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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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said today it worked with industry partners to seize hundreds of domains associated with NetNut, a sprawling residential proxy service operated by the publicly-traded Israeli company Alarum Technologies [NASDAQ: ALAR]. The action comes roughly two weeks after KrebsOnSecurity published findings from multiple security firms connecting NetNut to the Popa botnet, a collection of at least two million devices that have been compromised by malicious software with little or no consent from victims.

On June 19, three different security firms issued similar findings: That NetNut is a residential proxy network which populates a botnet called Popa, and distributes software for devices commonly found in homes, such as smart TVs and streaming boxes. NetNut’s software turns those systems into always-on residential proxy nodes that are rented to others, who predominantly use them to relay abusive and intrusive Internet traffic, such as mass content scraping, advertising fraud, and account takeover activity.

Earlier today, NetNut’s homepage was replaced with a seizure notice from the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation division. The seizure notice thanked Google, Lumen, Shadowserver and other industry partners for their help in dismantling hundreds of domains tied to the Popa botnet, which experts say has long been synonymous with NetNut’s residential proxy infrastructure.

In a blog post published today, the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said NetNut’s proxy network is widely resold and white-labeled by a number of third-party proxy providers, and that its services are heavily sought out by cybercriminals seeking to obfuscate the source of their malicious traffic. The GTIG said that in a single week during June 2026, they observed 316 distinct clusters of threat actors using suspected NetNut exit nodes, including cybercriminal and espionage groups.

“These bad actors can use NetNut to mask their origin IP address when accessing victim environments, accessing their own infrastructure, and conducting password spray attacks,” Google’s GTIG wrote. “Furthermore, when a consumer device becomes an exit node, unauthorized network traffic passes through it. This means bad actors can access other private devices on the same home network, effectively exposing them to Internet threats.”

Google said it disabled Google accounts and services used by NetNut for malware command and control, and that it shared technical intelligence on NetNut’s software development kits (SDKs) and backend infrastructure with platform providers, law enforcement and research firms. The company also disabled apps known to bundle NetNut’s various SDKs.

Omer Weiss, legal counsel for NetNut parent Alarum Technologies, said the company was aware of the FBI seizure and cooperating with investigators.

“Alarum takes this matter seriously and will fully cooperate with law enforcement to ensure any misuse of its infrastructure is thoroughly investigated and those responsible are held to account,” Weiss said in a written statement.

Benjamin Brundage is founder of the proxy tracking service Synthient, one of the companies that published evidence last month linking the Popa botnet to NetNut and Alarum Technologies. Brundage said the domain seizures appear to have disrupted both the Popa botnet and the NetNut proxy network that rides on top of it.

Brundage said NetNut’s apparent demise is likely to be a great disadvantage for the cybercrime community, which was already reeling from legal actions by Google earlier this year that seized infrastructure for NetNut’s biggest competitor — IPIDEA.

“I think this takedown is going to have a big impact, because NetNut gained significant popularity after the IPIDEA takedown,” he said. “Also NetNut has been incredibly common among resellers, and they were on par with IPIDEA in terms of their daily traffic, quality, size, price per gigabyte, all of it.”

The NetNut and Popa botnet takedown may have another added benefit, Brundage said: Lessening the impact of large distributed denial-of-service botnets that have been built on the backs of poorly configured residential proxy services. In January, Synthient revealed how cybercriminals had built the world’s largest DDoS botnet (Kimwolf) by tunneling through IPIDEA proxy connections into the local networks of TV box owners, and infecting other Android-based devices behind the victim’s firewall.

While many of the bigger proxy providers took steps to block this activity, resellers of the major proxy networks have been far slower to respond to the threat, Brundage said.

“In terms of all these TV box devices getting compromised from the proxy network, it will have an impact on the DDoS botnets out there,” he said.

For its part, Google reckons today’s actions have caused “significant degradation to NetNut’s proxy network and its business operations, reducing the available pool of devices for the proxy operator by millions.” But the company warns that proxy networks can rebuild themselves by effectively reselling other proxy services, as IPIDEA has done over the past few months.

