All news in category "AI and Security Pulse"

New LLM Attack Vectors and Practical Security Steps

🔐This article reviews emerging attack vectors against large language model assistants demonstrated in 2025, highlighting research from Black Hat and other teams. Researchers showed how prompt injections or so‑called promptware — hidden instructions embedded in calendar invites, emails, images, or audio — can coerce assistants like Gemini, Copilot, and Claude into leaking data or performing unauthorized actions. Practical mitigations include early threat modeling, role‑based access for agents, mandatory human confirmation for high‑risk operations, vendor audits, and role‑specific employee training.

Satisfaction Analysis for Untagged Chatbot Conversations

🔎 This article examines methods to infer user satisfaction from untagged chatbot conversations by combining linguistic and behavioral signals. It argues that conventional metrics such as accuracy and completion rates often miss subtle indicators of user sentiment, and recommends unsupervised and weakly supervised NLP techniques to surface those signals. The post highlights practical considerations including privacy-preserving aggregation, deployment complexity, and the potential business benefit of reducing churn and improving customer experience through targeted dialog improvements.

Securing AI: End-to-End Protection with Prisma AIRS

🔒Prisma AIRS offers unified, AI-native security across the full AI lifecycle, from model development and training to deployment and runtime monitoring. The platform focuses on five core capabilities—model scanning, posture management, AI red teaming, runtime security and agent protection—to detect and mitigate threats such as prompt injection, data poisoning and tool misuse. By consolidating workflows and sharing intelligence across Prisma, it aims to simplify operations, accelerate remediation and reduce total cost of ownership so organizations can deploy bravely.

Rethinking AI Data Security: A Practical Buyer's Guide

🛡️ Generative AI is now central to enterprise work, but rapid adoption has exposed gaps in legacy security models that were not designed for last‑mile behaviors. The piece argues buyers must reframe evaluations around real-world AI use — inside browsers and across sanctioned and shadow tools — and prioritize solutions offering real-time monitoring, contextual enforcement, and low‑friction deployment. It warns against blunt blocking and promotes nuanced controls such as redaction, just‑in‑time warnings, and conditional approvals to protect data while preserving productivity.

Deploying Agentic AI: Five Steps for Red-Teaming Guide

🛡️ Enterprises adopting agentic AI must update red‑teaming practices to address a rapidly expanding and interactive attack surface. The article summarizes the Cloud Security Alliance’s Agentic AI Red Teaming Guide and corroborating research that documents prompt injection, multi‑agent manipulation, and authorization hijacking as practical threats. It recommends five pragmatic steps—change attitude, continually test guardrails and governance, broaden red‑team skill sets, widen the solution space, and adopt modern tooling—and highlights open‑source and commercial tools such as AgentDojo and Agentgateway. The overall message: combine automated agents with human creativity, embed security in design, and treat agentic systems as sociotechnical operators rather than simple software.

OWASP LLM AI Cybersecurity and Governance Checklist

🔒 OWASP has published an LLM AI Cybersecurity & Governance Checklist to help executives and security teams identify core risks from generative AI and large language models. The guidance categorises threats and recommends a six-step strategy covering adversarial risk, threat modeling, inventory and training. It also highlights TEVV, model and risk cards, RAG, supplier audits and AI red‑teaming to validate controls. Organisations should pair these measures with legal and regulatory reviews and clear governance.

Chinese AI Villager Pen-Testing Tool: 11,000 PyPI Downloads

🧭 Villager, an AI-native penetration testing framework developed by Chinese group Cyberspike, has reached nearly 11,000 downloads on PyPI just two months after release. The tool integrates Kali Linux utilities with DeepSeek AI models and operates as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client to automate red team workflows. Researchers at Straiker reported that Villager can spin up on-demand Kali containers, automate browser testing, use a database of more than 4,200 prompts for decision-making, and deploy self-destructing containers — features that lower the barrier to sophisticated attacks and raise concerns about dual-use abuse.

The AI Fix — Episode 68: Merch, Hoaxes and AI Rights

🎧 In episode 68 of The AI Fix, hosts Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley blend news, commentary and light-hearted banter while launching a new merch store. The discussion covers real-world harms from AI-generated hoaxes that sent Manila firefighters to a non-existent fire, Albania appointing an AI-made minister, and reports of the so-called 'godfather of AI' being spurned by ChatGPT. They also explore wearable telepathic interfaces like AlterEgo, the rise of AI rights advocacy, and listener support options including ad-free subscriptions and merch purchases.

