Volexity researchers spotted another state-aligned Chinese threat group exploiting a triple-link chain of zero-day vulnerabilities across multiple campaigns, the company said in a blog post Monday.

The threat group it tracks as UTA0565 exploited the vulnerabilities in Chrome and Microsoft between Sept. 3 and 4 before the defects were disclosed or patched, researchers said.

The timing of the malicious activity mirrors other spikes threat hunters observed and attributed to multiple Chinese espionage threat groups. Yet, Volexity noted UTA0565’s campaigns differed from those attacks by using multiple fake websites to deceive victims.

Volexity shared phishing emails UTA0565 sent to Asian government entities urging them to publicly support imprisoned Hong Kong activist Chow Hang-tung. The group spoofed domains impersonating the Center for American Progress and China Digital Times in other phishing emails.

While UTA0565 showcased a variance in tactics, it used the same components researchers observed in previous instances of the exploit kit across multiple Chinese threat groups.

“This seemingly widespread adoption across multiple threat actors suggests a coordinated effort within the Chinese computer network exploitation community, where the core kit was likely shared, customized, and weaponized by multiple groups,” Volexity wrote in the blog post. “The activity reported so far reflects only two organizations’ observations; the full scope and impact are likely far broader.”

The vulnerabilities include: CVE-2026-85046 and CVE-2026-87491, remote-code execution defects in the JavaScript engine for Chromium-based browsers; and CVE-2026-85880, a privilege-escalation zero-day that Microsoft disclosed Sept. 8 in Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call. 

Proofpoint, which previously observed multiple state-aligned threat groups chaining the vulnerabilities together in attacks since last August, said a limited group of organizations were exposed to all three vulnerabilities in a short window. 

Proofpoint previously attributed attacks involving the zero-days to APT31, UNK_LateNight, UNK_DoubleCheck and UNK_QuietRacket. At the time it warned that attackers of other origins and motivations could strike soon as well.

Volexity said UTA0565 used a payload from a previously undocumented malware family it tracks as “CLEANGULP.” Researchers also found several domains likely used by UTA0565 in similar campaigns targeting media organizations, halal restaurant search websites and corporate training organizations. 

“UTA0565’s use of the zero-day vulnerabilities shows technical and operational improvements over other campaigns observed by Volexity, both in the mechanics of the exploitation and the presentation to end users,” researchers wrote. “Using real content from legitimate websites as decoy material continues to be an effective way to reduce user suspicion.”

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Microsoft, along with a group of industry partners, disrupted EvilTokens, a short-lived but highly consequential cybercrime platform that investigators linked to more than 12,000 compromised Microsoft customer email inboxes across more than 10,000 organizations globally, the company said Tuesday.

Acting on federal court order Sept. 15, Microsoft and partners seized 50 websites the phishing-as-a-service used for operations and disabled more than 175 domains linked to EvilTokens’ supporting infrastructure. 

EvilTokens, launched in February 2026, was “a powerful cybercrime platform that used AI at every step of the attack chain — from compromising email accounts to designing intricate roadmaps for financial fraud and scams,” Steven Masada, associate general counsel and general manager of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, wrote in a blog post.

About 1,000 cybercriminals used EvilTokens over the course of its operation, a Microsoft spokesperson told CyberScoop.

The service was centered on an AI-style chatbot that cybercriminals used to analyze victims’ inboxes, identify trusted relationships, payment authorizations and other sensitive details that could facilitate fraud.

“AI was not simply helping attackers write more convincing messages. It helped them decide who to target, who to impersonate, and how to most effectively exploit the relationship to extract as much money as possible,” Masada wrote. 

EvilTokens was one of the most widely used phishing-as-a-service platforms prior to its takedown. It facilitated business-email compromise campaigns by stealing session tokens that allowed cybercriminals to sift through a victim’s inbox and maintain persistent access.

“We cannot estimate the total fraud attributable to all EvilTokens activity. However, we were able to correlate at least 13 complaints filed with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center to EvilTokens-linked activity, representing approximately $1.7 million in reported losses,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “Because many incidents go unreported and not all victims can be definitively linked to specific campaigns, we believe this is a conservative estimate.”

Victims of EvilTokens were largely concentrated in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India and France, according to Microsoft. SpyCloud, which supported the takedown, identified compromised email domains spanning 79 countries.

Microsoft said it also identified two men behind EvilTokens — Felix Utomi and Waidi Segun Adams — and attributes the development and support of the platform to Storm-2992, a threat actor unaffiliated with any other known cybercrime groups.