“Google has high confidence that many popular residential proxy brands are in fact whitelabeling the NetNut botnet,” the GTIG report concludes. “While we expect this disruption to have a larger ripple effect across the residential proxy ecosystem, observations after the disruption of IPIDEA proved that individual networks can appear resilient. What we have observed is that when faced with the degradation of their own botnet, proxy operators begin buying capacity from their competitors, effectively becoming a reseller. We recognize that creating a lasting disruption in this fluid ecosystem means we must scale our efforts to target the infrastructure of several interconnected providers.”

As KrebsOnSecurity has warned repeatedly, most of the no-name TV streaming boxes for sale on the major e-commerce websites either come pre-installed with residential proxy software, or require the installation of proxy SDKs in order to use the device for its stated purpose (streaming pirated movies, sporting events and TV shows). Google’s advice here is sound: When it comes to TV boxes, stick to name brands from reputable manufacturers, and then be sparing and judicious with any apps you choose to install.

The sketchy TV boxes that are being commandeered by the Popa botnet and other threats all come with or require the user to install unofficial Android operating systems that do not operate within the confines of Google’s Official Play Protect store. Google says consumers can confirm whether or not a device is built with the official Android TV OS and Play Protect certification by following these instructions.

Even people without TV streaming boxes can find their smart TVs enrolled in residential proxy networks, just by installing one of thousands of apps available for download on Samsung and LG smart TVs. In a report released last month, the proxy tracking company Spur found 42 percent of apps available for download via the webOS operating system on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. More than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung’s Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components, Spur found.

Update, 4:24 p.m. ET: Included a statement shared post-publication from an attorney representing NetNut parent Alarum Technologies.

Update, July 8, 2:34 p.m. ET: The website for Alarum Technologies — alarum[.]io — now also features a seizure notice from the FBI. The company’s stock has taken a beating since the FBI action, and is currently trading at $2.62 a share, a roughly 67 percent decline over the past week.

TeamPCP is on a rampage through open-source software.

In less than four months, the threat actor has compromised and injected malicious code into more than 1,000 software packages. The extraordinary spree has transformed how software developers and maintainers distribute and manage their code, as their dependencies and repositories have become one of the most effective and prevalent attack vectors this year.

While there has been a host of technical exploits, TeamPCP’s greatest attack has been the uprooting of trust — repeatedly proving that most organizations fail to verify the code they ingest into their systems is legitimate, abusing a nearly blind faith that much of the software development industry relies on to power today’s modern economy.

Starting with Trivy in February, TeamPCP’s attacks have shaken that trust many times over.

The scale of TeamPCP’s attacks lies partly in the automated systems companies use to deploy code, like CI/CD pipelines. It is also capitalizing on new security gaps created by developers’ increasing reliance on AI. Yet, with relatively low effort and unoriginal tactics, TeamPCP is wrecking open-source frameworks and underlying systems at levels the technology community has rarely reckoned with.

“Developers didn’t do a great job of analyzing the security of their open-source dependencies before but, now with AI, there’s in some cases virtually no human in the loop or any kind of sanity check on what these tools are doing,” Feross Aboukhadijeh, founder and CEO at Socket, told CyberScoop.

“You have agents installing packages that haven’t been vetted,” he said. “When an attacker gets in, the impact is even broader because there’s less checks and balances to stop it from affecting everybody.”

TeamPCP hasn’t identified a new problem or proved anything novel. The crux of these attacks hinge on a central theme — defensive vulnerabilities the entire software industry has known about for years. Researchers and developers know the open source trust model is broken and susceptible to sabotage. Yet, the software industry has not fixed this problem. 

“The speed and scale of these attacks is what makes it most notable, not necessarily the methodology behind it, because at the core it is really about exploiting third-party trusts that we have,” said Kimberly Goody, senior manager at Google Threat Intelligence Group.

Software packages are typically subjected to intensive security monitoring to test for vulnerabilities and poisoned updates before they are released to live environments. 

