Researchers show that file-change notification systems can leak keystroke timing, browsing activity, and WhatsApp media events.
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The FBI is investigating an attack on its own systems after ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the incident, putting the prolific cybercrime group in the most direct conflict yet with agents responsible for investigating data extortion attacks.
The Monday breach, first reported by 404 Media, allowed ShinyHunters to temporarily deface the FBI jobs site. The group claimed it stole “very sensitive data on almost all FBI agents and individuals who filed an application with the FBI for a job,” in a lengthy post on its data-leak site.
“The FBI is aware of claims regarding unauthorized activity affecting FBIjobs.gov and is currently investigating,” a spokesperson for the agency said in a statement.
An alert on the FBI jobs site notes that apply.fbijobs.gov and the Special Agent Application Portal are currently unavailable.
The attack marks a sobering escalation by ShinyHunters, a notorious group that previously targeted major cloud platforms, healthcare organizations, universities, technology companies, retailers and education service providers. Previous victims of ShinyHunters this year include Instructure, Salesforce, Snowflake and McKesson.
“The ShinyHunters ransomware group appears to be actively trying to put a target on their back,” Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president at Halcyon’s ransomware research center, told CyberScoop.
ShinyHunters claims it targeted the FBI in response to a public service announcement it says contains false allegations about the group. The FBI issued the PSA following ShinyHunters’ May attack on Instructure, the company behind Canvas, a widely used central hub for K-12 and university coursework, exams and communication.
The group responded with its own “PSA” on its data-leak site, insisting it is not affiliated with The Com, has never conducted swatting attacks or claimed it had sensitive or compromising information, including embarrassing photos or videos, to extort victims.
The PSA was addressed to Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI’s cyber division, and FBI Director Kash Patel.
“While ShinyHunters has in the past been hyperbolic about the criticality of the data they’ve accessed, the group has established itself as a legitimate threat,” Flashpoint analysts told CyberScoop.
“This attack benefits ShinyHunters by bolstering their reputation as a credible threat,” the analysts added. “In the group’s statement on their leak site regarding the breach, they portray the FBI’s PSA as an “attempt to ‘disrupt’ our operations and hinder clients’ trust in our organization hoping nobody pays us.”
The threat group typically uses social engineering, abuses weaknesses in identity systems or exploits vulnerabilities to gain access to cloud-hosted environments containing troves of sensitive or proprietary data, which it threatens to leak if the victim doesn’t pay a ransom.
ShinyHunters doesn’t appear to be seeking a payoff in this case, but rather a bid to coerce the FBI into amending or removing the May PSA. The group didn’t make any direct threat in the data-leak site post to release the stolen data, but it set a deadline of one week for action.
That coercive approach toward the FBI could backfire, according to experts.
“Ransomware groups are largely successful because they operate like businesses,” said Kaiser, a former deputy assistant in the FBI’s cyber division. “Targeting other criminal groups or law enforcement — especially in ways intended to publicly shame — demonstrates a lack of discipline that historically has led to takedowns, takeovers or defections.”
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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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Researchers said they used Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex to identify a damaging flaw embedded in a popular software decoding tool that could leave major internet platforms, enterprise services, and web frameworks vulnerable to data theft and remote access.
The vulnerability, nicknamed HEIF Heist, refers to the malware’s ability to trigger memory corruption errors in affected software, allowing the attacker to pilfer sensitive data from its victims. In a report published Thursday, the researchers laid out the potential damage an attacker could cause, including gaining access to internal OpenAI repositories, leaking user files, access tokens, and other sensitive data for online services like Amazon Web Services, and gaining remote code execution privileges across a range of online services, including Meta’s core product suite, GitHub Enterprise servers and open-source internet forum Discourse.
“Even when Remote Code Execution isn’t immediately achievable, the attack primitives may still allow arbitrary heap disclosure, letting an attacker ‘heist’ in-memory data such as other users’ data and environment variables,” wrote Hacktron researchers Harsh Jaiswal, Mohan SRK, Rahul Maini and Sudhanshu Rajbhar.
The researchers relied heavily on AI systems, including frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic, to conduct their research. Attribution for the research is described as being “led” by the Hacktron human researchers “assisted by Hacktron Harness, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Opus 5.”
According to the research, the attack exploited the way that code parsing tools in many popular software decoders — specifically libheif and libde265, used to parse C and C++ software — process certain image files.
By uploading HEIF, HEIC and AVIF image files corrupted with malicious code, the attacker could bypass most of the victim’s application layer defenses, in many cases achieving remote code execution privileges for accounts or products tied to major AI and tech brands.
