In this article Attack chain overviewMitigation and protection guidanceIndicators of compromise (IOC)Microsoft Defender XDR detectionsAdvanced hunting queriesLearn more Microsoft Threat Intelligence identified a large-scale npm supply chain attack affecting more than 400 packages across multiple unrelated publishers, including packages associated with major enterprise software ecosystems such as keyv, flat-cache, cache-manager, and others. The malicious releases contain a Mini Shai-Hulud…
An agentic SOC is only as good as the model driving it. The moment you let an LLM triage an alert, hunt across your telemetry, or author a detection rule, the question stops being "is this a smart model?" and becomes something much more specific: will it pick the right skill, call the right tool in the right order, and reach the right disposition without inventing a result it never actually checked? That is not a question a general-purpose leaderboard can answer. A model can top every public…
In this article What is device isolation?Case study: QNETAttack chain overviewMITRE ATT&CK techniques observedReferencesLearn more Microsoft Defender’s attack disruption now includes device isolation, a new response action that extends autonomous protection directly to compromised endpoints. At QNET, an attacker initiated a multi-stage attack using a legitimate Windows tool on a compromised endpoint to retrieve a malicious remote payload–a classic living-off-the-land (LOL) technique that often…
A Huntress survey of 504 IT leaders found that compliance demands caused burnout at 37% of orgs, delayed security initiatives at 34%, and cost 21% a contract.
Large language models (LLMs) made it trivially cheap to generate vulnerability reports. In the first half of 2026 alone, our HackerOne bug bounty program received over 1,390 reports, more than the full-year totals for 2024 and 2025 combined. Every one of them still requires human attention, so we decided to put agents against agents. If AI can generate reports at near-zero cost, AI should triage them at near-zero cost, too. The system we built agrees with human security engineers 85% of the…
Large language models (LLMs) made it trivially cheap to generate vulnerability reports. In the first half of 2026 alone, our HackerOne bug bounty program received over 1,390 reports, more than the full-year totals for 2024 and 2025 combined. Every one of them still requires human attention, so we decided to put agents against agents. If AI can generate reports at near-zero cost, AI should triage them at near-zero cost, too. The system we built agrees with human security engineers 85% of the…
Tenable spent 30 days running frontier AI models against our own code. It didn’t just find bugs — it proved they’re real, with reproducible exploits. That fundamentally changes code security from ranking potential code defects to a much higher signal focused on the findings that matter. Read on to learn how it reshaped our security team's work, what it cost, and why your program is next.Key takeaways:Now code security starts with proof, not suspicions. Frontier AI instantly builds working…
In this article The CaptiveCrunch campaignStorm-2945 and Midnight BlizzardCaptiveCrunch tradecraft and toolingHow to protect against CaptiveCrunch activityMicrosoft Defender detections and hunting guidanceIndicators of compromise Since early May 2026, Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed Storm-2945, a sub-cluster of Midnight Blizzard, conducting widespread but targeted traffic manipulation attacks involving hospitality sector networks served by captive portals worldwide. Despite some…
Hugging Face reconstructed more than 17,000 attacker events from a July 2026 intrusion driven by an autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agent. The path was familiar: untrusted dataset content abused a processing worker (file disclosure, then code execution), credential harvest, then multi-cluster lateral movement. Production Elastic Defend behavior rules and Elastic Security detection (SIEM) rules already watch those types of behaviors. This post maps each stage to detections you can enable…
Hugging Face reconstructed more than 17,000 attacker events from a July 2026 intrusion driven by an autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agent. The path was familiar: untrusted dataset content abused a processing worker (file disclosure, then code execution), credential harvest, then multi-cluster lateral movement. Production Elastic Defend behavior rules and Elastic Security detection (SIEM) rules already watch those types of behaviors. This post maps each stage to detections you can enable…
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. For my fianceé’s 30th birthday, I took her on a weekend trip to Shenandoah National Park – a favorite of ours since we went to a wedding there several years back. We’ve done several incredible hikes over the years, but one in particular had always loomed over my head: Old Rag, a 9.3 mile circuit hike that’s largely considered the most difficult in Virginia. I've always been warned that at the beginning and end, you hate Old Rag.…
Between January and June 2026, TrendAI™ tracked more than 35,000 fake sites exploiting the 2026 FIFA World Cup, spanning counterfeit merchandise shops, cloned ticket pages, and bogus free-streaming sites, which together drew roughly 1.48 million visits from Japan.