Yet, the real vulnerability highlighted by TeamPCP lies further up the chain of command with the organizations or individuals that publish these packages to the wider market, according to Nathaniel Quist, manager of cloud threat intelligence at Palo Alto Networks.

“It is their responsibility to secure their credentials and not provide a jump off point to trigger a supply-chain event,” he said. “Everything that interacts with or crosses through that zone must be highly monitored and controlled to ensure a compromise can be contained quickly and easily.”

TeamPCP’s motivation

TeamPCP, like any prolific cybercriminal, has captured significant attention from threat hunters since it emerged in late 2025. Google attributes the activity to one core operator.

The company said it traced TeamPCP’s residential and mobile IP address connections to South Africa, indicating the primary operator was located there during at least some of its attacks.

“We don’t believe that there’s an established core group, at least not yet, and that a lot of this has been conducted by an individual,” Goody said. Google declined to name the core operator or confirm it knows the person’s true identity. 

Palo Alto Networks said the core manager of TeamPCP uses the “ResoluteXBF” handle on multiple platforms. The cybersecurity firm is also tracking two additional core members: “diencracked” and “Shinigami.”

If TeamPCP is primarily run by one person, law enforcement has a rare opportunity to make a lasting impact with a single arrest.

TeamPCP has collaborated with other cybercriminals, but most of those partnerships were short-lived and ended in a public feud or otherwise failed to get off the ground in any meaningful way, Goody said.

Researchers have linked TeamPCP to extortion crews, dark web forums and affiliates including Lapsus$, ShinyHunters, Vect, DragonForce, BreachForums and “HasanBroker.” TeamPCP listed about 4,000 private code repositories on a dark web forum with an asking price of $95,000.

The actions to date, including unpredictable behavior, indicate motivations beyond financial gain and a “clear desire for notoriety,” Goody said. “They seem to like to make chaos.”

Quist draws the same conclusion from his months-long investigation, noting that it encourages other cybercriminals to get in on the action, at one point offering financial rewards for the largest software supply-chain attack. 

TeamPCP isn’t in the game for extortion payments, he said. “These actors are more interested in the underground street cred they are gaining” and “causing as much damage and mayhem as possible.”

Victims abound, but exposure limited

TeamPCP has been remarkably noisy, opportunistically injecting malware into open-source software for the purpose of stealing credentials for Kubernetes environments, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and many other connected services.

The group’s claimed victim list is staggering: Checkmarx, Bitwarden, LiteLLM, Telnyx, Mercor AI, PyTorch Lightning, AntV, SAP, GitHub, TanStack, UiPath, MistralAI, Microsoft DurableTask, Red Hat and Nx Console.

The full collection of packages compromised or poisoned by TeamPCP to date accounts for roughly 500 million weekly downloads combined, according to Quist.

While the breadth of potential downstream compromise flowing from those downloads is substantial, many endpoints infected with those malware-riddled packages aren’t exposed to the internet and less susceptible to attack, he added.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a very extremely large number of victims,” Quist said. “There’s going to be a lot of people who potentially could be compromised and have potentially vulnerable packages in their environment, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re in an exploitable position.”

While these incidents have grabbed headlines, TeamPCP hasn’t accumulated payouts nearly as large as other cybercriminals. The broader reputational impact it has wrought, however, is massive.

TeamPCP has publicly claimed more than 10,000 victims and about $90,000 in extortions, according to Quist.

“They might not be making a lot of money, but they are causing a lot of impact,” Goody said. “Their campaigns have been very disruptive.”

How TeamPCP’s operating model targets development

TeamPCP’s victim list has grown as its hijacked open-source repositories on npm, PyPI, GitHub and other outsourced developer tools that are incorporated into upstream code running in production environments.

Developer laptops and other endpoints that are assigned to install, build and publish software widely contain keys and access to source code that create incredibly valuable supply-chain targets for attackers, Amitai Cohen, head of the attack vector intel team at Wiz, explained during a June presentation on TeamPCP at SleuthCon in Arlington, Va. 

