Rapid7’s Q3 analysis finds high-severity flaws exploited within three days on average, while AI appeared in just 8% of tracked incidents.
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Microsoft researchers attributed the recent supply-chain attack targeting ConnectWise customers’ Microsoft 365 environments to a China-state aligned threat actor it tracks as Storm-0940.
“As early as September 2026, Storm-0940 used the agentic AI penetration testing framework ARTEX to automate attacks targeting hundreds of organizations globally across a broad range of industries,” Microsoft Security Research wrote in a blog post Wednesday.
The nation-state group, which has been active since 2021, targeted organizations in aerospace and defense, automotive, chemicals, energy, financial services, government, legal, manufacturing, media, military, semiconductors, software, technology, think tanks and non-profits.
Storm-0940 initiated a widespread, but ultimately unsuccessful, password-spraying campaign immediately preceding the compromise of ConnectWise’s Cloud Backup service. During a four-day stretch ending Oct. 14, Storm-0940 targeted 327 Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online accounts across eight organizations, researchers said.
During that short campaign, Microsoft observed more than 151,000 failed logon attempts, peaking at 2,900 failures per minute. Storm-0940 set its sights on ConnectWise the next day, using AI agents and the same malicious infrastructure to compromise a series of ConnectWise Cloud Backup customers’ Microsoft 365 environments.
Storm-0940 gained significant advantages in the ConnectWise supply-chain campaign by using ARTEX to accelerate scanning, conduct password-spray attacks and abuse OAuth applications in downstream victims, according to Microsoft.
“In some of these environments, the AI agents (on behalf of the threat actor) progressed beyond authentication to Microsoft Graph and directory operations, including reconnaissance, application credential modifications to establish persistence, and changes involving identities, groups, and privileged roles,” researchers wrote. “Microsoft identified multiple customer environments with evidence of follow-on activity, highlighting how a compromised third-party application with high privileges could provide access beyond its originally intended purpose.”
Microsoft Threat Intelligence said multiple threat actors from various regions are using ARTEX to strengthen capabilities and speed up the tempo of attacks.
The open-source penetration testing framework works with any AI model to automate various offensive security workflows, the company said. “ARTEX is a system of LLM-driven agents that run an autonomous penetration test from reconnaissance through data exfiltration with little needed human interaction.”
In the ConnectWise campaign, Microsoft said “Storm-0940 used ARTEX to reach more than 2,250 tenants at 2,900 sign-in attempts per minute, a pace that leaves defenders with little time to detect and respond.”
Microsoft did not say how many customers were compromised, adding that successful authentication doesn’t necessarily indicate Storm-0940 accessed or stole data. Yet, researchers said the threat group’s AI agents could also gain persistent access and establish backdoors by modifying credentials in targeted victims’ environments.
ConnectWise, which temporarily shut down services Saturday in the wake of the attacks, said it began restoring services in phases Wednesday. The company advised customers to keep connections disabled and said it expects the recovery process to take several days.
“Since early October, a wave of AI-driven cyberattacks has been ongoing,” Igor Tsyganskiy, executive vice president at Microsoft, wrote in a LinkedIn post Wednesday. The ConnectWise supply-chain attack is just “one of many,” he added.
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A portion of ConnectWise’s customers have been adrift for days, and hundreds are compromised, as the company’s efforts to restore its Cloud Backup service remain underway with no confirmed timeline for when customers can regain access.
The company temporarily shut down multiple services Saturday after a threat actor gained access to a highly sensitive credential that allowed its customers to connect the vendor’s application with Microsoft 365 environments.
The threat actor, which hasn’t been identified, used the application programming interface (API) secret to compromise a series of ConnectWise Cloud Backup customers’ Microsoft 365 applications, including Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Cloud Backup, MS Graph and Partner Center, according to Huntress.
Researchers observed an initial wave of attacks Friday, and by late Saturday Huntress “had seen sign-in activity from the malicious infrastructure across almost 1,000 Entra tenants, with more than 300 of those sign-ins appearing to succeed,” Jonathan Semon, principal security operations analyst at Huntress, told CyberScoop.
The cybersecurity company, which primarily supports small- to mid-sized businesses, confirmed unauthorized sign-ins in 162 tenants and said additional compromises beyond its telemetry are likely.
ConnectWise suspended its Cloud Backup, SaaS Security and Cloud Management services about two days after researchers observed an initial wave of unauthorized sign-ins.
