Lucc

Cyber Security

[Lucc @securitystack]

Security Stack Sheet #118

Word of the Week
“Ransomcloud”
Word of the Week special
“Why Is the Majority of Our MFA So Phishable?”
“Why Zero-Days Are Essential to Security”

#security #cybersecurity #cyberresilience #zeroday #ransomware https://t.co/5PuySIXA9g

[John Gedmark @Gedmark]

The cyber incidents of the last 48 hours have been pretty mind blowing. I’ve been trying to piece together the “why now” question, and I think what we’re seeing is the first of a new kind of super-agent driven vulnerability cascade-- first one vulnerability is found by a malicious actor, then other bad actors pop up to try and take advantage of it before companies patch their systems.

But because each bad actor is using swarms of thousands of super-agents, those agents are not only exploiting the existing vulnerability, but finding new zero days as well, all in a matter of hours. And the cycle repeats. As of the writing of this post there have been vulnerabilities found across at least half-dozen independent systems including LiteLLM, PHP, eMudhra Certificates, NGINX, Bind 9, and NodeJS. The list continues to grow hour by hour.

Basically everything connected to the internet is at risk. Not just company websites and the usual databases of sensitive personal information, but all our critical infrastructure-- banks, power grids, pipelines, government agencies, all of it.

The good news is that cybersecurity and ops teams had a chance to see this coming. This is why from when Mythos first dropped and had our first warning, these teams have been hard at work shoring up systems across the board.

This is also why at Astranis we’ve seen a massive uptick in demand for truly air-gapped, sovereign networks, deployed via dedicated satellite to span an entire country or connect a large enterprise.

It is in fact possible to take an entire category of critical infrastructure off the internet entirely. With a fully self-contained network where all the endpoints are off grid. This is not a new concept-- anyone could do this for your home today with equipment you can buy from Best Buy. But to stand up such a network covering a large geographic area or an entire country, without touching the existing fiber or other network infrastructure, you can only do that with a dedicated satellite. And specifically a satellite in a special orbit called geosynchronous orbit.

Over the past year we’ve begun working with some of our customers on what it will take to implement truly air-gapped, standalone networks in support of mission critical use cases like core government functions, emergency response, defense, core infrastructure, or all of the above.

That might sound extreme, but that is the kind of measure we expect will be required to shrink the attack surface of some of the world’s most critical infra. That’s just the position we are now in. It's a brave new world.

[Florian Roth ⚡️ @cyb3rops]

And as if all these critical vulnerabilities weren't enough, we've also had several reports about threat actors using AI agents to compromise systems at scale.
This is actually the part that worries me even more.

Some interesting reports from the last few days:

01) ARTEX / ConnectWise

Microsoft reports that Storm-0940 used ARTEX in a large-scale campaign targeting more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants. Up to 2,900 authentication attempts per minute, with privileged cloud access achieved in under three hours in some cases.

https://t.co/vPafbvD1oG

02) ARTEX / South Korean Finance

CrowdStrike found evidence of AI-driven attacks against South Korean financial organizations, including exposed Claude Code sessions and ARTEX configurations. DeepSeek, GLM and Grok were used in the attacker's setup.

https://t.co/kOiEqSEwUi

03) Cairn / 100+ Compromised Companies

NorForge investigated exposed Cairn instances used for autonomous hacking campaigns. More than 1,100 attack projects in one cluster alone. Reuters identified over 100 companies whose websites had been compromised.

Estimated AI costs: around $5 per task, according to NorForge. That's ridiculously cheap.

https://t.co/54Ir7IeY4Q

04) Four More Agentic AI Campaigns

CrowdStrike documented four additional threat actors using AI agents for real intrusion campaigns, including attacks against healthcare organizations and government entities.

https://t.co/rte8LIYL90

What concerns me is how quickly the economics of offensive operations are changing.

Finding vulnerabilities, testing attack paths, adapting payloads, trying something else when an exploit fails, and eventually deploying a webshell. Much of this can now be delegated to agents that keep working for hours.