The group targets CI runners, which are automated systems that build, test, and publish code. TeamPCP injects malware into the code repositories these runners maintain. When other developers pull that code into their own systems, they unknowingly download the malware alongside it. 

Some of these artifacts, including Python libraries, npm registries and GitHub Actions, are downloaded almost immediately by thousands or millions of developers who’ve set their runners up to consistently pull the latest version, according to Cohen. “We as a security industry have taught them that that is the right thing to do. You want to use the latest version because you want to be protected against vulnerabilities, and obviously you want to benefit from all the latest features.”

That instinct is exactly what TeamPCP exploits. By compromising one company’s CI/CD workflow, the group gains access to every downstream user who automatically pulls that infected code. “This is what allows [TeamPCP] to leverage initial access to some patient zero, some company that had a vulnerability in their CI/CD workflow, in order to gain access to their downstream users,” Cohen said. “That’s just how the software supply chain works. Everything has dependencies upon dependencies upon dependencies.”

Some of the packages compromised by TeamPCP were live for almost 13 hours, but security practitioners have responded by identifying code-injection attacks much quicker now, pulling some compromised repositories within 15 minutes, said Ben Read, director of strategic intelligence at Wiz.

The threat group’s operations remain high-tempo. TeamPCP infects new software packages almost daily, validates compromises and captures sensitive data within 24 hours, according to Wiz researchers.

The threat group has consistently evolved its tactics, developing payloads in JavaScript and Python while spreading from local files to Kubernetes application programming interfaces and bundled software development kits. Most recently, it’s been stealing credentials via custom protocols. 

The group’s ambitions have expanded beyond its own attacks. TeamPCP is also responsible for a self-replicating piece of malware known as Mini Shai-Hulud, which infected hundreds of software packages across open-source registries in back-to-back attack sprees last month. A TeamPCP affiliate published the full source code for the malware on GitHub last month and encouraged other cybercriminals to use it for their own campaigns.

“TeamPCP is going for volume. They are not being discriminating, they’re not necessarily trying to be stealthy or trying to maximize ROI. They’re going for an all-of-the-above strategy,” Read said during the Sleuthcon presentation.

Defensive gaps create openings for attack

TeamPCP’s attack spree has also underscored how difficult it is for organizations to revoke compromised secrets. Multiple victims have experienced recurring infections, sometimes falling prey to TeamPCP three times within a month, because they didn’t rotate secrets properly, Cohen said. 

At its core, these attacks highlight a direct trade-off organizations accept when they update software quickly to fix vulnerabilities, but learn that doing so too quickly could expose them to illegitimate registries containing malware.

TeamPCP has targeted what Aboukhadijeh describes as a “public good,” open-source registries that were never perfect but widely trusted and rarely turned into a point of entry for supply-chain attacks. 

Rapid open source software installation is one of the most dangerous things an organization can do right now, he said, adding that there’s a roughly 1 in 10 chance that any package installed by an organization could trigger an active attack. 

TeamPCP has compromised security scanners, password managers, automation tools, data visualization software, and CI/CD infrastructure across various environments.

And it’s lifted a trove of credentials and other sensitive data from victims.

Researchers like Cohen at Wiz, who have been tracking this attack spree since the beginning, are nearing a breaking point. 

“This is also too hard on us. We’re very tired. I’m sure a lot of people working on this problem space are very tired, and it’s just kind of become untenable,” Cohen said.

“You can’t keep existing in a world where you wake up every morning and some super prevalent package is compromised and everybody’s just going to be using it like nothing,” he added. “We need to start taking this a bit more seriously.”

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Google threat hunters spotted yet another Chinese state-sponsored espionage group that for years had burrowed into systems belonging to government and private organizations to steal data across academia, medicine, military, cybersecurity and foreign policy. 

Google Threat Intelligence Group discovered the previously unknown threat group UNC6508, which targeted organizations in the United States and Canada, in late 2025 but traced its earliest known compromise back to September 2023. 