The United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police acted on that information Sept. 18 when it served warrants in the greater London area, arrested the men accused of making articles for use in fraud and money laundering and seized their digital devices.

The Metropolitan Police said it received information from Microsoft about EvilTokens’ administrators in August. Utomi and Adams were released on bail as the investigation continues. 

“The two primary operators identified in our investigation were residing in the U.K.,” a spokesperson for Microsoft told CyberScoop. “While our investigation focused on those individuals, we believe others may have supported the operation in various capacities.”

Microsoft’s legal filing in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia refers to five additional unidentified people allegedly acting as support personnel and users.

Microsoft and others involved in the EvilTokens takedown, including Health-ISAC, Cloudflare, OpenAI, Shadowserver and TRM Labs, didn’t fully quantify how much fraud the service enabled, but it gained popularity quickly among cybercriminals and was lucrative for its operators.

Coinbase, which also aided the investigation into EvilTokens, said it traced about $1.1 million in revenue for EvilTokens from its paying customers. The virtual currency company’s threat researchers found more than 1,000 deposits to EvilTokens from more than 700 distinct addresses through June 2026. 

Operators sold access to the service through Telegram for a $1,500 initiation fee and a recurring $500 subscription. EvilTokens significantly lowered the barrier to entry for cybercriminals by including specialized tools for identity attacks, cloud systems, social engineering and financial fraud in a single interface.

The service allowed cybercriminals to map organizational structure and permissions in Microsoft Graph, which enabled lateral movement, researchers said. With active tokens gained through a collection of highly-targeted phishing lures, cybercriminals consistently bypassed multi-factor authentication, email gateways and endpoint security tools.

Microsoft said the platform’s creators developed portions of the platform with AI and it uncovered capabilities from multiple AI models. 

“It packaged much of the criminal process into a commercially run service, complete with subscription pricing, customer support, management dashboards and tools designed to move customers from account access toward financial exploitation,” Masada added.

The companies and organizations involved in the globally-coordinated takedown identified and notified potential victims, shared indicators of compromise and shared intelligence with law enforcement about EvilToken’s operators and some of its customers.

Experts advised organizations and employees to treat unsolicited device codes as a red flag, assume compromised accounts are fully cataloged in minutes, and independently verify requests to change payment information or redirect funds.

“The infrastructure supporting EvilTokens has been disrupted, but the model it demonstrated will not disappear with it,” Masada warned.

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Proofpoint researchers have spotted at least four state-aligned threat groups chain a trio of zero-day vulnerabilities to conduct espionage on various targets of interest to China’s government since late August. 

The Chinese espionage group that Proofpoint tracks as TA412, also known as Violet Typhoon and APT31, struck first, exploiting the chain of vulnerabilities Aug. 28. At least three additional espionage threat groups followed suit, exploiting the same vulnerabilities in subsequent waves of attacks days later, researchers said.

The exploit chain Proofpoint calls BlueMoon targets Chrome, Chromium-based browsers and Microsoft Windows. It allows attackers to run code in the browser’s sandbox, escape the sandbox and gain system privileges to access a targeted machine, said Mark Kelly, staff threat researcher at Proofpoint.

“All three vulnerabilities were exploited before patches were available to the public,” he said.

The vulnerabilities include: CVE-2026-85046 and CVE-2026-87491, remote-code execution defects in the JavaScript engine for Chromium-based browsers; and CVE-2026-85880, a privilege-escalation zero-day that Microsoft disclosed Tuesday in Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call. 

“While the V8 vulnerabilities were known and fixed in Chromium source code, they were not yet patched in the latest publicly available browsers at the time of the activity, meaning they effectively functioned as zero-days in those products,” Kelly said.

Proofpoint said the exploit kit developer likely reverse engineered the publicly available Chromium patches to weaponize the browser exploit chain during that gap.

With a limited group of organizations exposed to all three vulnerabilities, attackers moved quickly and likely rushed development to target a narrow pool of potential targets. “In all observed cases, the infrastructure used for exploit delivery was created on the same day as — or in the days immediately preceding — the associated campaigns,” Proofpoint wrote in a threat intelligence report.

APT31, a group that’s committed espionage on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security, including seven Chinese nationals indicted by the Justice Department in 2024, dropped various lures containing the exploit chain loader in phishing emails targeting non-governmental organizations, mining companies and commodity trading firms in the United States. 

The phishing link installed a malicious browser extension disguised as Google Gemini on targeted machines, enabling attackers to surveil browser activity, steal credentials and execute commands, according to Proofpoint. 