Key Takeaways Two real-world cloud attacks reached meaningful impact in less than ten minutes despite pursuing entirely different objectives. Both attackers treated the environment as a connected system, using existing permissions and relationships to expand their reach. Reconnaissance increasingly focuses on understanding access and capability rather than discovering vulnerable assets. AI is compressing the gap between discovery, decision-making, and execution for cloud attackers. The interval…
This is Part 3 of the Inside Elastic InfoSec's Agentic SOC series. Part 1: How we triage every alert before an analyst opens it · Part 2: Choosing the right agent architecture for a 5× cost reduction We run 14 AI agents in the Elastic InfoSec security operations pipeline. They were producing correct verdicts and taking up to 19 large language model (LLM) calls to do work that needed 8, at thousands of input tokens per call. At hundreds of runs per day, that compounds fast. We built a five-step…
This is Part 3 of the Inside Elastic InfoSec's Agentic SOC series. Part 1: How we triage every alert before an analyst opens it · Part 2: Choosing the right agent architecture for a 5× cost reduction We run 14 AI agents in the Elastic InfoSec security operations pipeline. They were producing correct verdicts and taking up to 19 large language model (LLM) calls to do work that needed 8, at thousands of input tokens per call. At hundreds of runs per day, that compounds fast. We built a five-step…
This is Part 2 of the Inside Elastic InfoSec's Agentic SOC series. Part 1: How we triage every alert before an analyst opens it. Part 3: how we cut AI agent LLM calls by 60%. Investigating a Windows endpoint alert in Elastic InfoSec's production agentic security operations center (SOC) costs $0.69. That's what we pay running an orchestration workflow of specialized Elastic AI agents on the Elastic Inference Service (EIS). Route the same alert to a single agent working through 14 skills, and the…
An AI agent has run a ransomware intrusion on its own for the first time, from break-in to data destruction. The autonomous attacks TrendAI™ Research predicted are beginning to arrive, and defending against them shifts from blocking known indicators to detecting behavior.
This is Part 2 of the Inside Elastic InfoSec's Agentic SOC series. Part 1: How we triage every alert before an analyst opens it. Part 3: how we cut AI agent LLM calls by 60%. Investigating a Windows endpoint alert in Elastic InfoSec's production agentic security operations center (SOC) costs $0.69. That's what we pay running an orchestration workflow of specialized Elastic AI agents on the Elastic Inference Service (EIS). Route the same alert to a single agent working through 14 skills, and the…
The ransomware economy has been rewired. Meet the eight ransomware groups driving the shift, from affiliate breakaways to AI-assisted attacks based on Group-IB Threat Intelligence.
Cisco Talos has discovered a new Rust-based remote access trojan (RAT) we call “msaRAT” attributed to the Chaos ransomware group. The name is derived from the binding names found in the binary: “msaOpen,” “msaClose,” “msaError,” and “msaMessage”.msaRAT is implemented using the Tokio asynchronous runtime, with primary capabilities of browser-leveraged remote code execution and covert tunneling to establish command-and-control (C2) communications.This RAT never touches the network directly — it…
We ran a noisy wget detection rule on Elastic's own cloud fleet for seven days. Three destinations survived deterministic filtering, Elasticsearch Query Language (ES|QL) COMPLETION triaged all three, and none of them created an alert that an analyst had to open. Each rule parses the destination from curl and wget executions, filters known-good hosts, redacts secrets, and then hands whatever’s left to a large language model (LLM) for a triage verdict. File transfer detections stay on in cloud…
In April, SentinelLABS’ Tom Hegel published an initial assessment of the first five weeks of the conflict. Three months later, the evidence supports refinement. Executive Summary The cyber risk remains quieter than the public narrative. It rests on persistent access, trusted administration, service-provider pathways, selective disruption, and personas that magnify technical effects. Iran-linked activity is not a single threat set. MOIS, the IRGC Intelligence Organization, the IRGC Cyber…
Elastic Security Labs found a new Contagious Interview campaign, tracked as REF9403, hiding malware inside SVG image files using steganography. To our knowledge, this specific infection chain has not been previously documented. We found it after the DPRK-aligned group targeted our own community Slack workspace with a fake job posting and a "coding challenge" project. Any user who ran the project ended up with a four-stage payload aligned with OTTERCOOKIE: a browser credential and crypto wallet…
