post. “If you go back to the hot 0-day summer of 2023, there were 17 Microsoft 0-days between January and October as opposed to 15 this year during the same period.”

Microsoft disclosed one actively exploited zero-day affecting Windows Shell — CVE-2026-96951 — that allows unauthorized attackers to bypass a security feature. The high-severity defect is the third Windows Shell vulnerability exploited this year, according to Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable. 

“There have been 26 Windows Shell vulnerabilities patched in 2026 through October, a staggering figure compared to previous years, with only 3 Windows Shell CVEs in 2025 and just one in 2024 and 2022,” he added.

The vast majority of defects Microsoft disclosed in this month’s security update affect Windows, its ubiquitous operating system , spanning 1,102 vulnerabilities combined. The update also included 134 vulnerabilities in Office, 61 in various developer tools and 36 in SharePoint Server. 

Microsoft tried to address the toll this monthly flood of vulnerabilities has on its customers by introducing “risk cohorts.” These groups of vulnerabilities don’t necessarily share a root cause or severity rating, but generally require a similar customer assessment that could guide prioritization efforts, the company said. 

“The volume isn’t the real story anymore,” Childs added. “What matters is that discovery is scaling faster than exploitation, so teams that triage by sheer CVE count instead of exploitability are burning cycles on the wrong bugs. Patch what’s proven, prioritized, and public, and treat everything else as this month’s new normal.”

The full list of vulnerabilities addressed this month is available in Microsoft’s Security Response Center.

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Members of Congress are pressing the Trump administration to expand the federal government’s role in securing artificial intelligence, wanting new safety standards and regulations, independent testing of models and more “aggressive” use of AI for defensive cybersecurity purposes.

In a letter, Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said that multiple incidents of frontier AI models escaping sandbox protections and breaching real companies, organizations and governments necessitate a stronger federal role in regulating the technology.

Recent revelations that hundreds, and possibly “tens of thousands,” of such incidents may have occurred for months without OpenAI’s staff detecting them makes the need for federal intervention even more urgent, the senators argued.

“These incidents come as AI systems are becoming dramatically more capable at discovering software vulnerabilities, writing and executing code, using digital tools, and operating autonomously,” the senators wrote.

The letter, addressed to Jay Clayton, director of national intelligence and new White House “AI czar” and Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, urges the federal government “to bring its full capacities to bear on this challenge, building a coordinated national response around standards, testing, auditing, and defensive AI.”

The Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI), housed within the Department of Commerce, has become the Trump administration’s main body for evaluating and testing AI models. In the letter, the senators are seeking to expand the center’s resources and mandate.

Under the Trump administration, testing of frontier models has been voluntary and focused on evaluating model capabilities, not restricting them. The administration has since said it has reached a safety testing framework with OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies to govern safety testing, but has not made the agreement public.

The senators call for CAISSI to spearhead the development of “technically grounded and measurable standards and risk management frameworks for advanced AI safety and security.” Those standards would address potential risks like cyberattacks, automated attacks on critical infrastructure and other threats.

“The standards should also address the security of the environments in which advanced AI systems are developed, trained, tested, and used internally, including protections against agents escaping testing environments, gaining unauthorized access to external systems, or taking actions beyond their intended permissions,” the senators wrote.

The letter argues the center and federal technology hubs like the National Institute of Standards and Technology should hire additional expertise in AI, cybersecurity, model evaluation and national security.

It also calls for a much broader community of independent and third-party testers. Currently, that testing is done almost entirely by AI companies and hand-selected auditors, like Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), Redwood Research and others.

Last month, Chris Painter, president of METR, told Congress that the firm’s investigation of the Hugging Face hacking incident was at the invitation of OpenAI, which tightly controls which organizations and testers get access to its unreleased models. While they are permitted to publicize some findings, such as those that relate to potentially catastrophic risks to humanity, researchers are otherwise restricted from discussing other parts of their investigation through nondisclosure agreements.

Additionally, Painter suggested that frontier companies are relying too heavily on their own technology, rather than technical controls, to monitor and restrain their models in testing.

“Because of the scale and speed at which AI agents are deployed, companies depend on AI monitoring and controls instead of human supervision, to prevent unwanted agent behavior,” Painter said. “That is, monitoring of AI is now in large part done by other AI systems.”

The senators call for CAISSI, national laboratories and the Department of Energy to become federal testing sites. There, the government would evaluate AI models for advanced cyber capabilities, biological or chemical threats, threats to critical infrastructure, sandbox evasion techniques and other autonomous rule-breaking behavior. They also want testing opened to universities, independent research organizations and “qualified third-party evaluators,” including private sector companies.