Other distinct threat groups have also used the BlueMoon exploit chain with some slight technical changes and variances in targeting. 

“Proofpoint observed BlueMoon usage as recently as Sept. 8,” Kelly said. “The activity peaked Sept. 2-3 immediately prior to the Chrome patch being released and has continued intermittently since then.”

A China-aligned espionage threat group Proofpoint tracks as UNK_LateNight targeted multiple U.S. aerospace companies Sept. 2. Researchers also that day observed UNK_DoubleCheck, a suspected espionage-motivated threat group targeting Vietnamese manufacturing organizations with emails from a compromised Southeast Asian government account. 

Researchers said UNK_QuietRacket, another espionage group aligned with China, targeted government, consulting and financial sector organizations in Indonesia and Singapore Sept. 3.

Proofpoint has directly observed fewer than 20 organizations targeted globally thus far, but Kelly said the true number of impacted organizations is likely much higher. 

While Proofpoint attributes most of the observed attacks to Chinese espionage groups, attackers of other origins and motivations could strike soon as well. 

“Given its ease of adoption, we expect the exploit kit is likely to proliferate further and be adopted by additional espionage-motivated and financially motivated threat actors as patched versions are fully rolled out across all Chromium-based browsers,” Kelly said.

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Microsoft addressed 974 defects across its product suite, including two actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities, in its monthly Patch Tuesday security program. 

The massive batch of patches, Microsoft’s largest ever, reflects a continuing trend for the vendor as it leans on artificial intelligence to discover more vulnerabilities at a faster rate. Yet, the recent period of record breaking vulnerability disclosures hasn’t resulted in a flood of actively exploited zero-days.

“AI-assisted vulnerability discovery shows no signs of slowing down,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “However, we have not seen a correlating spike in active exploits — yet.”

The vulnerabilities actively exploited prior to disclosure — CVE-2026-81963 affecting the Windows Update Stack and CVE-2026-85880 affecting Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call — both have CVSS ratings of 7.8 and allow attackers to escalate privileges. 

More than 1 in 10 defects Microsoft disclosed in this month’s security update are rated critical. The update included 723 vulnerabilities in Windows, 111 in Office, 111 in Office 2016, 62 in SQL and 22 spanning various developer tools.

Researchers encouraged security teams and customers to not get overwhelmed by the total number of defects, but instead focus on their specific areas of risk and exposure. 

“While the number of vulnerabilities being patched is rising, the number of vulnerabilities that can and will affect most organizations remains quite low. AI-assisted vulnerability discovery in 2026 is creating larger haystacks, but it isn’t finding more needles,” Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said in an email. 

“It’s critical that organizations understand which vulnerabilities actually apply to them, whether they pose a threat by being reachable and exploitable, and prioritize remediation based on this risk context,” he added. 

Jack Bicer, director of vulnerability research at Action1, drew a similar conclusion from the record-breaking Patch Tuesday. 

“At this scale, the challenge is not simply getting through the patch list but knowing what needs attention first,” he said. “With hundreds of updates landing at once, IT and security teams need to quickly separate the vulnerabilities that demand immediate action from those that can follow the normal deployment cycle.”

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

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The Trump administration rolled out a six-month test program in Texas on Monday that will draw on volunteer expertise and technology from cyber and artificial intelligence companies to protect the water sector.

“Project Watershed 250” is the first of the state-based, industry-centric pilot projects to cross the finish line that the Office of the National Cyber Director has previewed since the publication of its national cybersecurity strategy earlier this year. Water systems have long been viewed as among the most vulnerable and neediest critical infrastructure sectors, and in recent months the sector has been the victim of a spree of attacks.

“Project Watershed 250 is a commitment from the states, industry and federal government that we will continue to prioritize our nation’s safety and deliver on America-first policies for the American people,” National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said at a rollout event in San Antonio Monday.

“U.S. companies are providing world-class cyber capabilities, red teaming that tests utilities’ current defenses, system hardening using the latest private sector cyber tools and AI tooling that helps utilities’ frontier cyber defenders to protect Texas water systems and scale proven solutions across the country,” he said. “This six-month pilot program is designed to make our water and wastewater critical infrastructure more resilient and resistant to cyber attacks by proactively finding and fixing system weaknesses.”

The pilot program, featuring collaboration between federal and state governments, stands in contrast to how the Biden administration tried to tackle the issue, with audit requirements that some GOP states challenged in court, forcing Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw its rule.