Elastic Security Labs found a new Contagious Interview campaign, tracked as REF9403, hiding malware inside SVG image files using steganography. To our knowledge, this specific infection chain has not been previously documented. We found it after the DPRK-aligned group targeted our own community Slack workspace with a fake job posting and a "coding challenge" project. Any user who ran the project ended up with a four-stage payload aligned with OTTERCOOKIE: a browser credential and crypto wallet…
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. We all knew, to some degree or another, that this summer was going to a hot mess. I don’t mean FIFA drama or record setting heat waves. I mean the slow but steady momentum that AI frontier models were accruing for vulnerability research. If you were like me, and guesstimating exactly when that shoe would drop, my money was on the middle of summer. And... well, friends, I hate to say it, but I was right. This July’s Patch Tuesday is…
Cisco Talos is disclosing UAT-11795, a sophisticated, Russian-speaking, financially motivated adversary that has been conducting a malicious campaign targeting users in the U.S. and Europe since at least June 2025. Talos has discovered that the actor in this campaign delivers a Python-based remote access tool (RAT) that we track as “Starland RAT” and a command-and-control (C2) memory implant known as the “WLDR agent.” The WLDR agent is a sophisticated PowerShell-based C2 memory implant that…
Elastic Security Labs is tracking an emerging threat named TELEPUZ, which we have discovered spreading widely via a CLICKFIX-VIDAR chain. This malware is in active development and has been operating since late April 2026, according to the infrastructure information we collected. The malware is full-featured, lightweight, and modular. While the number of C2 domains is currently small, the daily volume of builds uploaded to VirusTotal and the rapid pace of updates indicate active development and…
Written by: Corné de Jong Introduction Mandiant security assessments frequently identify publicly exposed serverless applications that lack authentication, often as a result of specific business requirements. Serverless deployments typically run custom-developed code that incorporates third-party packages, making them targets for a wide range of application-level attacks, including: Local and Remote File Inclusion (LFI/RFI) Command Injection Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities can…
ESET researchers discovered 11 vulnerable UEFI shim bootloaders signed by Microsoft that allow attackers to bypass UEFI Secure Boot by exploiting decade-old vulnerabilities
For years, the cyber security industry tracked AI as a force multiplier: something that made existing attack techniques faster, cheaper, and more accessible. That framing was accurate. But the Annual AI Security Report 2026 from Check Point Research documents a transition that goes further. AI has crossed from assistant to operator. Where it once helped attackers prepare, it now runs the operation. Key observed findings AI has crossed from development aid to live attack operator. It now does…
TrendAI™ Research analyzed over 200 Gemini CLI session logs showing how a Russian-speaking threat actor used AI to run a live botnet, finishing a full C&C migration in six minutes while doing just 11% of the work himself.
Two Microsoft 365 attacks got through Conditional Access policies that seemed fully configured. Learn what went wrong and how Huntress Managed ISPM catches these gaps first.
A Mexican banking fraud operation we're tracking as REF6045 doesn't run on autopilot. A human operator is behind the wheel, monitoring infected machines and deciding what happens next. Victims are infected through fake CAPTCHA pages that trick them into running a single command, which installs SCMBANKER, a PowerShell toolkit with components dating back to at least October 2025. Once installed, the operator can see when a victim opens a banking session, lock the screen behind a fake bank warning…
A Mexican banking fraud operation we're tracking as REF6045 doesn't run on autopilot. A human operator is behind the wheel, monitoring infected machines and deciding what happens next. Victims are infected through fake CAPTCHA pages that trick them into running a single command, which installs SCMBANKER, a PowerShell toolkit with components dating back to at least October 2025. Once installed, the operator can see when a victim opens a banking session, lock the screen behind a fake bank warning…
Note: SysAid was not compromised, and no SysAid vulnerability was involved. The attacker had already gained access to the victim environment and abused a legitimate software-deployment feature to deploy malware onto another machine within it. Key Points Check Point Research (CPR) tracks ‘Cavern Manticore’ as an Iran-nexus threat actor operating against Israeli targets, with a focus on the government and IT sectors. Cavern Manticore shares technical overlaps with other Iranian MOIS (Ministry of…