The revelation mirrors an alarming pattern of Chinese espionage groups dropping backdoors into critical infrastructure to pre-position for potential sabotage, intercept research and steal data with national security implications. These groups working at the behest of China’s government, including UNC6508, operated in stealth for years before authorities or researchers discovered their activity.

“We don’t know the full extent or impact of the campaign,” Patrick Whitsell, senior security engineer at GTIG, told CyberScoop. Researchers said the threat group intruded a medical research university in September 2023, stole credentials and communications, and remained active on the institution’s systems through November 2025 when it was discovered.

Google said it confirmed multiple victims compromised with INFINITERED, a custom backdoor the threat group deployed on targeted networks to steal administrative credentials after it exploited externally facing REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) servers.

Researchers still don’t know how UNC6508 gained initial access to the REDCap servers. Google said the survey and database software, which was created at Vanderbilt University and issued multiple patches for critical remote-code execution vulnerabilities throughout 2023, is widely used across the medical research community. 

“Given the breadth of the threat actor’s intelligence collection criteria and their ability to remain undetected within compromised networks for more than a year, we assess the known victims likely represent only a fraction of a larger campaign,” Whitsell said. “We also assess that this highly capable threat actor will remain active and continue to be a threat to the defense, technology and medical industries for the foreseeable future.”

Google said the campaign targeted clinical providers, academic medical centers and U.S. military health institutions, demonstrating advanced capabilities from a threat group that doesn’t currently overlap with any other publicly known groups.

The threat group abused domain compliance rules to steal data, a technique that doesn’t rely on malware or living-off-the-land tools, and routed traffic through U.S.-based IPs to blend in with legitimate traffic, researchers said.

“We have some evidence to suggest this is a large threat group with multiple sub-teams, but this is not confirmed,” Whitsell said.

Like other previously identified China state-sponsored espionage groups, UNC6508 remains active.

Google said it disrupted some of UNC6508’s known infrastructure by disabling an Gmail account it used to exfiltrate data, notified the affected organizations and helped remediate compromises before it published research on UNC6508’s activities.

Whitsell said several unconfirmed instances of compromise remain under investigation.

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Researchers are warning that cybercriminals exploited an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day vulnerability and potentially infiltrated the networks of more than 100 organizations in an attack spree that largely impacted higher education.

Mandiant and Google Threat Intelligence Group said it became aware of the attacks earlier this month as part of its ongoing monitoring of ShinyHunters operations. The notorious cybercrime group claims it hacked more than 100 organizations and started naming victims and publishing allegedly stolen data Tuesday.

University of Nottingham, one of ShinyHunters’ alleged victims, on Wednesday confirmed a significant amount of student data was stolen during a cyberattack after the threat group leaked some of the school’s data.

The attacks date back to at least May 27, according to Mandiant, and involve the exploitation of CVE-2026-35273, a defect in Oracle PeopleSoft PeopleTools that allows unauthenticated attackers to execute remote code and takeover affected servers.

Oracle disclosed the vulnerability and recommended some steps for mitigation Wednesday, weeks after the attacks were already underway. The vendor hasn’t released a patch to address the defect and did not respond to a request for comment.

Google said it alerted more than 100 organizations of potentially vulnerable endpoints in their environments, but it declined to confirm how many victims are compromised. 

“This campaign is still active. We have observed ShinyHunters sending extortions as recently as today,” Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting, told CyberScoop Thursday evening. He added that more victims, beyond Google’s visibility, may be impacted.

Most of the potential victim pool is based in the United States and 68% are in the higher education sector, according to Google.

“We have previously observed ShinyHunters target the education sector this year, however it’s possible this targeting is representative of the majority of exposed PeopleSoft instances belonging to the sector,” Carmakal said. 

Oracle PeopleSoft PeopleTools includes more than 40 tools for human resources and customer relationship management.

The attacks come less than a year after the Clop ransomware group exploited a zero-day in Oracle E-Business Suite that affected dozens of victims. The data theft extortion campaign that followed those attacks, which began in August, didn’t get underway until October.