And with open-weight models and freely available agent harnesses, the cost of running these operations is dropping significantly.

We've been talking about AI changing offensive security for quite a while. These reports show that it's already happening in real-world intrusions.

And I'm pretty sure we're only seeing a fraction of it.

[thaddeus e. grugq @thegrugq]

Give a man an 0day and he'll have access for a day, teach a man to phish and he'll have access for life.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

New on our Frontier Red Team blog: using Claude to formally verify software at large scale.

Formal verification can prove that code is free of certain bugs, but historically it has only been feasible for small codebases (or required a lot of expert time).

With AI models, however, this is beginning to change. In collaboration with @theoremlabs, we used Claude to prove security properties in over one hundred real-world open-source libraries over the span of a few weeks.

Read our research in full here: https://t.co/zUyx8CjBEk

[Alex Stamos @alexstamos]

Fun week! 🐶☕️🔥

Our team at @Cognition has been securing our customers against the latest PHP and Node vulns. To make this easier for everyone, we’ve open-sourced an agent plugin to make this easier for everybody.

https://t.co/icKKpZwoGu

https://t.co/7nCwvSJjXE

[Claude @claudeai]

We’re opening a research preview of Claude Duet, a new app where Claude works as a proactive agent.

It comes to you with what needs your attention, completes tasks you ask of it, keeps working when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf.

[ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ 🛡️ @DanielMiessler]

I think I have a good analogy for what's about to happen in cyber.

It's pitch dark. Always has been. And the world is dilapidated buildings and rats and maggots and other creepy-crawlies. The whole world.

And we just invented flashlights.

[Cybersecurity News Everyday @TweetThreatNews]

NSA, NIST and CISA published voluntary practices for preparing for, detecting, responding to and recovering from rogue AI agent incidents. The guidance addresses autonomous agents but excludes adversarial activity such as prompt injection and malware.
https://t.co/suotn3J8RX

[ClaudeDevs @ClaudeDevs]

We launched OSS Scanner, which gives critical open source projects free, periodic vulnerability scans from our strongest models.

Each finding includes a proof-of-concept, and a patch where possible.

https://t.co/aonfpNG3WO

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Our latest model advances bring stronger capabilities for building and migrating software in low-resource programming languages such as COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic.

These languages power software that banks, governments, and businesses depend on. Progress here means understanding decades of business logic and helping developers modernize those systems while preserving what works.

We’re building these capabilities around the challenges developers and enterprise customers bring us. If your team is working on these systems, tell us which languages and workflows we should tackle next.

https://t.co/2TbnkQixJ1

[The Hacker News @TheHackersNews]

AI is testing the limits of post-quantum cryptography.

An Anthropic AI model found an attack that halved HAWK's effective security in just 60 hours, prompting its withdrawal from NIST consideration.

Itan Barmes of QIZ Security explains why cryptographic agility now matters more than ever.

Read: https://t.co/VJKCwHOf5T

[Jim Manico from Manicode Security @manicode]

What I hear often:

“These models are terrible. They keep blocking my cybersecurity work.”

“Did you apply for CVP?”

“Uh, no.”

🤷‍♂️

[Math Files @Math_files]

A Fields Medalist gave AI the text of his mathematics lecture.

He didn't ask it to solve a problem.

But the AI agent unexpectedly suggested a better mathematical definition.

Maxim Kontsevich, winner of the 1998 Fields Medal, says the experience astonished him.

In a new interview, he describes how AI is beginning to contribute not just calculations and proofs, but ideas about how mathematics itself should be formulated.

Watch the full 28-minute CGTN interview:

[Miles Cranmer @MilesCranmer]

Had fun writing this talk for our MPhil students today:
"How to avoid AI Brain Rot"

Discussing how to avoid intelligence atrophy from AI use in work and study. And how to stand out on an ever-narrowing bell curve

[Miles Cranmer @MilesCranmer]

Here is the full talk:

[Jim Manico from Manicode Security @manicode]

My prediction: we’re heading toward software that continuously rewrites itself and adapts to the person using it.