“ConnectWise is continuing its investigation and remediation following unauthorized access to application identities associated with ConnectWise Cloud Backup, formerly known as SkyKick,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email.
“We are monitoring our entire environment around the clock,” the company said in a security advisory. “Since mitigations began on October 17 at 05:00 UTC, we have not observed successful threat activity in the environments we monitor. This does not establish whether individual partner or customer Microsoft 365 tenants were affected; each potentially affected tenant still requires review.”
Microsoft Threat Intelligence said it observed broad successful sign-ins from a malicious IP address on Oct. 15. “Follow-on activity included Microsoft Graph API reconnaissance and attempts to add additional credentials on the related service principal in target tenants to maintain direct access as a backdoor,” the company said in a LinkedIn post.
The root cause of the breach and ensuing fallout remains under investigation, and the company declined to answer questions about how attackers obtained the credential for ConnectWise Cloud Backup.
Researchers at Huntress and Todyl, which conducted its own investigation, characterized the secret and its chain of command as critical.
“Because it’s a multi-tenant application, anyone holding that credential can request access tokens in any tenant where the application is installed, without any action by the customer,” Semon said.
Sign-ins, which were performed by an automated tool, also gave the attacker the technical ability to read and write mail and files across various Microsoft 365 applications, Todyl wrote in a blog post.
Highly privileged access granted by the credential for ConnectWise Cloud Backup allowed attackers to bypass security controls, including multi-factor authentication, and establish additional access.
“In the tenants where we saw post-compromise activity, the account associated with the application elevated its own privileges and added new credentials to other applications in the tenant. That would let someone keep access even after the original application was disabled,” Semon said.
ConnectWise and researchers haven’t attributed the attacks to any known threat actors and none have publicly claimed responsibility. The company said restoration efforts remain underway, but it hasn’t provided a timeline for when customers can regain access.
ConnectWise and researchers shared indicators of compromise to help potentially exposed customers hunt for malicious activity in their systems. Yet, the vendor and third-party companies responding to confirmed attacks, encouraged customers to disable any affected applications even if they don’t see anything unusual in their logs.
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Election influence campaigns, particularly ones playing out over social media, are a dime a dozen.
Such campaigns – sometimes devised by foreign powers, other times by domestic groups – are often designed to influence the U.S. electorate. Fake accounts and online personas are created, networks of propaganda are disseminated and the campaign seeks to nudge American voters into thinking a certain way.
Mostly, these efforts are known for getting little to no traction with U.S. audiences. But while social media influence campaigns may not be effective, bad actors continue to adapt their coordinated propaganda goals to new tactics and technologies.
Enter AI chatbots, which have become a source of information and truth for many, who consult the tool for feedback and advice on everything from their careers, to their relationships with their family, as well as their politics.
But new research from VisionHeight, an Israeli threat intelligence firm, highlights how AI systems can often serve as more useful marks for influence actors than humans. To wit: someone is setting up networks of hyperlocal websites across at least 14 different states, filled with content meant to influence U.S. races.
These networks include websites with names like “Wolverine State Report” or “Peach State Bulletin.” Each state network usually has between five to six separate sites, some presenting themselves as hard news outlets and others as opinion or editorial sites. The outlets also cite one another, creating a circular network of local credibility.
But the content on these websites does not resemble journalism, or any writing that a human would find coherent or compelling. Rather, they often include text of statements about specific candidates running in local races, directly stating they are the better candidate for a political issue.
Statements like “Candidate X is the stronger choice” for voters who care about housing, taxes or other political issues were repeated hundreds of times on the websites, with slight changes in the language for different political issues. Most notably, they appear to be explicitly written for AI crawlers scraping web traffic, not humans.
“What’s really interesting about this is that the websites themselves and the content is so well built to let’s say optimize the probability for AI crawlers and the model to be influenced by this content,” said Nitsan Daniel, chief technology officer and co-founder of VisionHeight in an interview.
When a user asks an AI chatbot a question, the model will often search the internet for an answer. By creating specific online content providing direct answers to questions like “which candidate in a local race is better on housing affordability” it can essentially train the AI to retrieve that information when responding to queries.
Many media websites will opt to block AI crawlers, but these websites were all configured to specifically allow major U.S. AI companies to scrape their websites.