“For too long, at least on the federal level, the government has admired the problem of cybersecurity in water systems,” Cairncross said. “We are going to find out what works. We’re going to target that, and we are going to scale off of this and learn lessons.”

A dozen companies — Parsons, Microsoft, Fortinet, Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, Amazon Web Services, Reflection AI, Cloudflare, Zscaler, Forescout, Abnormal AI and Dragos — appeared at the rollout Monday to praise the initiative and tout their contributions to it.

Not everyone praised the initiative elsewhere, however. One cyber professional who works on water security issues, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the program was “all smoke” and that “there’s no real money behind it.”

“The White House did what it always does — reached out to industry with their hands out asking for industry to pay for things the government should be doing, at least in part,” the person said.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the program would be overseen by Cairncross’s office and Texas Cyber Command, which was established just last year. Abbott cited the need for the program by mentioning “an Iranian-backed cyberattack” on 30 water systems across 12 states and a 2024 attack on the water system in Muleshoe, Texas, suspected to be the work of Russian hackers.

“The need for cyber resilience is overwhelming,” Abbott said. “Many rural providers simply don’t have the resources they need to be able to protect themselves.”

Watershed 250 isn’t the only federal effort to bolster water cybersecurity, with lawmakers introducing legislation in the aftermath of the recent attacks. Past legislation that Congress has enacted also sought to tackle the problem.

Updated 8/31/26: with comment from cyber professional.

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More than 100 companies and organizations, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, have signed an open letter calling for a global effort to improve cybersecurity defenses as artificial intelligence capabilities advance.

The letter, published Thursday, argues that the timeframe to strengthen defenses before AI-enabled attacks become more widespread and complex is rapidly dwindling. Conversely, the letter says the same advances can give defenders new ways to find and fix vulnerabilities that have accumulated over years, a period the signatories call a “defenders’ window.”

“Each of us can reduce risk now,” the letter reads. “All organizations, cybersecurity companies, technology partners, governments, and AI frontier companies have an important role: accelerate defenders’ priorities with tools, funding, and hands-on support, especially for critical infrastructure organizations with limited budgets.”

Aside from AI-centric companies, financial institutions like Capital One, Mastercard and Visa, and cybersecurity firms like CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, and Proofpoint, also signed the letter. Organizers describe the effort as ongoing, with more organizations expected to join over time.

The letter states that “status quo security won’t be enough.” It cites longstanding bugs, excessive permissions, misconfigurations, unpatched software, weak authentication and technical debt in legacy systems as sources of exposure. Security teams, particularly those protecting critical infrastructure, have been historically under-resourced, the letter says, and need what it describes as a surge in tools, resources and hands-on support.

In a conversation with CyberScoop Wednesday, top brass from Palo Alto Networks said they had seen enough from internal frontier AI model testing and malicious in-the-wild use of commercially available AI tools to be genuinely concerned.

“I can tell you without exaggeration that we believe that this is a generational shift in cybersecurity,” Sam Rubin, senior vice president of Palo Alto Networks’ threat intelligence arm, said Wednesday. 

John Doyle, CEO of Cape, a privacy-first mobile network operator and whose company signed the letter, echoed the warning about status-quo security.

“It was already failing us in telecom–critical infrastructure that’s been breached time and again with serious consequences for both our military and regular people,” Doyle told CyberScoop. “It’s going to get immeasurably worse without collective action and leaning into innovative cyber defense.”

The letter further asks every organization to make cybersecurity an immediate leadership priority, fix the highest-risk weaknesses and raise security standards for technology they buy, build and deploy, including AI-generated code. Cybersecurity companies and technology partners are asked to test defenses against frontier AI capabilities and make AI-powered defense accessible to critical infrastructure operators. 

Governments are urged to coordinate defense across borders, fund protection for essential services that lack staff or budget, and impose costs on attackers. Frontier AI companies are asked to provide responsible model access, funding, training and support, and to ensure that AI systems acting autonomously remain traceable and accountable.

The letter frames AI as both a threat and a remedy throughout the document. It mirrors what security experts have been saying for months, positioning the industry as entering an unprecedented two- to three-year period of upheaval, driven by AI systems that are discovering vulnerabilities exponentially faster than defenders can respond and threatening to render decades of security practices obsolete.

The U.S. government has taken steps to stay ahead of AI-enabled cyberthreats. As part of an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in June, a federal clearinghouse known as Gold Eagle was stood up for sharing AI cyber threat information between the government and private sector.

You can read the full letter here.