This is Part 1 of the Inside Elastic InfoSec's Agentic SOC series. Part 2: choosing the right agent architecture for a 5× cost reduction. Part 3: how we cut AI agent LLM calls by 60% Elastic's InfoSec team built an agentic SOC that triages every alert before an analyst opens it. A 30-minute manual investigation now finishes in under 3 minutes: deterministic ES|QL queries close obvious false positives at zero token cost, specialized AI agents investigate the rest across endpoint, cloud, and SaaS…
This is Part 1 of the Inside Elastic InfoSec's Agentic SOC series. Part 2: choosing the right agent architecture for a 5× cost reduction. Part 3: how we cut AI agent LLM calls by 60% Elastic's InfoSec team built an agentic SOC that triages every alert before an analyst opens it. A 30-minute manual investigation now finishes in under 3 minutes: deterministic ES|QL queries close obvious false positives at zero token cost, specialized AI agents investigate the rest across endpoint, cloud, and SaaS…
Key Takeaways This case was first reported to customers in a threat brief released in July 2025 and in a public flash alert in August 2025 in partnership with Swisscom B2B CSIRT, which observed another intrusion tied to the same campaign. This report contains data from both intrusions. We plan to release a DFIR Labs […] The post From Bing Search to Ransomware: Bumblebee and AdaptixC2 Deliver Akira appeared first on The DFIR Report.
In this blog entry, TrendAI™ Research examines a wave of phishing emails observed in May 2026 that targeted Japanese accommodation facilities using Booking.com, detailing the victims, attack techniques used, and characteristics of the malware involved.
See how Shai Hulud-linked CI/CD compromise exposed Jenkins credentials, enabled AWS escalation, and led to Redshift breach activity detected by FortiCNAPP
Group-IB analyzes Millenium RAT version 4.*, a remote access trojan that has undergone an architectural shift from .NET to native C++, while continuing to leverage the Telegram Bot API for command and control, requiring no dedicated server infrastructure. This blog also profiles the developer “ShinyEnigma”, and threat actor cluster “Y2K Operators” responsible for active Millenium RAT exploitation campaigns. Over 62,000 compromised endpoints across more than 160 countries have been identified,…
ESET Research analyzes Gamaredon’s new toolset and the group’s growing reliance on legitimate online services to hide its C&C infrastructure and exfiltrate stolen data
ESET researchers assisted in the global disruption of the Amadey botnet and Stealc infostealer, providing technical analysis, infrastructure tracking, and affiliate-level insights
Elastic's InfoSec Product Security Team built a generative AI agent using Elastic Agent Builder that drafts complete CVE security advisories (CWE classification, CAPEC methodology, CVSS scoring, and mitigation guidance) directly from raw vulnerability reports. The agent uses RAG against the MITRE CWE and CAPEC catalogues indexed in Elasticsearch, which grounds its output in authoritative data and prevents hallucinated classification IDs. ESA-2026-01 is already in production as an example of…
A previously undocumented Windows loader tracked as OXLOADER is delivering the CASTLESTEALER infostealer via malicious Google Ads, with low detection rates across static engines and sandbox detonations. The loader uses several obfuscation layers (control-flow flattening, opaque predicates, mixed Boolean-Arithmetic), self-modifying decryption stubs, and abuses the Windows .reloc section to stage shellcode. Elastic Security Labs identified OXLOADER in an active campaign targeting one of our…
AAD Graph Activity Logs are now ingestible into Elastic and usable for threat detection within the SIEM/XDR solution. That sentence shouldn't be exciting, but it is. For most of the past decade, this slice of telemetry simply didn't exist as a customer-accessible log stream. Microsoft Graph Activity Logs (the modern graph.microsoft.com surface) went GA in April 2024. The legacy graph.windows.net surface, the one adversary tooling actually hits, stayed dark until early 2026. This post walks the…
FortiGuard Labs analyzes a multi-stage malware campaign that uses fake AI-themed documents, hidden PowerShell scripts, AutoHotkey loaders, and process injection to deploy AsyncRAT and maintain remote access.
FortiGuard Labs research shows how cybercriminals are exploiting the demand for the FIFA World Cup 2026 through phishing, fake tickets, malware, impersonation, and credential theft.
Aikido vs XBOW compared in an independent benchmark by Doyensec. Aikido found 58% more vulnerabilities at the same price. See setup time, false positive rates & full results Category: News