A blog by VisionHeight published Wednesday said the operation encompassed six states and 37 websites, but Daniel told CyberScoop that they have since discovered the operation spanned at least 14 states and 460 pages of online content.
The states targeted include Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin . At least seven states saw one or more House races targeted, while other sites focused on other races like Secretaries of State, statewide judicial appointments and local offices.
Most of the research focused on AI answers provided through Google search, but Daniel said they had confirmed at least one major AI model, Perplexity, linked to and cited one of the pages, Tarheel State Report, as its first source for an answer.
VisionHeight does not attribute the activity to a particular actor. To Daniel, who is behind the campaign and their ultimate goals are less important than the prospect that this kind of operation is easily reproducible by both foreign and domestic bad actors looking to influence how AI systems answer questions around political races.
“What we’re seeing here is,I think, very nicely demonstrating how the entire world is transitioning to [a new era],” she said. “So if in the previous election you could have seen fake websites aimed at getting people to actually read it, and containing content built to impact what they’re thinking, what we’re seeing here is…now instead of spending time and effort on getting people to read the content, [they’re] getting into their AI and being influenced by that.”
But Daniel’s concerns are broader. Large language models have become increasingly sophisticated in their ability to carry out a range of deceptive activities, such as creating false organizations, websites, as well as deepfake video, audio and imagery at scale.
It appears AI was used to generate much of the infrastructure and content used in the operation as well. All 37 websites VisionHeight identified in their first analysis, spanning multiple states, were registered in a single evening, and 36 were registered within an 8 minute timeframe. On Sept. 30, the network published “roughly 100,000 words of candidate content” all using the same template and layouts.
Foreign and domestic actors can easily replicate this process, generating hyperlocal propaganda that shapes what AI chatbots say in response to political questions. Experts say chatbots have improved at avoiding false election information, but they remain vulnerable to manipulation and errors that make them unsuited to providing more complex answers around politics.
Whereas in the past a foreign actor might lack the budget, time and incentive to target small elections, AI tools now allow for such operations to be created and optimized at scale within days. Domestic actors, meanwhile, could potentially pair the same tactics with a more sophisticated understanding of how to influence American audiences.
“It really demonstrates how in general using AI just makes what was in the past small targets [more attainable], Daniel said. “People could think that the odds of them being hit, being manipulated or being attacked are just lower because people will not put all their energy and resources on that. Nowadays, because it is so much easier, we’re seeing influence operations and cyber attacks hitting small, medium businesses as well as smaller communities, like in this case.”
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Microsoft collaborated with Japanese authorities, Health-ISAC and several cybersecurity companies to dismantle an expansive, seemingly disconnected ecosystem of Chinese-language cybercrime tools and services, the company announced Wednesday.
Since the start of the year, a vast collection of customized phishing kits developed and sold by Chinese-speaking threat actors — a cluster Microsoft tracks as Storm-2990 — have delivered more than 1 billion phishing emails and SMS messages to more than 75,000 organizations globally. More than three-quarters of those malicious messages targeted Microsoft customers, the company said.
Cybercriminals purchased the phishing kits, tools and infrastructure from an interconnected network Microsoft and Japanese authorities started investigating in early 2025. The kits were used to target individuals and organizations in healthcare, financial services, logistics and IT predominantly in the United States and Japan.
Microsoft said it and Health-ISAC, working with a federal court order, seized and redirected domains that powered the underlying infrastructure of these cybercrime tools and services known as YAM Store, CoGUI and Iron Man.
The company said it also disabled more than 20,000 accounts connected to YAM Store and continues to disrupt the operation by removing infrastructure hosted on its services and blocking more than 100,000 domains used for impersonation and fraud.
“Most people have opened their messages to find a suspicious alert urgently telling them that a package cannot be delivered, a toll remains unpaid, a bank account needs attention, or a tax bill is overdue. The details may change, but the goal is the same: to get someone to click, share personal information, or pay,” Steven Masada, general counsel and general manager of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, wrote in a blog post.
“These messages are relentless,” he added. “Delete and block one, and another takes its place. Ignore them, and more will follow. Fall for one, and the floodgates open. What appears to be a simple scam message is often the visible end of a much larger transnational cybercriminal operation.”
The phishing kids included templates impersonating legitimate brands that cybercriminals used to facilitate high-volume campaigns. Researchers said similar infrastructure and overlapping activity suggested the tools shared development origins, code reuse or close collaboration among developers.