While the latest version of libheif has been patched, the researchers said “any deployment lacking the latest upstream security patches is potentially vulnerable.”
In one incident detailed in a Sept. 13 blog, Jaiswal, Maini, and Hacktron researcher Mohan Pedhapati described how chaining two vulnerabilities, including an image parser flaw, could compromise OpenAI employee accounts.
With access to the compromised accounts, researchers could reach OpenAI’s internal repositories. As a proof of concept, they opened a pull request in the company’s “monorepo,” a centralized library where code is shared across projects, using the employee’s Codex credentials.
According to a timeline provided by the researchers, the flaw was discovered on July 25 and patched within days. They said the entire attack, from discovering the initial vulnerability to gaining access to the repositories, took less than 72 hours. OpenAI paid them a bug bounty of $6,500 for their work.
Given that AI models are increasingly integrated into enterprise and personal networks, an attacker exploiting HEIF Heist could have accessed far more than just OpenAI’s systems and data.
“Until two months ago, a user or OpenAI employee logging into OpenAI’s own help forum could have had their ChatGPT and Codex accounts taken over,” the researchers wrote. “Since people can connect various services to Codex and ChatGPT, the scope of what we could theoretically access was huge, including GitHub, Slack and emails.”
CyberScoop has reached out to OpenAI for comment on the research and additional information.
At the same time, the researchers said the attack paths they found were not particularly easy or efficient to exploit.
“Exploitation requires fingerprinting the target version and tailoring the payload images,” the blog stated. “Some of our RCE attempts landed only after thousands of image uploads. That said, an AI agentic approach with a frontier model like GPT-5.6 Sol cut exploit development time down to roughly 1 to 3 days from initial probe to remote RCE. A motivated attacker can convert a vulnerable upload endpoint into RCE or an info leak.”
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The past few weeks have “felt very strange” for Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade.
Like many, he is trying to sort through the spate of frontier-model AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and others hacking their way onto the open internet over the past few months, particularly amid the already-heated national debate around the emerging technology and its impact on society.
Guerrero-Saade, a fellow for AI and security research at SentinelOne and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, said the hacks are worth taking seriously, but at a time when businesses and open-source maintainers should be focused on further hardening their systems and policymakers should be discussing new solutions, “what we see is cybersecurity being used essentially as an excuse for these AI doomer arguments.”
The incidents have spawned those “doomer arguments” amid an intense public debate about the technology, the pace of industry development, and whether government and the private sector are doing enough to protect against “doomsday”-type scenarios, where AI systems take over or attack large parts of the internet or society.
Guerrero-Saade is among a growing chorus of cybersecurity professionals who say that while AI systems pose real, unique threats to our systems, the apocalypse is far from inevitable. Most of the public concerns around the incidents, let alone worries about killer AIs attacking critical infrastructure, assuming control of the internet and wiping out humanity, are either technically impossible or can largely be controlled through established cybersecurity principles.
There is this “narrative or magical thinking of ‘Well, AI is going to be able to hack everything, and therefore it can control everything, and therefore it’s going to kill us all,’” he told CyberScoop. “And you [think] these just don’t add up. They’re not very well-reasoned arguments.”
This fatalistic narrative tied to AI’s eventual dominance doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, according to experts CyberScoop spoke with. In recent conversations, cybersecurity and national security professionals raised questions about both the technical solutions OpenAI and Anthropic use to contain their models, as well as the glaring absence of federal oversight from federal regulators or truly independent third-party review.
For example, Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic employee who resigned over AI safety concerns, told CBS News that frontier models could not be “unplugged” by humans once deployed because the model would copy itself to thousands of other computers connected to the internet.
By contrast, Matt Tait, a former information security specialist at UK signals intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), pointed out that the models run by Anthropic and other frontier companies require extremely expensive, “ultraspecialist” machines that “are functionally supercomputers.”
“There is a zero chance that Anthropic’s most capable models will be able to extract their own model and run in the wild, because those supercomputers essentially only exist in datacenters,” Tait said.
Other former cybersecurity government leaders say the agentic hacks represent a failure by regulators and industry to deploy known technical and policy options that make it harder for these types of incidents to occur.
Matt Hartman, former deputy executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said “we should not accept harmful AI behavior as inevitable or unmanageable.”
“There are meaningful steps companies can take to monitor agent activity, constrain permissions, detect anomalous behavior, and build stronger safeguards into how these systems operate,” said Hartman, now a chief strategy officer at Merlin Group. “Those controls will inevitably involve trade-offs in capability and speed, but that’s a familiar cybersecurity challenge. Our goal should be to manage the risk without unnecessarily limiting the enormous benefits AI can provide.”
