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"If you're not using AI to attack your own systems, your adversaries will."
Views expressed in this cybersecurity, cybercrime update are those of the reporters and correspondents. Accessed on 23 August 2026, 1514 UTC.
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Russ Roberts (https://www.hawaiicybersecurityjournal.net).
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AI agents excel at hacking organizations, as they’ve demonstrated in real-life attacks multiple times over the past few weeks. They also expose a whole new attack surface for organizations trying to protect against both human and AI intrusions. As if defenders needed more worries to keep them up at night, agents introduce new data-integration channels that attackers can abuse. They also introduce
Aug 21, 2026
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One of the best ways to lower your AWS bill by 99 percent or more is by not checking your keys into public GitHub repositories. Many of us have done this inadvertently over the years, and the defenses against it have improved dramatically (my personal favorite being "using non-ephemeral credentials derived from OIDC or SSO is an anti-pattern"), but it still happens. On Friday, BleepingComputer rep
5 TTPs
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CISA has ordered US federal agencies to patch two exploited flaws in TrueConf, a Russian-built video conferencing platform, after compromised servers were caught handing malware to unsuspecting meeting participants. The US cybersecurity agency on Thursday added CVE-2026-72529 and CVE-2026-72530 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, saying both have been used in real-world attacks. What C
Hackers slipped malware into several popular Rust packages this week, turning routine software builds into a route onto developers' machines. The Rust Security Response Team disclosed the supply chain attack on Thursday after receiving a tip about a crate called proc-macro1. An investigation found that its build script fetched malware from a remote server. The attack extended beyond a single dodgy
Lateral Movement (Enterprise TA0008)
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Cisco has revealed its Secure Workload Software, a micro-segmentation tool formerly known as Tetration that is supposed to stop attackers moving laterally across a network, has four critical flaws plus another high-severity bug. CVE-2026-20315 and CVE-2026-20317 are the two perfect-ten-rated bugs. Both relate to improper access control. Cisco has not offered much detail about either, saying only t
16 TTPs
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Google is tracking three distinct suspected Russian cyber-spy groups that are targeting individuals in academia, aerospace, defense, government agencies, and think tanks across Europe and the US. The UNC (unclassified) groups, as Google calls them, have been orchestrating these highly targeted campaigns since at least last year, and they remain ongoing. Some of the phishing and OAuth-abuse operati
US Bank says that it's investigating ransomware crew LockBit’s claims that it breached the financial institution and stole data, which the crims threaten to leak on September 3 unless the bank pays an extortion demand. "We have investigated this matter and the available evidence indicates that the claim regarding a potential cyber incident is related to a fourth party event that occurred outside o
A young security researcher figured out a way to enroll a Linux device into Apple’s Find My network and read live location data from it. Find My is Apple’s app for, you guessed it, finding things – whether AirTags, iPads, or other supported devices and items. It also works for people. Families can track each other's whereabouts for safety reasons, and friends can tell when others are hanging out w
A ransomware affiliate appears to have found a new way to squeeze victims for cash: pose as the good guy and undercut the criminals it was working with. Researchers at GuidePoint Security say an outfit calling itself "Ransom Busters" has been contacting ransomware victims before their attacks become public, offering to recover encrypted files and delete stolen data for a considerably smaller payme
xAI's Grok web chat agent is currently vulnerable to a novel form of prompt injection, according to security researchers with Adversa AI. The technique allows an attacker to create a web page poisoned with malicious instructions that induce an AI model summarizing the page to carry out harmful actions. That describes a well-known attack known as indirect prompt injection. Frontier AI models have b
France's tax authority says attackers may have stolen the contents of messages exchanged with hundreds of taxpayers during the data raid it confirmed last week. In an update published this week, the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) said lists of messages exchanged with the authority were exposed. For around 250 people, the compromised information also included the messages themselves
PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we make fun of those who are security self-owned, so hopefully you don’t do the same. This week, we have a story that’s hot off the presses about a company almost sabotaging its security by using AI for programming. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon reque
Attackers are using AI-generated exploitation scripts to break into internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLCs) at water, manufacturing, energy, and other critical facilities, in what five US federal agencies on Wednesday called an “active threat.” In this latest round of intrusions against American critical infrastructure, the attackers use open source industrial auto
Some ICE employees seemingly needed a reminder not to wear their Meta pervert glasses to work. Because only ICE can spy on ICE. Meta smart glasses are essentially “body-worn cameras,” as they can covertly record video and audio, David Venturella, Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director, reportedly reminded agency employees on Tuesday. “The use of Meta Glasses or similar devices could u
Surveillance tech company Flock has struggled with its public image for years, but the problem has become particularly acute in recent weeks. Its network of ALPRs has long attracted criticism over mass surveillance and the retention of location data belonging to motorists who are not suspected of any offense. Days after its CEO apologized for documented abuses of the company's system, The Register
Comcast has folded its Wi-Fi-based intruder detection feature into Xfinity Shield, a repackaged bundle of physical and cybersecurity offerings. The US telco launched WiFi Motion in 2025. Xfinity Shield also includes cybersecurity protections built into the Xfinity Gateway router. The Wi-Fi sensing technology harnesses the radio waves beamed around a user's home to detect motion and potential intru
Australian aparthotel chain Quest has revealed it leaked customer data. A Reg reader kindly shared an email from the chain with the subject line “Important Security Update Regarding Your Quest Data.” That missive opens with unwelcome news that “I am writing to inform you of a recent data security incident involving some of your personal information.” “On Monday, 17 August 2026, we identified unaut