Other federal bodies, like the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and National Science Foundation can help develop new standards and testbeds for AI tools used in defensive cybersecurity that can then be shared across government and with the public.

“The recent incidents make clear that the security infrastructure surrounding advanced AI must advance as quickly as the technology itself,” the senators wrote. “The United States has an opportunity to lead both sides of this challenge: building the standards, testing, and auditing infrastructure needed for increasingly powerful AI, while harnessing those same capabilities to make American networks harder to attack.”

You can read the full letter here.

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Ivanti customers are in familiar territory, responding to yet another actively exploited zero-day affecting one of the vendor’s most commonly targeted security products. 

Volexity researchers, which discovered in-the-wild exploitation earlier this month, said attackers actually exploited three zero-days in a chain that allowed them to bypass authentication, execute code remotely and escalate privileges. 

Ivanti disclosed and issued a patch for the authentication bypass and remote-code execution components of the exploit chain as a single vulnerability in Ivanti Connect Secure. The company said it initially discovered a portion of the high-severity vulnerability — CVE-2026-104935 — during internal security checks in June.

A threat actor, which Volexity tracks as UTA0576, exploited the defects before Ivanti addressed them and issued a patch.

“Because the issue was discovered internally, was not being actively exploited, and did not meet the threshold for an out-of-band release, a fix was scheduled for inclusion in our normal product release cycle,” an Ivanti spokesperson wrote in response to questions.

“Successful exploitation requires chaining multiple vulnerabilities and Ivanti has fully addressed the unauthenticated remote code execution component of that chain, eliminating the primary exploitation path,” the spokesperson added. “We are also developing additional updates to address the remaining vulnerability and further strengthen product security.”

The full scope of compromise remains under investigation. The company, in a security advisory, said a “limited number of customers” were already compromised prior to disclosure. 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the defect to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog Tuesday.

Sean Koessel, vice president of professional services at Volexity, said the earliest confirmed instance of exploitation occurred Oct. 1. Yet, “it wouldn’t surprise us if there was activity toward the end of September,” he added.

Volexity researchers observed a series of post-exploitation activities during an investigation involving a customer’s compromised Ivanti Connect Secure VPN appliance earlier this month. “UTA0576 repeatedly exploited these vulnerabilities to compromise the ICS VPN appliance and run commands on it,” the company wrote in a blog post. 

The threat actor extracted credentials stored on the device, dumped and stole Active Directory metadata, and deployed multiple custom and malicious tools capable of facilitating follow-on attacks, credential testing and hunting for administrator passwords, recovery keys and other passwords.

“Based on Volexity’s observations, UTA0576 primarily focused on credential theft, data exfiltration, log tampering, and network reconnaissance,” the company added.

Ivanti encouraged potentially vulnerable customers to act immediately by upgrading to the latest version of software, running the company’s Integrity Checker Tool regularly, and reviewing indicators of compromise published by Volexity.

CISA also urged Ivanti customers to patch the vulnerability quickly, as it dissuaded customers from relying on the company’s Integrity Checker Tool.

“Organizations seeking to determine whether they were compromised will need to conduct network and memory forensics to identify evidence of exploitation,” the agency said in an alert Tuesday. “Ivanti’s Integrity Checker Tool may not detect evidence of exploitation of CVE-2026-104935 because threat actor commands execute in memory.”

Ivanti products, including Ivanti Connect Secure, are a frequent target for attackers of various motivations in the network edge space. 

CISA has flagged 36 Ivanti defects on its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog since late 2021. At least 6 defects across Ivanti products have been exploited since late January.

“Edge devices are a valuable initial foothold and often enable attackers to pivot further into targeted networks,” Koessel said. “It would be fair to expect widespread exploitation, this is a common theme with most vulnerabilities in edge devices.”

Other researchers also expect exploitation to pick up rapidly. 

“Given the history of attacker attention and focus Ivanti Connect Secure has previously drawn — and the trivial nature of the authentication bypass — widespread, indiscriminate exploitation is inevitable as attackers begin reviewing patches and public information,” said Yordan Ganchev, principal threat intelligence specialist at watchTowr.

“The race condition required for code execution offers little resistance, as an unauthenticated attacker can repeatedly attempt exploitation until it succeeds,” he added.

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Federal authorities have charged 14 people and seized roughly 187 computers in their newest effort to disrupt North Korea’s remote IT worker scheme. 