Ciaran Martin, former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, took issue with the way the CEOs of frontier AI companies have framed the threat of “rogue” AI behavior as inevitable, while issuing dire warnings about future threats and capabilities with little transparency.
Martin’s comments came after an essay published by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that cited the threat of a HuggingFace-style swarm of agents that could create a botnet capable of “taking over the entire internet” within 6-12 months.
This, Martin said, “is not a credible warning,” because it doesn’t explain how the exploitation would function, how such a botnet would persist on the internet, or how it would escape law enforcement.
“It assumes no monitoring of systems, no anti-virus, no DDoS protection, no network segmentation, no incident management, no nothing of any kind of the cybersecurity on the global Internet of the type that has developed over the last 30 years,” wrote Martin. “For a claim of this magnitude, there is neither evidence for the contention nor a credible account of a path to this outcome.”
Meanwhile, some federal government cybersecurity leaders have touted the technology’s disruptive potential and called for more widespread adoption of AI tools by defenders.
Joseph Alm, assistant secretary of cyber, infrastructure and risk resilience at the Department of Homeland Security, said classified systems may retain stronger protections. But for most other data, AI models are “just going to know things and be able to infer things about the world, and we’re going to have to adapt to that as almost inevitable.”
Asked by CyberScoop whether the government or frontier AI companies could be doing more to prevent or deter their models from carrying out unauthorized hacks via agents, Alm cited recent efforts by the Trump administration this year to establish pre-release testing of commercial models as a step in the right direction. But he called unauthorized AI agent hacks “a new threat class” that is different from previous threats and can be easily distributed to users through open-source software today.
“I think what we can do is…encourage the building of good sandboxes, so that the best models aren’t used for this and the stuff you see out in the wild is the kind of detritus that you can actually respond to effectively and control your networks,” said Alm.
Other experts have shared similar concerns. Earlier this month, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz recently warned of a new threat class emerging alongside nation-states, cybercriminals, and hacktivists: “the agent state.” By pairing AI systems with small human teams, these operators can now match the speed, scale, and sophistication of government-backed hackers.
“It took a nation to fund the talent, the tooling, the infrastructure, the patience,” said Kurtz. “That scarcity is over.”
To be sure, frontier AI companies tout their commitment to both approaches. OpenAI and Anthropic have rolled out an array of cybersecurity partnerships, external red-teaming programs, vulnerability disclosure programs and cybersecurity technical advisory bodies filled with cybersecurity experts.
Mohammed Husain, strategic delivery lead for government at OpenAI, told CyberScoop that the company deploys both internal safety guardrails for their models and relies on outside cybersecurity vendors for additional expertise.
Internally, OpenAI focuses on vulnerabilities at the training level: filtering data poisoning attacks, blocking harmful datasets, and using network controls to prevent prompt injections. For other security layers like sandboxing, identity management, networking controls, they outsource to external vendors.
“I don’t think OpenAI has all the answers here but what we do as a research lab is we’re going to focus on levels of protection we have expertise in and we partner to self-complement,” said Husain.
In response to the HuggingFace hack, OpenAI and Anthropic have allowed third-party organizations, such as nonprofit AI research firms METR and Redwood Research, to investigate. But multiple cybersecurity professionals told CyberScoop that both firms lack incident response experience and focus primarily on AI alignment and safety. Their reporting on the hack also lacked critical details: network monitoring logs, telemetry, and other data standard in cybersecurity threat intelligence reports.
METR president Chris Painter addressed those general concerns in a post on X, saying since 2022 the organization has worked with Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Amazon and others on investigations and third-party evaluations. Painter said none of the AI companies fund METR and that his employees are not uniformly “doomer” or “accelerationist” around AI.
Painter also said METR’s work ensures that if AI systems become autonomous or “rogue” within a company, there are ways to share that information with governments and people “outside the company’s walls.”
“We don’t accept money from frontier AI companies,” wrote Painter. “They haven’t paid us for our work, and we don’t accept donations from them or their employees. As we’ve shared previously, multiple frontier AI companies currently provide us with free access to their models in order to perform our evaluations, research, and engineering.”
AI safety and AI cybersecurity advocates take different approaches to securing “rogue” AI behavior. Safety advocates focus on aligning models around ethical training and behavior. Cybersecurity advocates argue that technical and regulatory controls must go further—actively preventing models from accessing what they need to carry out malicious behavior.