Agents will increasingly improve applications and parts of their own code. Making that secure will require strict sandboxes, least privilege, and security controls the agents can’t modify themselves. A trusted authorization service should issue narrowly scoped, short-lived OAuth access tokens for specific resources and actions.

UI, workflow, and eventually more backend logic could change based on each user’s needs and behavior. Humans will soon stop manually reviewing every change. We’ll need automated testing, independent security checks, a record of exactly what ran, and reliable rollback.

I expect this to shake up both open source and proprietary software. The ability to inspect, modify, and share software will still matter. But more of our work will shift toward defining requirements, controlling access, and verifying applications that agents keep changing.

That is a much bigger shift than simply having AI write our code.

[Bernardo Quintero @bquintero]

VirusTotal is now available in ChatGPT

Scan files, URLs, and domains for potential threats, right from your chat

https://t.co/BlfJnZW4JF

[Daniel San @dani_avila7]

Anthropic released code-modernization v1.0.0, a Claude Code plugin for modernizing legacy codebases

Save this post if you have a legacy project worth modernizing

What I find interesting is that it doesn’t just rewrite code. It tries to prove the new implementation behaves like the original

Here’s how:
- Analyzes the legacy system and extracts business rules

- Generates a modernization plan for your approval

- Rewrites or upgrades the code, even across languages

- Runs the old and new implementations with identical inputs and compares outputs

- Generates additional edge cases to test behavior

- Introduces deliberate bugs to verify tests actually catch them

- Produces a verification report with PROVEN, PARTLY PROVEN, or NOT PROVEN results

It also keeps the original code untouched and requires human approval at critical steps

I think this is the right direction for AI-assisted modernization, generating new code is one thing

Proving that you haven’t broken existing behavior is a completely different challenge

Install:
/plugin install code-modernization@claude-plugins-official

Repo:
https://t.co/ezRBiO3ij3

[zack @zack_overflow]

there is zero reason to use python in 2026

it's inferior in every single way

and the only benefit it ever had (ease of use) is completely meaningless now that agents can write all the code

[Oege de Moor @oegerikus]

For the second time in Google Chrome’s history, Google awarded a $250,000 bounty for a full-chain exploit… to @XBOW. Here’s the full story:

At an all-hands at the start of 2026 in Malta, I set the team a crazy challenge. A full-chain exploit of Chrome by the annual Black Hat cybersecurity conference in August.

I believed there were few better tests of whether @XBOW could move beyond web applications to desktop software, servers and devices.

Chrome is one of the most hardened pieces of software on the planet, used by more than half the world’s population.

A full-chain exploit lets an attacker take total control of a machine, where they can read every email, password and bank login the user types. You don’t need to download anything or click a phishing link. Visiting the wrong site is enough.

So @moyix, Andres Luksenberg, Baul Lee, and Willem Pinckaers took on the challenge along with a fifth teammate: OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol.

They built a chain they thought would win, but Google told us they already knew one of the bugs.

We were already in Las Vegas for Black Hat and DEF CON, and the team didn’t want to go home without the win.

So Brendan and the agents built a new exploit in just 6 days.

We submitted it to Google and waited.

The news came through that we'd done what should’ve been impossible. A full-chain bounty of $250,000, the first awarded under Google’s 2026 rules.

It took just 6 days and $40,000 of compute to construct an exploit that affects a billion users of Chrome on Windows. An intelligence-agency veteran told me his team used to spend 6 months on this kind of vulnerability.

My takeaway: the cost of finding truly critical vulnerabilities is collapsing, for attackers and defenders alike. Restricting powerful models is not the answer; GPT-5.6 Sol is already public.

But defenders have one advantage attackers never will: they can test their own code first.

Assume your software is exploitable. Whoever is hunting your bugs has the same building blocks we did.

This is cause for urgency but not panic.

XBOW is now developing an autonomous product for testing compiled software (desktop applications, servers, embedded devices), and partnering with the world’s top organizations to design that product.

If you’d like to be one of them, get in touch.

P.S. Restart Chrome whenever the Update button appears!