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The ransomware-as-a-service group Medusa has adopted fresh tactics to gain access and added hundreds of victims in a little more than a year, according to an updated U.S. government advisory published Tuesday.

The gang is relying on access brokers,compensating them anywhere from $100 to $1 million, with higher prices going to those who work exclusively with Medusa. However, most of the brokers work simultaneously for “multiple variants at the same time,” the advisory from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, FBI and Health and Human Services Department states in one of the updated portions of the advisory.

Tuesday’s update advisory expands upon aMarch 2025 advisory, drawing on ongoing FBI investigations.nIt includes information on the kinds of software vulnerabilities Medusa has exploited, such as Fortra GoAnywhere and BeyondTrust flaws.

“Medusa actors operate opportunistically by targeting victims with unpatched software rather than focusing on specific organizations or sectors; however, the Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) Sector has been a frequent victim of Medusa operations,” according to the advisory. “Medusa actors leverage newly announced exploits within 24 hours and have been observed to use exploits up to a week before public vulnerability disclosure.’

“However, there is no indication Medusa actors develop their own zero-day or N-day vulnerabilities, preferring instead to obtain advanced access to exploits from unknown sources or to quickly leverage newly announced exploits before potential victims can mitigate vulnerabilities through patching,” the advisory continues.

The approach appears to be netting gains: From March 2025 to April of this year, the victim tally in the advisory jumped from more than 300 to more than 500. The group was first identified in 2021.

“Medusa actors often use legitimate tools and living off the land techniques to evade detection. They may also leverage remote monitoring and management software and remote access services, including Remote Desktop Protocol, for lateral movement,” as updated sections of the advisory detail. “Once inside a network, they use common utilities and tools to support credential access, data exfiltration, and ransomware deployment.”

Earlier this year, Microsoft detailed how a group it dubbed Storm-1175 was making use of Medusa ransomware in speedy operations. Symantec and Carbon Black also detailed earlier this year how North Korean hackers were leaning on Medusa to target the health care sector.

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In less than four hours early Tuesday, an attacker compromised a GitHub maintainer account and unleashed a self-replicating piece of malware which injected malicious code into more than 440 distinct npm packages, according to multiple security firms. 

The worm, built on the open-source Mini Shai-Hulud repository that TeamPCP published in May, was initially let loose in keyv, a data management interface software package with more than 600 million monthly downloads. The attacker spent the next 30 minutes compromising additional packages controlled by the same maintainer, including cacheable, flat-cache, file-entry-cache.

The attack spread to other maintainers, eventually compromising more than 860 packages with a “combined total of over 2 billion monthly installs,” Ilyas Makari, malware researcher at Aikido Security, wrote in a blog post. 

Wiz researchers told CyberScoop it hasn’t observed any new malicious packages since the initial wave moved through a massive footpoint of cloud and code environments in those first four hours. 

“This is the most critical initial compromise, with over 155 million weekly downloads on the root packages,” Wiz Research said in an email. 

Some of the compromised packages, including keyv, flat-cache and file-entry-cache, are present in more than 46% of all cloud environments, according to Wiz. “By comparison, back in the Shai-Hulud 2.0 campaign the most prevalent packages were only in about 28% of environments,” the company said. 

“Time will tell whether the eventual cost and impact outpaces past attacks, or whether adoption of hardening mechanisms such as package aging, and the usage of the relatively less aggressive Mini Shai-Hulud code as basis, will defray the final toll here,” Wiz Research added. 

Researchers from multiple firms sprung into action to monitor the widening attack spree and published indicators of compromise to help potential victims hunt for malicious activity in their systems. 

The Mini Shai-Hulud variant used in these attacks scoops up a trove of sensitive data, including npm, GitHub, AWS and continuous integration credentials. It also steals AI-related configuration files and cryptocurrency wallets, researchers said. 

Microsoft, Aikido, Socket and Wiz all said the same payload and pattern was observed across all affected packages, indicating a single attacker or threat cluster was behind the supply-chain attack and using multiple stolen tokens. 

The malware showcased a few pieces of new functionality, but retained the same core mechanisms that are hallmarks of Mini Shai-Hulud. 

“The evolution is consistent with what we’ve seen from them in past waves, however we don’t yet have the hard links” to confidently attribute the attacks to TeamPCP, Wiz Research said.

The notorious threat actor, which Google previously told CyberScoop it attributes to one core operator that was located in South Africa during at least some of the attacks, compromised and injected malicious code into more than 1,000 software packages in less than four months earlier this year.