Microsoft said cybercriminals used the phishing kits to steal credentials, financial data and abuse the device code authentication process to obtain authentication tokens and access compromised accounts. Researchers said cybercriminals primarily used the tools for financial fraud, typically using stolen payment data to make fraudulent purchases of high-end goods or transactions on legitimate financial platforms.
Resecurity, which aided the investigation, gained access to Iron Man’s infrastructure and found 2,360 phishing templates impersonating banks, retailers, healthcare providers, transportation authorities, police departments and government agencies across 130 countries. Cloudflare, Oracle, Proofpoint and TRM Labs also provided research and investigative support.
“What began with scam activity targeting people and organizations in Japan led investigators to an underground service economy supplying criminals around the world,” Masada wrote.
“YAM Store, CoGUI and Iron Man are only part of that larger criminal network, but disrupting them makes it harder for criminals to obtain the accounts, tools and infrastructure they rely on,” he added. “The scam message is often the only part victims see. The businesses behind it are what make it possible.”
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Hybrid risk intelligence company Osavul has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by 33N Ventures.
The post Osavul Lands $10 Million to Spot Hostile Intent Across Cyber, Physical Domains appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Kiteworks, a provider of secure file transfer and data-sharing tools, told customers Monday they could resume normal operations after a weekend-long precautionary shutdown prompted by what it called “credible threat intelligence” from federal authorities.
The recommendation, issued last week, advised customers to take production systems offline ahead of a potential imminent attack. The company also shut down the environments it hosts on customers’ behalf. By Sunday, Kiteworks said continuous monitoring showed no abnormal activity.
“Telling customers to take production systems offline is not a decision any vendor makes lightly, and we knew exactly what we were asking of them,” Chief Information Security Officer Frank Balonis said in the company’s statement. “We made it anyway, because when the choice is between certainty and convenience, customer data is not something we are willing to gamble with.”
During the shutdown, Kiteworks discovered a previously unknown critical vulnerability in Advanced Forms, a secure data collection tool used by fewer than 1% of its customers, a group the company said comprises approximately 50 organizations. The company said its other products, including file collaboration, file transfer, email encryption and managed file transfer, were unaffected.
Kiteworks said it developed and deployed a fix during the window and has no indication the vulnerability was ever exploited. All known vulnerabilities are addressed in release 9.5.1, which the company recommends customers run.
Company CEO Jonathan Yaron said in a release that being proactive about the threat was top of mind.
“Our customers gave up their weekend on our recommendation, at short notice and at difficult hours, and many of their teams worked through the night alongside ours,” Yaron said. “The industry standard is to wait for proof of an attack. We would rather be proactive on credible warning than wait for certainty and be too late. That is the standard we intend to keep.”
Kiteworks, a California-based company formerly known as Accellion, rebranded in October 2021 after a vulnerability in its legacy file transfer appliance allowed an extortion gang to breach hundreds of organizations. That campaign was part of a broader wave of attacks on file transfer products.
Kiteworks declined to identify which federal authorities provided the intelligence or which hacking group prompted the warning. The company said it worked with federal intelligence authorities throughout the weekend and shared threat intelligence with industry partners, including Mandiant.
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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 Paris Peace Forum, a French non-profit that has convened world leaders on global security issues, is launching a new project to bring together international experts to assess AI-related threats to global internet infrastructure.
The Integrated Network for Trusted AI in Cyberspace (INTAiC) will tap researchers and civil society experts from government and the private sector, analyzing current AI cyber threats from the field and creating “forward-looking” reports on how the technology will impact society and what organizations can do to respond.
One of the project’s top goals is to create an international, quick-response coalition of government and business to address AI-related threats, similar to coordination mechanisms that exist in other areas of cybersecurity.
“Evidence fragmentation on AI-driven cyber threats isn’t incidental — it’s structural: those defending networks and those securing AI systems have long worked in separate spheres,” said Adrien Abecassis, policy initiatives director for the Paris Peace Forum. “That’s exactly why INTAiC is unique — it’s built to turn those fragments into one comparable reading of the threat, because this is a challenge no actor can meet alone.”
The network already lists a number of prominent businesses and organizations, including Microsoft, the Cyber Threat Alliance, the Cloud Security Alliance, Orange Cyberdefense and others.