Guerrero-Saade said sandboxes in particular can easily be programmed with aggressive cybersecurity monitoring in order to spot when something odd may be happening and react in real time.
“I can’t think of an easier situation in which to set up trip wires, set up configurations like DNS servers, just different parts where you can say ‘Hey, anomalous behavior is happening,’” he said. “We should have been able to tell this immediately, not weeks and months later. So watching [the AI hacking incidents] go down is a little ‘crazy-making’ because we’re seeing things that, frankly, look like neglect, negligence, people just mishandling things, and then being told that these are categorically new incidents that mean that AI systems need to be treated completely different from anything that’s come before.”
While cybersecurity experts say AI systems are, at their core, still software, they do operate differently from more traditional code in ways that can make them harder to predict and control.
John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google’s Threat Intelligence Group, said most software has been deterministic. It may have bugs or vulnerabilities, but an expert could generally understand how it would react to certain stimuli, making it easier to design straightforward controls.
AI models are non-deterministic, with far more variability than traditional software. That can break security controls that rely too much on predicting behavior in advance. Using AI to enforce security controls on other AI models faces the same problem: the systems being deployed to control AI are just as unpredictable.
But people are also non-deterministic, and people have developed systems in other industries and practices to account for that.
Hultquist drew on his Army experience, noting that “they give incredibly dangerous, expensive things to 18-year-olds” and expect responsible use. The military manages this through two types of controls: deterministic ones like strict weapons and ammunition protocols, and non-deterministic ones like human officers who monitor and correct violations.
Similarly, established cybersecurity controls have been used by incident responders to detect and prevent or mitigate ongoing cybersecurity breaches.
“I don’t think we should throw out all the other tools that we have learned to use as well. I think that would be utterly foolish,” he said, later adding “I will say that if we use only non-deterministic tools to figure out when things are happening, we shouldn’t be surprised when we get the wrong answer.”
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Attackers of unknown origins and motivations are exploiting a critical zero-day vulnerability in Cisco Secure Email Gateway, authorities and researchers said Monday.
The vulnerability — CVE-2026-76461 — was exploited before Cisco disclosed and patched the defect Monday and allows unauthenticated, remote attackers to execute commands with root privileges on vulnerable systems. “In practical terms, that gives the attacker control of the gateway itself,” Douglas McKee, director of vulnerability intelligence at Rapid7, told CyberScoop.
Cisco said its product security incident response team became aware of active exploitation of the defect affecting Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Secure Email Gateway in September. When asked for further details, a company spokesperson pointed to the advisory and reiterated that the company is aware of active exploitation of the vulnerability.
The company did not say how many organizations are impacted by active exploitation thus far, but it indicated multiple customers were likely compromised prior to disclosure.
“Cisco has conducted a thorough threat intelligence investigation on devices that belong to Cisco Secure Email Cloud. Cisco has directly contacted customers who own Cisco Secure Email Cloud devices where indicators of possible compromise were identified,” the company wrote in its security advisory. “Cisco is engaged in remediation and recovery operations. Cisco has already deployed mitigations that are within Cisco’s management.”
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the zero-day, which affects cloud-based and on-premises instances of Cisco Secure Email Gateway, to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog shortly after Cisco’s disclosure.
The tight timeline between Cisco’s public advisory and patch guidance, and CISA’s quick addition to the KEV catalog indicates the vulnerability deserves immediate attention, McKee said.
“The combination here is pretty ugly. No authentication is required, an attacker can reach the vulnerable code by sending an email through the appliance, successful exploitation can result in root-level command execution, and Cisco has observed exploitation in the wild,” he added.
Researchers at Rapid7 and VulnCheck said they don’t yet know how many organizations are impacted by active exploits, but they encouraged Cisco customers to patch and hunt for potential signs of compromise as soon as possible.
Spencer McIntyre, director of exploit development at VulnCheck, told CyberScoop the exploit could allow an attacker to maintain access to the email gateway and monitor communications. “Stealing or silently snooping on email comms is a common tactic for state-sponsored and other threat actors conducting espionage operations,” he said.
“It’s going to be worse for organizations that have the appliance deployed on-premises. In this case, the attacker could pivot internally,” McIntyre added. “If, however, organizations use a cloud instance, the compromised gateway is less likely to have significant access to internal organizational resources.”
Cisco released indicators of compromise to help customers hunt for attempted exploitation in their environments, but the company added that attackers could remove or hide those traces with the level of access granted via exploitation.
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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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SonicWall customers are grappling with yet another pair of actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in SonicWall SMA 1000 appliances, a product that’s been besieged with recurring defects and attacks over the past nine months.