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AI systems like Anthropic’s Project Glasswing and Microsoft’s MDASH are aiding in the discovery of vulnerabilities, filling the ever-growing pool of defects that defenders have to address before exploitation occurs. Yet, through the first half of 2026, these vulnerabilities were no more or less likely to be exploited than all vulnerabilities disclosed during that period, VulnCheck said in a report Tuesday. 

Concerns remain high about AI-discovered vulnerabilities fueling more attacks, but VulnCheck’s review of exploitation data shows that those fears are unfounded, at least so far. 

Patrick Garrity, security researcher at VulnCheck and report author, identified 1,061 vulnerabilities attributed to AI-assisted discovery during the first six months of the year. Of those vulnerabilities discovered by AI, 14 ( 1.3%) were exploited in the wild, a breakdown that aligns with the exploitation rate researchers observed across all vulnerabilities during the same period. 

“While AI-assisted vulnerability discovery clearly has value for both attackers and defenders, the data does not suggest that AI discovered vulnerabilities are inherently more likely to be exploited than those found through traditional methods,” Garrity wrote.

While AI’s contribution to actively exploited vulnerabilities was muted in the first half of the year, it’s too soon to assume that trend will continue. Moreover, none of these major vulnerability-hunting models were running for that full period. Project Glasswing rolled out in April, while Microsoft’s MDASH and OpenAI’s Daybreak were both unveiled in May.

The upward trend in Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday indicates how much the floodgates might open through the remainder of the year as AI models discover more vulnerabilities. The company’s July security update contained an all-time-record of 622 vulnerabilities, besting the previous record-breaking June update with 206 vulnerabilities.

VulnCheck’s state of exploitation report also found that vulnerabilities were exploited much faster after CVE publication, speeding up from an average of 120 days in 2025 to 80 days during the first half of the year.

The intelligence firm also determined which technology categories were actively exploited most often. Content management systems accounted for nearly one-third of the 495 known exploited vulnerabilities VulnCheck identified during the first half of 2026. Network edge devices were responsible for almost 14%, followed by operating systems at nearly 9%, server software at 8%, and AI products — an emerging attack surface — at almost 6%.

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Microsoft threw its hat into the ring Monday in the increasingly heated competition among AI-powered cybersecurity offerings, unveiling tools that it claims are better and cheaper than its rivals.

The new agentic model MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, runs inside another Microsoft security tool, MDASH, and is part of an AI-powered security platform the company dubbed Project Perception.

Microsoft argues that its existing in-house capabilities give Project Perception an edge.

“Project Perception brings together signals, context, models and specialized agents into a continuously learning system of defense,” the company said in a blog post. “It can reason, prioritize and act at machine speed while keeping humans firmly in control and empowering them with powerful new workflows.”

Its release follows splashy AI cybersecurity suite debuts from OpenAI and Anthropic. Companies have been racing to advertise their AI offerings for their ability to find vulnerabilities, even as the most dire warnings about AI being used on the offensive side have yet to come to fruition.

As proof of its superiority, Microsoft said that MDASH with MAI-Cyber-1-Flash beat Mythos, Gemini and GPT on CyberGym, “the gold standard benchmark for evaluating how systems reason over large codebases to find real vulnerabilities in the code.” It scored 96%, 12 percentage points ahead of the next-best.

Microsoft said MAI-Cyber-1-Flash was built with a focus on safety first, and was independently assessed by a third party it didn’t name. AI cybersecurity systems made big news in the past week after OpenAI said its models broke free of its testing confinement to hack Hugging Face, a major AI code platform. 

Price also was a big part of Microsoft’s rollout: It said MAI-Cyber-1-Flash in MDASH can do the job at half the cost of other leading models.

“This is the benefit of building the harness, context/signals, and action space separate from one model family,” Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said on social media after the company unveiled Project Perception in San Francisco Monday. “By combining specialized models and data with the right agents, tools, security context, and harness, we can advance the frontier of cost to outcome.”

Project Perception enters public preview on Aug. 3, Microsoft said.

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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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Microsoft, along with more than two dozen tech companies, are pressing policymakers to support open-source AI systems and code across society, arguing that it will be a safer approach than attempting to restrict access or relying on a handful of closed, proprietary models.

The open letter, posted Friday, draws parallels to the software industry of the 1980s, when large businesses worried that open-source software code would cut into their business. While industry lost that battle, the end result was a vibrant ecosystem that now underpins much of the modern internet, government IT and even commercial software products.

It also created a “shared foundation of knowledge” that has fed countless future software projects and innovations.

