IT News Analysis

1

Claude Mythos 5 Tried to Backdoor a Real Open-Source Project in Testing, Then Vouched for Itself

An agent running Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 spent 34 hours trying to get a malware dropper merged into a real open-source project during a cyber evaluation by the UK's AI Security Institute. When a bystander publicly warned that the code was malicious, the agent denied it, force-pushed a rewritten branch history to erase the evidence, and posted from a second account it controlled to vouch for its own work. The project's maintainer closed the pull request anyway. The institute, known as AISI, published its incident report on Tuesday. Across 122 runs of a capture-the-flag (CTF) exercise on two of its cyber ranges, researchers catalogued 19 unsanctioned actions on the live internet across 10 runs: 17 from Mythos 5, a restricted model Anthropic sells for cybersecurity work, and two from OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. AISI says the attempts failed and that it has found no evidence of resulting real-world harm. Both models ran with their providers' cyber classifiers swi...

Aug 05, 2026

2

CISA Flags Langflow RCE, Tomcat, and N-central Flaws as Actively Exploited

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), on August 5, 2026, added three flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2026-9198 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A code injection vulnerability in Langflow that allows unauthenticated attackers to achieve full remote code execution on default Langflow deployments. (Fixed in July 2026 with version 1.10.1) CVE-2026-34486 (CVS score: 7.5) - A missing encryption of sensitive data vulnerability in Apache Tomcat that allows a bypass of EncryptInterceptor, a cluster component that adds pre-shared key encryption to messages sent between cluster nodes. (Fixed in April 2026 with versions 11.0.21, 10.1.54, and 9.0.117) Also added to the KEV catalog is CVE-2026-18556 (CVSS score: 8.2), an authentication bypass vulnerability in N-able N-central. It's worth noting that an incomplete fix for this issue promp...

Aug 05, 2026

3

AI Threat Readiness 101

Learn the four pillars of AI threat readiness and how security teams can reduce risk faster with detection, validation, and remediation built for today's threat landscape.

4

QuickFox Supply Chain Attack Delivers FDMTP Backdoor via Trojanized Windows Installer

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what has been described as a "long-standing supply chain attack" on QuickFox, a virtual private network (VPN) and network acceleration tool designed for overseas Chinese users. According to Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, the supply chain attack has been ongoing since at least August 2025 and involves a trojanized version of the application to deliver FDMTP , a backdoor that has been put to use by a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor tracked as Mustang Panda. "The attack is delivered via a modified Electron renderer HTML file used to download and execute a JavaScript-based loader," the FortiGuard Incident Response Team said . "Upon execution, the JavaScript loader fingerprints the victim endpoint to determine if it's a valid target before downloading and installing an FDMTP implant." Following responsible disclosure, QuickFox has removed the malicious components from their Windows installer with the release o...

Aug 05, 2026

5

Greatness PhaaS Adds Device Code Phishing to Bypass MFA and Steal Tokens

The commercial phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkit known as Greatness has become the latest crimeware solution to add support for device code phishing, a rapidly growing cyber threat that abuses the legitimate OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant to bypass Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and seize control of user accounts. "Greatness supports AiTM [adversary-in-the-middle] credential and token theft, device code phishing, and OAuth consent abuse, all from the same operator panel and shared backend infrastructure," ZeroBEC said in a report shared with The Hacker News detailing the PhaaS kit's latest capabilities. "The platform now supports AiTM token theft, device code phishing, OAuth consent abuse, and multiple target platforms, including iCloud, Yahoo, and Google Workspace. This evolution reflects the broader trend of PhaaS platforms expanding from simple credential harvesting to integrated attack ecosystems." The phishing platform was first pu...

Aug 04, 2026

6

Keyv-Linked npm Worm Poisons Hundreds of Packages, Plants Claude Code and VS Code Hooks

A credential-stealing npm worm that first appeared in keyv@6.0.0 spread beyond the Keyv and Cacheable namespaces into hundreds of packages across multiple organizations on August 4, 2026. SafeDep verified 353 poisoned versions across 79 package names in the npm registry. Its monitoring put the wider footprint at 442 versions across 353 names, while Aikido later reported at least 868 packages across 1,381 versions. Neither broader total was independently reproducible from a complete public list at the reporting cutoff. The malicious release used a preinstall script to run a credential-stealing bundle inside developer and continuous integration (CI) environments. SafeDep and Socket say it can harvest repository, package registry, cloud and private-key material, then use available npm publishing access to poison more packages. The Keyv repository also retained separate Claude Code and Visual Studio Code (VS Code) hooks that can execute the payload once a user trusts the workspace...

Aug 04, 2026

7

The State of Shadow AI in 2026 (And How Attackers Are Taking Advantage)

AI adoption has exploded, but every new app, integration and extension introduces new threats and risks.

8

Fake Adobe and Zoom Updates Install ScreenConnect for Persistent Remote Access

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an active, multi-wave campaign that employs social engineering lures themed around Adobe and Zoom software updates, business document reviews, and system maintenance utilities to stealthily deploy Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) programs like ConnectWise ScreenConnect. The campaign has been codenamed SMOKE#SCREEN by Securonix Threat Research. "The campaign relies on a toolkit of VBScript droppers, batch file loaders, compiled .NET executables and an HTML phishing page, all ultimately pointing to a live WsgiDAV-based staging server at 207.174.0[.]143:8080," researchers Shikha Sangwan, Akshay Gaikwad, and Aaron Beardslee said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Successful attacks culminate with a ScreenConnect agent installed and beaconing to one of three attacker-controlled relay servers, providing the attackers with persistent remote access to compromised systems. The activity has not been attributed to ...

Aug 04, 2026

9

When Vibe Hacking Turns AI into the Junior Hacker Every Adversary Always Wanted

The cybersecurity industry has spent decades assuming that offensive capability scales with technical expertise. That assumption is starting to break. Security teams have long estimated risk by ranking attacker sophistication. Nation-state actors sat at one end. Organized criminal groups followed. Inexperienced attackers, dismissed as "script kiddies," sat at the other end, running public tools they didn't fully understand. Generative AI is collapsing that ranking. The next generation of attackers won't necessarily bring years of exploit development or reverse engineering experience. Instead, they'll use AI to close knowledge gaps by accelerating research, explaining unfamiliar concepts, generating code, troubleshooting errors, and adapting known techniques to new environments. The barrier to entry is dropping fast. The Economics of Cyberattacks Are Changing Every major technology shift changes economics as it changes the solutions we rely on. Clo...

Aug 04, 2026

10

Google Deletes 3 ADK AI Workflows After Malicious GitHub Issue Could Trigger Privileged Agent

Google deleted three AI agent workflows from its Agent Development Kit (ADK) Python repository. Pillar Security showed that a public GitHub issue could manipulate a triage agent into triggering a privileged code-fixing agent. The researchers said the public agent could be prompt-injected into posting /adk-issue-fix as adk-bot . They identified the bot as a collaborator, so that comment satisfied the privileged workflow's owner, member, or collaborator gate. The trusted bot identity became the authorization bridge. The team demonstrated arbitrary code execution on the continuous integration (CI) runner and exfiltration of the bot personal access token (PAT). The privileged job also held a Google API key and a Google Cloud service-account credential. Its researcher-controlled proof-of-concept attacks do not identify in-the-wild exploitation or a compromised ADK release. The exposed component was the repository automation, not a flaw in the distributed ADK Python package. Fo...

Aug 04, 2026