The vendor disclosed and released patches for the defects — CVE-2026-83548 and CVE-2026-83549 — and noted both were already actively exploited in the wild in a security advisory Tuesday. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the defects to its known exploited vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog Wednesday.
SonicWall customers have confronted a barrage of actively exploited vulnerabilities in SonicWall devices for years. Attackers have consistently exploited newly discovered zero-days and years-old defects in the vendor’s products to break into victim environments.
Rapid7 researchers said the new zero-days — a max-severity pre-authentication server-side request forgery vulnerability and a high-severity OS command injection vulnerability — can be chained together to achieve unauthenticated remote-code execution.
SonicWall did not say how many customers have been directly impacted by active exploitation or when the first known instance of exploitation occurred. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
“Please stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Another appliance sitting at the edge of the network, another pair of vulnerabilities chained together, and another unauthenticated path to complete compromise,” Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at watchTowr, said in an email.
“SonicWall says these vulnerabilities were internally discovered, while also saying it investigated a case indicating active exploitation. Please pick one, or, at minimum, explain how both are true,” Knott added. “Those statements may be technically accurate, but without that context, the disclosure leaves defenders guessing about when and how the vulnerabilities were actually identified.”
The vendor’s security advisory did not include indicators of compromise. It urged customers to contact tech support for assistance in reviewing IOCs and hunting for potential signs of compromise, and if detected, to reimage or redeploy the appliance, change all user and administrator passwords and reset tokens.
SonicWall did not attribute the known exploits to a specific threat group or describe the attacker’s motivations.
The freshly disclosed pair of vulnerabilities are the latest in a series of security issues confronting the vendor’s customers, including actively exploited zero-days, previously disclosed defects, and an attack last year that allowed a state-sponsored threat group to steal the firewall configurations of every SonicWall customer.
In late July, Huntress researchers spotted an attack spree that compromised 30 SonicWall customers in less than two days. Earlier that month, the company acknowledged another pair of zero-days that were exploited for three weeks before the vendor disclosed and patched the defects.
Ransomware groups, including INC ransomware and Akira, have taken a special interest in SonicWall. Ten of the 19 SonicWall defects added to CISA’s KEV catalog since late 2021 are known to be used in ransomware campaigns.
The five defects added to CISA’s KEV most recently, since just mid-December 2025, all impact SonicWall SMA 1000 appliances.
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The FBI said a 17-year-old from Maine is the first child federally charged and adjudicated for crimes stemming from their involvement in 764, a violent extremist collective.
A judge ordered the teen to remain detained after determining they committed multiple crimes, including conspiracy to sexually exploit a child, sexually exploiting and enticing a child, distributing child sexual abuse material, sending interstate threats, cyberstalking victims and identity theft.
“This first-in-the-nation case should make it crystal clear that if you conspire to commit violent, extremist crimes, your age will not shield you from accountability,” Ted Docks, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston Division, said in a statement Tuesday. “What this juvenile did would shock most people to their very core, and it is our hope that by publicizing this case, others will be deterred from making the same devastating choices this teen did.”
The nihilistic extremist group the teen participated in, 764, is more broadly affiliated with The Com, a sprawling network of thousands of people, typically between 11 and 25 years old, seeking to foster social unrest by destroying civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of children and other vulnerable populations.
The Justice Department’s resolve in this case — detaining and adjudicating a 764 member before they reach adulthood — marks a turning point and apparent change in internal policy against charging children for federal crimes linked to their involvement in violent extremist groups.
“Crimes from 764 copycat groups in The Com are extremely serious and it speaks to how law enforcement prioritizes these things,” Allison Nixon, chief research officer at Unit 221B, told CyberScoop. “They recognize this loophole involving minors needs to be closed in order to tackle this social problem of violence arising from minors which crosses state lines.”
The first-of-its-kind case has a wider impact that will cause ripples across the landscape of violent extremist crime, she added.
“If you sexually exploit a child, the fact that you yourself are a minor will not protect you from the consequences of your actions,” Andrew Benson, U.S. attorney for the District of Maine, said in a statement.
The Maine teenager, whose identity is being withheld, was ordered to serve a term of official detention followed by supervision, the FBI said. Officials did not provide details about the terms of detention.
Andrew McCormack, assistant U.S. attorney for the U.S. District of Maine, and a spokesperson for the FBI Boston Division, both said federal law restricts what law enforcement can share about cases involving underage criminals and declined to say where the teen lived, where they’re being detained and for how long.
Nixon conveyed, with some reluctance, the need for more actions like this targeting underage members of 764 and similar groups.