The Justice Department announced the indictment Tuesday, highlighting two arrests and searches of more than 40 residences in Texas known or suspected to operate as “laptop farms,” where facilitators maintain employer-issued laptops so North Korean engineers can use them while abroad.

An indictment unsealed in the Northern District of Ohio charges two U.S. citizens, Michael James Bostelle of Pennsylvania and Juan Cecilio Pena Carrillo of Texas. It alleges the two Americans, along with 10 others located in China, held remote jobs at more than 70 companies from 2019 through 2025 using stolen or fabricated identities, and collected about $3 million in pay. 

An Ohio resident, Trey Michael Nolte, is also named as a co-conspirator in the indictment, but is not charged. Two unnamed defendants were also charged.

“This investigation is about far more than fraud,” Ryan Raybould, a U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Texas, said in a release. “It is about a hostile foreign regime infiltrating American companies through stolen identities and covert access points inside our own borders. Every laptop farm we dismantle shuts down a revenue stream that the North Korean government relies on to fund weapons programs that threaten global stability. Operation Lonestar Roundup sends a clear message: we will not allow enemies of the United States to exploit our businesses or compromise our national security.”

This particular scheme proliferated over the past decade as remote work became more common. There have been multiple indictments since 2024 that have looked to charge willing conspirators in the U.S., while also disrupting the ability for North Korean nationals to successfully earn a paycheck. 

Despite those actions, the scheme has persisted. Last month, U.S. and allied governments warned that a North Korean hacking group operating under the country’s Munitions Industry Department’s 313 General Bureau is infiltrating tens of thousands of job seekers’ networks by posing as prospective employers like AI firms to steal sensitive data and millions in cryptocurrency. The intent is to circumvent economic sanctions that prevent the country from bankrolling its military ambitions through legitimate financial channels.

Detailed in an indictment released Tuesday, this particular scheme was allegedly facilitated by Nolte, who kept roughly two dozen company laptops online for overseas workers, installed remote-access software on them, and moved more than $320,000 through accounts opened under false names. The DOJ said Bostelle aided the scheme by providing his name and a fraudulent driver’s license to help a remote worker obtain a job, Carrillo hosted laptops at his home under various names, receiving about $190,000 from five employers.

Prosecutors also allege that the men filed false employment records with the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS and the Social Security Administration in the names of more than 25 identity theft victims.

The FBI also released an updated advisory that detailed how the scheme has changed over the past few years. Under pressure from better detection, North Korean workers now pay U.S. citizens to appear in interviews, take drug tests, access accounts, and keep company laptops running at home. They target people under financial strain, whom they see as easier to recruit. 

Some go further and hire freelancers in Pakistan, India and Nigeria to do the work itself, hiding who is behind the job. 

The advisory also recounted sharper tactics: threats against former managers after firings, demands for payment backed by stolen data, and paid helpers sent to intimidate companies in person. 

The group has also changed how they use certain tools. CrowdStrike, which provided assistance to law enforcement, reported that since May, the group has spoofed device identifiers, making a video capture card appear as a webcam, and reused the same disguised device across several jobs. Because these habits resemble normal remote work, no single warning sign catches them, the FBI said, so it called for layered checks throughout employment and warned that blunt filters would screen out qualified applicants.

Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s head of counter adversary operations, told CyberScoop while the tradecraft may change, the North Koreans’ goal of evading sanctions remains the same.

“As companies get better at identifying fraudulent workers and law enforcement disrupts their infrastructure, FAMOUS CHOLLIMA is finding new ways to conceal its operations and make the scheme more resilient,” Meyers said. “That’s why disruption is so important. Working with the FBI, we’re not just identifying the threat but dismantling the infrastructure that enables it, forcing the adversary to rebuild and reinvest. Every laptop seized, every facilitator exposed, and every operation disrupted raises the cost of doing business for North Korea.”

Despite the law enforcement effort, CrowdStrike said in its own announcement that this particular action is unlikely to have a lasting effect.

“While disrupting a laptop farm will likely only yield a limited impact on Famous Chollina centered mostly on the geolocation of the takedown, these operations send a clear signal to the adversary that law enforcement and CrowdStrike have visibility into their infrastructure and are actively tracking their movements,” the blog post reads. 

The State Department is offering rewards of up to $5 million for further information that disrupts this scheme. 

You can read the full indictment below. 

UPDATE, 10/14/2026, 11:25 a.m.: This story has been updated with comment from CrowdStrike’s Adam Meyers.

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