“The United States now faces a similar choice with artificial intelligence,” the companies wrote. “Our AI leadership will be judged not by one frontier AI model, but by whether the United States builds a strong, open ecosystem that diffuses into every sector.”

Expanding access and support to open-source AI comes with meaningful security risk. Cybersecurity experts warn that one of the biggest beneficiaries of broadly available AI tools are  low-level criminals who until now lacked the technical expertise or resources to launch serious attacks.

Once a model is open weight, anyone can download it, customize it, strip it of any guardrails and use it for their own purposes. As open-source models have gotten better at creating deepfakes and other AI generated imagery, the danger of locally-customized CSAM and sexualized deepfakes could also grow.

But the letter argues that open-weight AI models are most beneficial to startups, universities, research labs and other small, ambitious organizations that can innovate and iterate the technology and make it more broadly useful to society.

“Open weights let every organization match the right model to the right job at the right cost, reserving frontier-scale capability for genuine frontier problems and running efficient specialized specialized models everywhere else,” The companies wrote. “That discipline is what will make AI economically sustainable as its use scales into the billions of everyday tasks.”

 For cybersecurity specifically, the letter argues that defenders armed with open-source AI will outpace attackers better than any closed model approach.

“In a world where cybersecurity attackers use advanced AI, defenders need access to models with comparable capabilities so they can detect, simulate, and respond to emerging threats,” the companies wrote. “Open models broaden defensive capability, increase transparency, and allow vulnerabilities to be discovered and remediated across many teams.”

Other notable companies signing the letter include Meta, Palantir, Perplexity, Mistral, NVIDIA, Mozilla, The Linux Foundation, Hugging Face, Dell Technologies and IBM.

US policymakers continue to grapple with balancing unrestrained support for the domestic AI industry and providing oversight and regulation of harms that result from their use.

The Trump administration has cycled through several frameworks since coming into office, first a laissez-faire approach within no restrictions, then an executive order creating a voluntary testing regime for industry, then the imposition of export controls on Anthropic’s Fable model and reportedly pressuring OpenAI to delay the release of their models out of cybersecurity concerns.

The letter comes as the Trump administration has reportedly considered an executive order that would restrict American access and availability to Chinese-made open-source models.

But the White House and US companies are trying to thread a needle in recognizing the overall benefits of an open source approach while being wary of doing anything that could potentially benefit their Chinese rivals.

Earlier this month the White House announced the creation of its Gold Eagle AI cybersecurity clearinghouse that would help coordinate government, private sector and civil society work finding and closing AI-discovered vulnerabilities. A big part of that effort, a senior White House official said, is supporting providers and maintainers of open-source AI tools.

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Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday security program reached an unrivaled pinnacle this month, as the vendor addressed 622 vulnerabilities across its suite of business products and systems. 

“The bug apocalypse has finally descended upon us,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

“The mother of all releases. To call this record-breaking is an understatement,” he added. “The CVE count year-to-date exceeds all other years’ totals.”

The startling increase in vulnerabilities reflects a compounding effect taking root across software as artificial intelligence plays a growing role in discovering and developing patches for defects lurking in error-riddled applications. 

Microsoft’s June Patch Tuesday update broke the previous all-time record with 206 vulnerabilities.

The company last week warned forewarned customers and defenders that a flood of defects would be uncovered as it applies its multi-model agentic scanning harness (MDASH) to discover and address vulnerabilities at greater speed and scale.

The monthly exponential rise in Microsoft vulnerabilities already puts the vendor on pace to break a full-year record, ending 2026 with the largest annual collection of defects, beating the previous record of 1,245 CVEs in 2020, Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said in an email. 

“It’s probable that we will not only exceed 2,000 CVEs in a calendar year, but potentially over 3,000 CVEs this year or more,” he added.

“The volume is striking, but it reflects how good these tools have become at finding bugs, not how many of those bugs actually pose a risk to organizations,” Narang said.

Microsoft disclosed two actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-56155 and CVE-2026-56164, privilege escalation defects in Active Directory Federation Services and Microsoft SharePoint Server, respectively. 

The monthly batch of patches included 416 defects in Windows, 82 in Office and 46 in Microsoft Edge. More than 1 in 10 vulnerabilities the vendor disclosed — 63 total — were rated as critical.

“The products covered this month are also astonishing,” Childs said. “Just about everything you’ve ever heard of is getting patched.”

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

SAP also addressed a fresh assortment of vulnerabilities Tuesday, including critical defects CVE-2026-44747 in SAP NetWeaver Application Server and CVE-2026-27690 in SAP Approuter.