“I’m not advocating normalizing throwing kids in prison but we very much need to find a new balance to protect society from violent groups that are incentivized by this federal loophole to commit maximum harm before turning 18, and then after 18, to recruit and train kids to do dirty work for them,” she said. “I cannot understate how much this loophole specifically influenced this culture of maximizing harm.”
The teen’s ordered detention marks a continuation of consistently heightened law enforcement activity targeting members of 764 and affiliated groups.
Kyle William Spitze, an original member of 764 and leader of one of its offshoots, was sentenced to 77 years in prison, the longest imprisonment ever imposed on a nihilistic violent extremist, in federal court in Tennessee in late August.
Alexis Aldair Chavez, who began associating with 764 as a child in 2022 before leading an offshoot 8884, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in July for blackmailing and coercing multiple girls to commit self-harm, torture animals and degrade themselves on camera to produce CSAM.
Other alleged 764 members arrested since 2025 include: Leonidas Varagiannis and Prasan Nepal, Baron Cain Martin, Tony Christopher Long, Erik Lee Madison, Zachary Sweeney and Aaron Corey.
The FBI said it is currently investigating more than 500 subjects nationwide who are allegedly involved in 764 and its many offshoots.
“These groups actively target minors and are made up of a large percentage of minors. They are intentionally recruiting juveniles here in the U.S. to conduct criminal acts because, simply put, they think they can get away with it because historically, the federal justice system has rarely prosecuted juveniles,” Docks said.
“We’re here to tell you, they’re wrong, and if they don’t stop this abhorrent behavior, they too could find the FBI on their doorstep and themselves in federal court. We are going to do everything in our power to protect kids and ensure those who harm them don’t get away with it,” Docks added.
Nixon, who has studied the rise of these violent extremist groups and helped law enforcement identify some of its members, said she’s pleased with this development.
“Right now the prevailing sentiment within these violent groups is that you can do anything you want with no accountability before you turn 18, so therefore you should commit the most heinous acts possible because it’s your last chance. That’s why there are so many 17 year olds who become a major public nuisance, because it’s their last hurrah — but for bomb threatening schools and abusing little kids,” Nixon said.
“They slow down on their 18th birthday and pivot to using minors to hide behind, and teaching them this lifestyle,” she added. “Closing that loophole will do a ton to break this cycle. They pay close attention to law enforcement, and just one arrest shatters their sense of safety. I don’t think the FBI will stop at just one arrest.”
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Sality, a Russia-based botnet that infected more than 11 million devices during a 23-year run of operations, was dismantled Monday by law enforcement, CrowdStrike and the Shadowserver Foundation.
CrowdStrike, which announced the takedown Tuesday alongside authorities, said it played a crucial role dismantling the botnet’s technical infrastructure, rendering the malware-spreading operation irrecoverable.
The peer-to-peer botnet was a persistent piece of criminal infrastructure that evaded disruption for an exceptionally long period because it lacked centralized architecture.
Sality used infected machines to communicate peer-to-peer, creating a decentralized structure that made system-wide disruption efforts more difficult than botnets that rely on a core server.
“The same properties that made Sality resilient also created the conditions for its undoing,” CrowdStrike wrote in a blog post. The company said it targeted Sality’s peer list of infected machines and tricked the network into permanently cutting off access to those devices.
“From the operator’s perspective, infected machines simply disappear,” CrowdStrike wrote, adding that the botnet is no longer under the operator’s control.
Sality’s domains were seized by a globally coordinated effort supported by the FBI, Justice Department and authorities from Europol, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania, officials said. Shadowserver is working with internet service providers to identify devices infected by Sality and aid with remediation.
“Cybercriminals, botnets, and malware are a clear and present danger to our nation’s security and economy,” Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney, said in a statement.
Europol said the Sality takedown was the culmination of work spanning global law enforcement back to 2017.
CrowdStrike said Sality’s operator was primarily financially motivated, but it attributed three DDoS attacks to Sality, suggesting the operator was occasionally willing to use the botnet for personal or political aims.
The botnet enabled cryptocurrency theft and cyberattacks on victims in the United States and abroad, the Justice Department said. Officials did not name the person or cybercrime group behind Sality.
“This operation demonstrates that peer-to-peer architecture, long considered a shield against disruption, is not invincible,” CrowdStrike wrote.
“Operating for decades without consequence does not mean operating without risk,” the company added. “The calculus has changed. We will find you, we will dismantle your infrastructure, and we will impose costs that make the enterprise untenable.”
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Unit 42’s top brass has 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 in a media briefing Wednesday.