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A House subcommittee will hold an open hearing next week on how frontier artificial intelligence models are shaping the cybersecurity landscape, for good and for ill.

The June 4 hearing will be the second the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection has held that was focused at least in part on the subject, following a similar hearing held in December. But unlike at that joint subcommittee hearing, where members also examined other emerging technologies, AI takes center stage next week.

It caps a series of closed-door meetings of the Homeland panel where members and staff have been evaluating the intersection of AI and cyber. CyberScoop is first to report details on the hearing.

The witnesses will be Sandra Joyce, vice president of Google Threat Intelligence; Chris Meserole, executive director of the Frontier Model Forum; Jack Cable, a former top official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and now chief executive officer and co-founder of Corridor Security; and Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“Communist China is moving aggressively to control the technologies that will define the future of economic and military power, and few technologies are more consequential than artificial intelligence,” subcommittee chairman Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., said in a written statement. “Adversaries are already working to steal American AI capabilities, weaponize AI-enabled tools, infiltrate critical systems and undermine our national security.”

“AI is the America First mission of the future, and it is becoming our number one offensive and defensive weapon against cyber terrorists,” he continued. “I look forward to hearing from our witnesses on how we can stay ahead of AI-enabled cyber threats, protect the services Americans rely on and win this AI arms race.”

The hearing is the latest response from Capitol Hill to the spate of news about the capabilities of advanced AI models to uncover cyber vulnerabilities. Earlier this month, for instance, lawmakers wrote to National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross asking for a plan to deal with the potential surge in vulnerability discovery stemming from such models.

Last week, the Trump administration postponed a draft AI executive order. It’s something lawmakers are likely to ask about at next week’s hearing.

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Google researchers found a zero-day exploit developed by artificial intelligence and alerted the susceptible vendor to the imminent threat before a well-known cybercrime group initiated a mass-exploitation campaign, the company said in a report released Monday.

The averted disaster probably isn’t the first time attackers used AI to build a zero-day, but it is the first time Google Threat Intelligence Group found compelling evidence that this long-predicted and worrying escalation in vulnerability-exploit development is underway.

“We finally uncovered some evidence this is happening,” John Hultquist, chief analyst at GTIG, told CyberScoop. “This is probably the tip of the iceberg and it’s certainly not going to be the last.”

Google declined to identify the specific vulnerability, which has been patched, or name the “popular open-source, web-based administration tool” it affected. It did, however, note that the defect impacted a Python script that allows attackers to bypass two-factor authentication for the service.

Researchers also withheld details about how they discovered the zero-day exploit or the cybercrime group that was preparing to use it for a large-scale attack spree.

The threat group has a “strong record of high-profile incidents and mass exploitation,” Hultquist said, suggesting the attackers are prominent and well-known among cybersecurity practitioners. 

GTIG is fairly confident the threat group was using AI in a meaningful way throughout the entire process, but it has yet to determine if the technology also discovered the vulnerability it ultimately developed into an exploit.

Whichever AI model the attackers used — Google is confident it wasn’t Gemini or Anthropic’s Mythos — left artifacts throughout the exploit code that are inconsistent with human developers. This evidence, which included documentation strings in Python, highly annotated code and a hallucinated but non-existent CVSS score, tipped Google off to the fact AI was heavily involved, Hultquist said. 

GTIG has been warning about and expecting AI-developed exploits to hit systems in the wild, especially after its Big Sleep AI agent found a zero-day vulnerability in late 2024.

“I think the watershed moment was two years ago when we proved this was possible,” Hultquist said, adding that there are probably several other AI developed zero-days in play now. 

Yet, to him, the discovery of a zero-day exploit developed by AI is less concerning than what this single instance forebodes even further.

“The game’s already begun and we expect the capability trajectory is pretty sharp,” Hultquist said. “We do expect that this will be a much bigger problem, that there will be more devastating zero-day attacks done over this, especially as capabilities grow.”

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