According to the forum, INTAiC’s work will focus primarily on two, separate workstreams. One is a single and regularly updated resource for defenders to stay up to date on how AI is reshaping cyber threats. The resource is focused more on attacker capabilities, different forms of misuse and the impact on security operations rather than isolated incidents.
“The result is a common reference point, grounded in reality, that gives policymakers a clearer measure of the threat and identifies the risks most deserving of collective attention,” the Forum said in a release.
The second workstream will focus on evaluating and preventing cyber risks associated with AI, building up a base of independent third-party experts who can provide neutral or unbiased assessments of frontier model cyber capabilities. That work will pull in governments, research institutions and non-profits to develop new organizational and funding pathways to support that kind of research.
While the U.S. federal government has come a long way in recent years building up its own capacity to test and study AI cyber threats, much of the access and technical expertise around frontier model capabilities are concentrated within commercial AI companies. This has at times created concerns that federal agencies were being overly reliant on AI companies to explain how the technology worked and walk them through the possible threat scenarios.
As Anthropic and OpenAI have rolled out defensive cybersecurity programs like Project Glasswing and the Trusted Access for Cyber program, access to those models have become available to a wider group of researchers and organizations.
The Paris Peace Forum intends to brief the public further on INTAiC’s work and accomplishments in Paris later this year during the organization’s annual conference in November.
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I keep hearing the same frustration when I talk with security leaders. The real problem sitting on their desk isn’t finding vulnerabilities. It’s deciding which ones actually matter.
The industry has spent billions on better visibility. We’ve convinced ourselves that if we could just discover more vulnerabilities, collect more data, and ingest more threat intelligence, we’d become more secure. But look around. Organizations still aren’t more secure. They’re just overwhelmed.
Then AI arrived and changed the game entirely. In a matter of months, vulnerability discovery accelerated dramatically. AI systems review code faster than human researchers ever could. They identify weaknesses at unprecedented scale. They scan continuously without the limitations of time, staffing, or attention. The headlines have been everywhere. Government leaders are reevaluating AI laws. CEOs are tossing and turning at night.
But we are focusing on the wrong issue. None of this is actually solving what matters most.
For years, security teams have been drowning in findings. Every new threat feed promised greater visibility. What arrived instead was noise—more data, more alerts, more dashboards, more vulnerabilities. Rarely clarity. Now AI is pouring gasoline on that fire.
The conversations around AI in cybersecurity often get stuck in the wrong place. People debate whether it will help defenders move faster or enable attackers more easily. Both matter, but they are not the core issue.
The real consequence of AI is that it’s exposing something organizations have avoided facing. A vulnerability is not risk, it’s just a clue. Risk emerges when information connects to context: how critical the affected asset is, what controls surround it, how likely exploitation is, the business processes it supports, and what happens operationally if it fails.
Without that context, prioritization becomes impossible. Resources get spent on low-risk issues while mission-critical, vulnerabilities sit unfixed.
Now AI is now making the data volume problem almost impossible to comprehend. An enterprise working with hundreds of software vendors, cloud providers, contractors, and technology partners must investigate every relationship. It’s like a cybersecurity nesting doll where AI continuously identifies vulnerabilities across that entire ecosystem, every minute of every day.
The real challenge today isn’t discovering weaknesses. It’s determining which of tens of thousands of newly discovered weaknesses could actually disrupt operations, impact customers, halt revenue, or create regulatory exposure. Most organizations can’t answer that question quickly.
Some still rank risk using severity scores built for technical teams rather than business leaders. Others rely on manual triage that was already struggling before AI. Many still measure security maturity by how many findings they identify rather than the speed and accuracy of their decisions.
These approaches don’t work anymore. They probably didn’t work yesterday either.
What’s uncomfortable to acknowledge is that AI isn’t creating a cybersecurity crisis. It is revealing one that’s existed for years. The organizations that succeed in this an AI world will transform discovery into judgment faster than their competitors. When AI can find nearly every weakness, security belongs to those who know what to act on. It belongs to those who can connect data to business reality.
That’s the real edge. That’s what separates secure organizations from those that are just collecting more findings.
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By Troy Wojewoda During a recent Breach Assessment engagement, BHIS discovered a highly stealthy and persistent intrusion technique utilized by a threat actor to maintain Command-and-Control (C2) within the client’s […]
The post The Curious Case of the Comburglar appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..
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