The acquisitions will add AI agent observability and automated AI security testing capabilities to the CrowdStrike Falcon platform.

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CrowdStrike announced Monday it has signed agreements to acquire two artificial intelligence security companies, Fiddler AI and Dreadnode, in deals announced at its Fal.Con Europe conference in Barcelona.

CrowdStrike did not disclose what it paid for the companies. A report in the Wall Street Journal listed the price for Fiddler at $400 million, and Dreadnode at $95 million. 

Fiddler, which specializes in AI agent observability and explainability, will become Falcon Observe on the company’s Falcon platform. Dreadnode builds automated security testing for AI systems, checking models and agents for weaknesses before deployment.

The acquisitions address a gap that has widened as companies adopt AI agents: the software can hold valid credentials and approved tools yet still make bad decisions, ignore instructions or claim work it never completed. Traditional security testing, built for code that behaves predictably, does not reach the model layer or the agent’s reasoning process.

Fiddler’s technology works after deployment. It evaluates agents before they reach production, traces decisions and reasoning across agent systems, flags drifting behavior and made-up answers, and creates records that can be used in audits. It works with common agent frameworks including LangGraph, Amazon Bedrock and Google ADK.

“When a regulator or your board asks what an agent did, saying ‘the model did it’ is not an answer,” said George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s chief executive and founder, describing Fiddler as “the flight recorder for every agent.”

Dreadnode works earlier in the process. Its platform runs more than 100 known attack methods, including jailbreaks and prompt injection, against models and agent systems. It ranks problems by severity and maps them to widely used security standards, such as the OWASP Top 10 for large language models and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. Dreadnode Chief Executive Brad Palm said his company was built on the idea that “the people best equipped to find those failures think like attackers.”

The announcements come alongside new Falcon Guardian capabilities that protect agents while they run. In a separate announcement, Kurtz introduced what the company calls the AI Kill Switch, a control that lets humans stop any AI agent. Writing on X, Kurtz said the switch “lives outside the model, at runtime, where an agent can’t argue with it, rewrite it, or wait it out.” He argued that the ability to stop an agent is what allows companies to run them faster: “The more certain a company is that it can stop any agent, the more agents it can put to work.”

Kurtz framed the shift as a move from security to safety. “For decades, security meant keeping the adversary out,” he wrote. “Safety is the bigger opportunity: letting AI run at full speed, inside the business, with a human in control.”

Both products are expected to be generally available in CrowdStrike’s fourth quarter of fiscal 2027. Both deals are expected to be paid mostly in cash, with part of the payment made in company stock that will be given out over time as conditions are met. They are expected to close in that quarter, pending standard approval steps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the full indictment below. 

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

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Former National Security Agency Director Paul Nakasone said a reported broad reorganization of the agency is “probably necessary” as it confronts faster-moving cyberthreats, artificial intelligence and competition with China, but he cautioned that the outcome will depend on how the changes are carried out.

Speaking Tuesday at VulnCheck’s ThreatCon1 conference, Nakasone addressed a recent report that the NSA is undergoing a major restructuring centered in part on artificial intelligence and China. According to a report last month from the Washington Post, the agency is creating five new organizations focused on artificial intelligence, China, cybersecurity, combat support, and global intelligence, with each led by a newly elevated “mission director.”

Nakasone, who led the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command from 2018 to 2024, said he found it encouraging that agency leaders recognized the need to adapt. 

“I think that the world has changed so dramatically, so it’s hard to imagine [the NSA] not changing,” he said.

But he said large-scale institutional changes can take time, especially in an agency with broad intelligence, cyber and military responsibilities. 

“When you’re a big bureaucrat, how effective is that change? I think it depends,” Nakasone said. “It’s not necessarily the change, because I think that’s a good thing. I think it’s how you implement the change.”

Nakasone’s comments reflected a central tension in the current national security environment: Intelligence agencies are under pressure to reorganize around emerging technologies, particularly balancing the need to keep the United States as a leader in AI, while also defending against adversaries like China that will look to use the technology for their own strategic goals. 

He specifically highlighted how AI has sharply reduced the time defenders have to detect and respond to cyber intrusions. When he assumed command in 2018, he said, CrowdStrike data showed that an adversary took hours to move laterally through a system after an initial intrusion. As of 2025, that dwell time has dropped to an average of 29 minutes. 

“Remember the old mantra, we’d say, ‘Hey, we have one minute to be able to recognize something has happened, 10 minutes to figure out what we’re going to do, and 60 minutes to really enact it,” Nakasone said. “We’re well past that, and this is the challenge that we have as we think about our opportunities to have better defense in the future.”

That attack timeline is particularly significant as organizations are figuring out how AI can be used to defend their networks and systems. Nakasone, who sits on the board of OpenAI, said defenders have a temporary advantage, which he called a “defender’s window,” before adversaries fully exploit AI’s capacity against critical infrastructure and sensitive organizations.

“I think there’s a defender’s window right now within AI that really our adversaries haven’t caught up and used the capacity that really could be utilized against our critical infrastructure and most sensitive organizations,” he said.

The ability to adapt also depends on personnel, Nakasone said, pointing to agencies competing with private companies for technical talent. Citing figures for the government’s national security workforce, he said the average age is 47, with half the workforce older than 50, 10% younger than 30 and 13.5% could retire immediately.

DefenseScoop reported last week that federal employees in cybersecurity roles could face significant pay cuts.

“I think our government has to create the atmosphere that wants to make sure that people see that their work for the government is valued,” Nakasone said. “I think that there’s probably no one in this room that wouldn’t say that we can be more efficient in our government, but I also think there are a lot of people in this room that have had [their] government service attacked to say, ‘That’s just for people that can’t get jobs on the outside.’ That’s not right. I think there’s a way that we can talk much more effectively about our service and our work in our government.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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