OpenAI on Tuesday said its decision to suspend model training work, implemented after unreleased, unsupervised AI models hacked HuggingFace, remains in effect as the AI biz tries to implement stronger security measures. Some of those measures will increase compute overhead by 20 percent of the observed inference workload. An OpenAI spokesperson told The Register that those costs reflect internal r
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Researchers affiliated with the University of Massachusetts Amherst have found that you can get payments out of certain expired contactless credit cards, a process detailed at the recent USENIX Security 2026 conference. Raja Hasnain Anwar, Gerard DeCunha, and Muhammad Taqi Raza describe their findings in a paper titled "Zombie Cards Back Online: Reviving Expired Credit Cards for Contactless Paymen
Aug 18, 2026
CISA says attackers are exploiting a critical 2025 vulnerability in Ray, the widely used open source framework for scaling Python and machine-learning workloads. Tracked as CVE-2025-62593 and rated 9.4 under CVSS v4, the bug was first disclosed in November 2025. It allows an attacker to use Firefox or Safari to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on a vulnerable Ray system. The open source distrib
Apple has released a batch of vulnerability fixes for iPhones, iPads, and Macs, including an image-processing flaw that experts say has the hallmarks of a spyware delivery vector. The most notable patch is for CVE-2026-65346, a defect in the ImageIO framework Apple uses to parse image files. Discovered and reported by Nik Tsytsarkin of Meta's Red Team X, CVE-2026-65346 is an integer-overflow bug t
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Researchers manipulated Microsoft Copilot Personal into telling them how to hack the AI assistant – eventually tricking it into sending sensitive data to an external server and poisoning its persistent memory, by repeatedly asking Copilot why an attack wouldn’t work. Varonis Threat Labs uncovered the vulnerability, which they named "CoSnitch" and reported to Microsoft in December 2025. Redmond, we
Aug 17, 2026
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An AI broke Snowflake’s code; then another AI, an attack agent, autonomously found the bug, exploited it, and extracted credentials without human intervention. Luckily, this wasn’t yet another case of rogue AI agents doing evil things. It was a sanctioned bug hunt, conducted through Snowflake’s HackerOne vulnerability disclosure program, and Snowflake fixed the flaw the same day Wiz reported it an
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A cybercrook claims to have siphoned millions of employee records from the Microsoft Azure environments of major companies including McDonald's, Vodafone, Kyndryl, and Tata Consultancy Services. The alleged haul spans nine organizations and is being advertised for sale by a threat actor using the name "TheHatman," according to research published by Hudson Rock. McDonald's accounts for the largest
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It is the best of times, it is the worst of times – especially if your job is keeping systems patched and up to date. Microsoft has gone from 60-90 Windows security fixes per month last year to a record of 600+ this July. Oracle and Linux are following the same path, and they are very much not alone. The good news is that a lot of bad things are getting fixed very quickly. The bad news is that pat
KETTLE Our cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons spent last week in Las Vegas for the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences, and at both events there was only one thing on everyone's mind: AI agents and their growing threat to cybersecurity defenders. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Those platforms also l
Microsoft has blamed extra work created by AI bug-finders for the delayed release of a major Cumulative Update to Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE). Redmond’s Exchange team made that admission last Thursday in a post titled “Where is Exchange SE CU1 anyway?” that reveals the software giant is “getting questions from our customers on when they can expect us to release Exchange SE Cumulative
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ASIA IN BRIEF Chinese company Zhipu last week launched a new AI model called GLM-5.3 that it claims has bug-finding powers that match those possessed by American models. The company’s announcement includes benchmark data that finds GLM-5.3 beats Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on the CyberGym benchmark, a test of a model’s ability to solve real-world cybersecurity challenges. “As we scaled post-training,
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Corma CEO Alon Pluda says his AI security startup aims to close the "defense gap," where models are better at offensive security. He tells the story of one customer, a security executive who was walking his dog when he received a notification on his watch from a Corma agent. “It said, 'I just caught a live attack. I need your permission to block it,'” Pluda told The Register in an interview. The s
7 TTPs
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A new variant of the Shai-Hulud npm worm has poisoned hundreds of packages while adding propagation techniques that can leave little trace in the corresponding source repositories. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, Shai-Hulud was the name of the giant self-sustaining desert sandworms that moved silently beneath the surface of the planet Arrakis. So it made sense that when some new self-replicating malware
Some 1.6 million unique email addresses tied to RingCentral have been leaked online, alongside names, physical addresses, and phone numbers, according to Have I Been Pwned. RingCentral disclosed the breach on July 28 and said “it was the target of a sophisticated social engineering campaign” affecting a “limited portion of RingCentral customers.” The comms platform said that it promptly responded
France's tax authority has confirmed that an intruder accessed its systems and extracted data in June after an alleged cybercriminal advertised a purported database of 2 million taxpayers. Using the alias "ZeroBytes," the alleged crook behind the attack on the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) advertised the stolen database on a cybercrime forum on Wednesday. They claimed the database
In early July, attackers used open source AI agents to autonomously hack government systems and energy companies, signaling to defenders that AI-powered attacks against critical infrastructure are no longer theoretical. "There is a clear and present danger," Tom Kellermann, TrendAI VP of AI security and threat research, told The Register. "As the geopolitical tension boils, systemic destructive cy
Cryptocurrency hardware wallet maker Trezor has confirmed that a breach at one of its shipping partners exposed the personal data of more than 13,000 customers. The company's initial findings suggested the breach was limited to orders placed in certain countries during the previous 90 days. New information indicates that earlier orders may also be affected. The breach exposed the names, email addr
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