A period of relative balance between security and exposure has been broken by frontier AI model capabilities that could allow attackers to find and exploit network weaknesses with speed, Rubin said.
Unit 42 warned that capabilities demonstrated by readily available agentic AI models, and those unlocked by frontier AI models that remain gated for defense, have shifted the balance of power from defenders to attackers.
“The defenses that we’ve had built up over years weren’t necessarily built for or prepared for these machine-speed attacks,” Rubin said. “Organizations are ill-equipped to detect and to respond quickly in the face of these attacks.
Back in April, when Anthropic brought Palo Alto Networks and other major technology companies together to form Project Glasswing, an initiative to find and address security defects with its Mythos model, Unit 42 estimated the same capabilities would be in the hands of attackers within a year.
“Well, here we are five months later, and we’re starting to see the early waves of this threat in the wild,” Rubin said.
Unit 42 is actively investigating an attack on one of its customers where an attacker used an agentic framework to exploit 50 applications and other weaknesses across the enterprise in less than 10 hours. Rubin estimates AI allowed the attacker to accomplish in 10 hours what would have taken at least 10 days in a pre-AI era.
Attackers are already using AI across the entire attack chain, said Sherrod DeGrippo, vice president of threat intelligence at Unit 42. “We are not far from fully agentic attacks across all at once, but right now it’s piece by piece by piece,” she said.
“AI has seeped into every part of what threat actors do,” including malware development at scale, delegation, social engineering and ransomware negotiations, DeGrippo added.
As such, she sees the threat landscape shifting in four areas. AI is a force multiplier, identity is the primary compromise vector, attackers are burrowing into foundational libraries and software supply chains “baked into the fabric of our digital world,” and nation-sponsored threat groups are learning more about points of weakness in enterprise systems, DeGrippo said.
Nobody is fully prepared for what’s coming and it would be naive or a bad defender mindset to think otherwise, she said. “This is a transformative period, and how organizations navigate that transformation is going to be make-or-break for a lot of them.”
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OpenAI says the behavior that led its agents to breach Hugging Face emerged in its research environment more than two months before the incident, and concluded that it was a failure of alignment as much as it was a failure of security.
The details come from a technical report the frontier AI company released Wednesday, which gives a full breakdown on how the incident unfolded and what the company has changed in response.
“This incident is the first known case of an automated agent collective acting offensively without authorization, and the autonomous cyber capabilities demonstrated represent a critical shift in the security landscape,” the report reads. “The central threat-model implication is that organizations should no longer assume that sophisticated cyber operations require continuous human direction, proceed linearly, or are constrained by the attention and coordination limits of individual human attackers. Agentic systems can persist across tasks, share discoveries, build on one another’s progress, and combine vulnerabilities, credentials, and permissions into attack paths that may not be apparent when individual weaknesses are assessed separately.”
According to the report, the earliest relevant activity occurred May 8, when a model in a training run was given a spreadsheet task that referred to files stored on a Google Drive. The agent had no internet access, which made the task impossible as written. OpenAI said it did not intend to create such a task. The agent continued reasoning and tried to use JFrog Artifactory, an internal package service and one of the few tools available to it, to retrieve the files. The attempt failed, but it wrote a file to the service.
On May 12, another agent in a testing environment could not reach a database file used to store information about protein sequences. The report says the agent reasoned that an agent in a different environment might have the file, and wrote a note into Artifactory reading, “Agent seeks [filename]; upload if found!” On May 13, other agents examining Artifactory began finding similar notes of that kind and adding their own, creating what OpenAI refers to as a message board.
By May 26, agents had used a flaw in Artifactory to reach the public internet, relying in part on information exchanged on the board. An internal team observed message board activity and disallowed internet access that month.
According to an independent report also published Wednesday by AI research nonprofit METR, Roughly 1200 agents communicated with one another on that message board, sending over 70,000 messages and files during the investigation period. Of those agents, 700 went on to participate in the attack on Hugging Face.
The Artifactory service itself was compromised in late June, when agents using AI exploitation benchmark ExploitGym identified a flaw in a legacy token refresh endpoint. From there, an agent traded a forged administrator token for a properly signed one, and by July 4 agents had a permanent account and scripts that ran commands as the service. A monitoring tool flagged the activity on June 27 but the run was allowed to continue, and only after the service failed on July 4 did OpenAI take it offline, revoke credentials and disclose the flaw to JFrog, resuming evaluations July 7.
From there, OpenAI’s models executed the attack on Hugging Face, which resulted in agents poisoning a dataset to run code on a processing worker, eventually gaining node-level access, and stealing cloud credentials.