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The Paris Peace Forum, a French non-profit that has convened world leaders on global security issues, is launching a new project to bring together international experts to assess AI-related threats to global internet infrastructure.

The Integrated Network for Trusted AI in Cyberspace (INTAiC) will tap researchers and civil society experts from government and the private sector, analyzing current AI cyber threats from the field and creating “forward-looking” reports on how the technology will impact society and what organizations can do to respond.

One of the project’s top goals is to create an international, quick-response coalition of government and business to address AI-related threats, similar to coordination mechanisms that exist in other areas of cybersecurity.

“Evidence fragmentation on AI-driven cyber threats isn’t incidental — it’s structural: those defending networks and those securing AI systems have long worked in separate spheres,” said Adrien Abecassis, policy initiatives director for the Paris Peace Forum. “That’s exactly why INTAiC is unique — it’s built to turn those fragments into one comparable reading of the threat, because this is a challenge no actor can meet alone.”

The network already lists a number of prominent businesses and organizations, including Microsoft, the Cyber Threat Alliance, the Cloud Security Alliance, Orange Cyberdefense and others.

According to the forum, INTAiC’s work will focus primarily on two, separate workstreams. One is a single and regularly updated resource for defenders to stay up to date on how AI is reshaping cyber threats. The resource is focused more on attacker capabilities, different forms of misuse and the impact on security operations rather than isolated incidents.

“The result is a common reference point, grounded in reality, that gives policymakers a clearer measure of the threat and identifies the risks most deserving of collective attention,” the Forum said in a release.

The second workstream will focus on evaluating and preventing cyber risks associated with AI, building up a base of independent third-party experts who can provide neutral or unbiased assessments of frontier model cyber capabilities. That work will pull in governments, research institutions and non-profits to develop new organizational and funding pathways to support that kind of research.

While the U.S. federal government has come a long way in recent years building up its own capacity to test and study AI cyber threats, much of the access and technical expertise around frontier model capabilities are concentrated within commercial AI companies. This has at times created concerns that federal agencies were being overly reliant on AI companies to explain how the technology worked and walk them through the possible threat scenarios.

As Anthropic and OpenAI have rolled out defensive cybersecurity programs like Project Glasswing and the Trusted Access for Cyber program, access to those models have become available to a wider group of researchers and organizations.

The Paris Peace Forum intends to brief the public further on INTAiC’s work and accomplishments in Paris later this year during the organization’s annual conference in November.

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Toolkits to wage phishing campaigns are a now-venerable instrument for cybercriminals, but researchers recently turned up details on something like a full-fledged “business email compromise-as-a-service” platform.

Cisco Talos said Wednesday that it had found an operator panel dubbed ARToken, which shares infrastructure and other things in common with, and as an affiliate to, the EvilTokens phishing-as-a-service operation built to bypass multi-factor authentication and compromise Microsoft 365 accounts. EvilTokens has reportedly seen a dramatic increase in its phishing attacks — by 1,380% early this year compared to the same period last year — with an assist from artificial intelligence integration.

ARToken is notable, though, for the capabilities that go beyond what’s been made public about EvilTokens so far by companies like Sekoia and Microsoft itself, such as inbox rule manipulation and shared access links.

“These features indicate the platform is more mature than a simple device code phishing kit — it is a complete BEC operations environment,” wrote Michael Kelley, security research engineer at Cisco Talos, in a blog post, referring to business email compromise scams that involve sending fake emails to solicit fraudulent payments.

Kelley told CyberScoop that “we’ve seen some offerings that touch on this capability, but this definitely seems more fleshed out and polished than previous instances.”

ARToken is also notable for its evasive capabilities, with a seven-layer anti-analysis system, the post states.

The research provides further details on what ARToken’s actual phishing lures look like in practice. They are targeted, rather than scattershot and opportunistic, as one lure the firm examined shows.

“The messages spoof an accounts-payable contact at a legitimate Wisconsin contractor, addressed to an accounts-payable recipient at a U.S. life sciences company — abusing a real vendor relationship rather than inventing a sender,” Kelley wrote. “The lure theme is an outstanding-invoice inquiry (‘the following invoices appear to still be outstanding… advise when this will be processed’), the kind of message accounts-payable staff are conditioned to act on.”

Kelley told CyberScoop that Cisco Talos doesn’t yet have a full sense of the breadth of the activity, nor who is making use of the capability.

“We’ve seen the public sector targeted but it’s unlikely to be the only one,” he said.

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