The company says the Hugging Face incident was carried out by two models, including GPT 5.6-Sol, but was primarily driven by an internal model that is “trained to be highly persistent and diligent in its work.“
The internal-only research model is comparable in scale to GPT-5.6 Sol and was trained to advance persistence and multiagent collaboration, among other capabilities,” the report reads. “The model was not intended for public use, and was only used by a small number of OpenAI personnel for internal research.”
As a result of the incident, OpenAI will now restrict network access in its testing, isolate risky projects, and increase monitoring of its reasoning systems. Staff will be alerted within 30 minutes if problems are detected, and unresolved issues will automatically pause the work.
The company will also use its own safety benchmarks on models it doesn’t publicly release. After the incident, tests with non-public models using ChatGPT’s consumer settings reduced the tendency to compromise infrastructure.
“We found the propensity to compromise infrastructure can drop over 100x when using the production ChatGPT harness and system prompt,” the report reads. “We also ran the auto-review system on a set of rollouts involved in the Hugging Face incident and found that it would have flagged a multitude of the models’ dangerous actions.”
The report comes as 15 state attorneys general wrote a letter earlier this month calling for OpenAI to release more details about the incident in order to “ensure the safety of its products poses an imminent risk of substantial harm.” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall went a step further Monday, issuing a subpoena to the company for more information.
The company wrote in the report that it hopes its findings will lead to industry-wide changes, especially as model capabilities continue to accelerate.
“The lessons from this incident extend to the entire AI industry,” the report reads. “As frontier models become more capable, the safeguards used to contain and monitor them must evolve as well.”
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You can’t patch everything. So what do you fix first? Findings in Q2 2026 have changed traditional answers.
The latest Quarterly Threat Landscape Report from Rapid7 Labs shows vulnerability disclosures still surging while attackers use automation and AI-assisted tooling to compress the time between disclosure and exploitation. The gap that patch cycles were built to fill is closing. Speed and volume are overwhelming security teams that have relied on traditional patch cycles and reactive programs. Success going forward can’t be about patching as much as possible - it has to be about understanding what matters most and reducing the exposures attackers can actually reach.
Here are the four trends that defined Q2 2026, and what they mean for your security program as you define priorities for Q3 and beyond:
There were 8,539 new high- and critical-severity CVEs (CVSS 7.0–10.0) this quarter- double the number reported in the same quarter last year (4,268). Meanwhile, the number of newly exploited vulnerabilities held roughly steady (40). The takeaway isn’t that exploitation exploded - it’s that disclosure volume is far outstripping what any team can triage.
The report breaks down which of those disclosures are actually reachable and how to triage by exploitability instead of severity score alone.
Nearly two-thirds of exploited vulnerabilities this quarter (62%) required no user interaction - no stolen credentials, no phishing victim, no click. Attackers reach and exploit them on their own, and that share is up nine points year over year (from 53% in Q2 2025). Reinforcing the trend, disclosures of missing-authentication flaws (CWE-306) surged 247% year over year - a fast-expanding pool of internet-facing systems that require no login at all.
This is the quarter’s clearest signal - and the report details exactly which exposures to close first, and how, before the exploitation curve catches up.
Rapid7 observed continued activity from Iranian, North Korean, and Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) clusters targeting government, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, energy, and telecommunications. Russian campaigns targeted edge infrastructure; Iranian activity included sustained industrial control system (ICS) and operational technology (OT) targeting.
The report maps the specific techniques and sectors each cluster focused on this quarter.
Qilin led ransomware activity in Q2 with 263 listed victims, and the United States remained the most heavily targeted country - with business services and healthcare among the hardest-hit sectors. Rapid7’s Incident Response team also saw growing use of ClickFix and fake CAPTCHA campaigns, and social engineering through trusted collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams - techniques that accounted for 31.8% of the incidents we worked.
The report includes the full ransomware leaderboard, the sectors most at risk, and where affiliate activity is expanding next.
The volume is daunting, but the real challenge is keeping pace with attackers. As disclosures keep growing, the organizations that stay ahead won’t be the ones patching fastest — they’ll be the ones that know what they expose, which assets matter most, where attackers can realistically get in, and how to reduce reachable exposure before it becomes an incident. That’s what preemptive security means: not a slogan, but an operating model.
The full Quarterly Threat Landscape Report shows where reachable exposure concentrates this quarter, the four actions Rapid7 Labs recommends, the sector-by-sector breakdown, and the dark-web signals shaping what’s next. Read it here before you pressure-test your Q3 prioritization.
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