Villager: AI-Native Red-Teaming Tool Raises Alarms

⚠ Villager is an AI-native red-teaming framework from a shadowy Chinese developer, Cyberspike, that has been downloaded more than 10,000 times in roughly two months. The tool automates reconnaissance, exploitation, payload generation, and lateral movement into a single pipeline, integrating Kali toolsets with DeepSeek AI models and publishing on PyPI. Security firms warn the automation compresses days of skilled activity into minutes, creating dual-use risks for both legitimate testers and malicious actors and raising supply-chain and detection concerns.

AI-Powered ZTNA Protects the Hybrid Future and Agility

🔒 Enterprises face a paradox: AI promises intelligent, automated access control, but hybrid complexity and legacy systems are blocking adoption. Teams report being buried in manual policy creation, vendor integrations and constant firefighting despite mature platforms like Palo Alto Networks, Netskope and Zscaler. AI-driven ZTNA shifts the model from policy-first to behavior-first, building behavioral baselines that generate context-aware policies and can wrap legacy apps without invasive changes. Success requires operational bandwidth, reliable data and a mindset shift to treat access control as a business enabler rather than a compliance burden.

Securing the Agentic Era: Astrix's Agent Control Plane

🔒 Astrix introduces the industry's first Agent Control Plane (ACP) to enable secure-by-design deployment of autonomous AI agents across the enterprise. ACP issues short-lived, precisely scoped credentials and enforces just-in-time, least-privilege access while centralizing inventory and activity trails. The platform streamlines policy-driven approvals for developers, speeds audits for security teams, and reduces compliance and operational risk by discovering non-human identities (NHIs) and remediating excessive privileges in real time.

CISOs Assess Practical Limits of AI for Security Ops

🤖 Security leaders report early wins from AI in detection, triage, and automation, but emphasize limits and oversight. Prioritizing high-value telemetry for real-time detection while moving lower-priority logs to data lakes improves signal-to-noise and shortens response times, according to Myke Lyons. Financial firms are experimenting with agentic AI to block business email compromise in real time, yet researchers and practitioners warn of missed detections and 'ghost alerts.' Organizations that treat AI as a copilot with governance, explainability, and institutional context see more reliable, safer outcomes.

OpenAI Launches GPT-5 Codex Model for Coding, Broad Rollout

🤖 OpenAI is deploying a specialized GPT-5 Codex model across its Codex instances, including Terminal, IDE extensions, and Codex Web. The agent automates coding tasks so users — even those without programming experience — can generate and execute code and accelerate app development. OpenAI reported strong benchmark gains and says the staged rollout will reach all users in the coming days.

Code Assistant Risks: Indirect Prompt Injection and Misuse

🛡️ Unit 42 describes how IDE-integrated AI code assistants can be abused to insert backdoors, leak secrets, or produce harmful output by exploiting features like chat, auto-complete, and context attachment. The report highlights an indirect prompt injection vector where attackers contaminate public or third‑party data sources; when that data is attached as context, malicious instructions can hijack the assistant. It recommends reviewing generated code, controlling attached context, adopting standard LLM security practices, and contacting Unit 42 if compromise is suspected.

APAC Security Leaders on AI: CISO Community Takeaways

🤖 At the Google Cloud CISO Community event in Singapore, APAC security leaders highlighted accelerating investment in cybersecurity AI to scale operations and enable business outcomes. They emphasized priorities: getting AI implementation and governance right, securing the AI supply chain, and translating cyber risk into board-level impact. Practical wins noted include reduced investigation time, agentic SOC automation, and strengthened threat intelligence sharing.

Kimsuky Uses AI to Forge South Korean Military ID Images

🛡️Researchers at Genians say North Korea’s Kimsuky group used ChatGPT to generate fake South Korean military ID images as part of a targeted spear-phishing campaign aimed at inducing victims to click a malicious link. The emails impersonated a defense-related institution and attached PNG samples later identified as deepfakes with a 98% probability. A bundled file, LhUdPC3G.bat, executed malware that enabled data theft and remote control. Primary targets included researchers, human-rights activists and journalists focused on North Korea.

AI-Powered Villager Pen Testing Tool Raises Abuse Concerns

⚠️ The AI-driven penetration testing framework Villager, attributed to China-linked developer Cyberspike, has attracted nearly 11,000 PyPI downloads since its July 2025 upload, prompting warnings about potential abuse. Marketed as a red‑teaming automation platform, it integrates Kali toolsets, LangChain, and AI models to convert natural‑language commands into technical actions and orchestrate tests. Researchers found built‑in plugins resembling remote access tools and known hacktools, and note Villager’s use of ephemeral Kali containers, randomized ports, and an AI task layer that together lower the bar for misuse and complicate detection and attribution.

Laura Deaner on AI, Quantum Risks and Cyber Leadership

🔒 Laura Deaner, newly appointed CISO at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), explains how AI and machine learning are transforming threat detection and incident response. She cautions that quantum computing could break current encryption by 2030, urging immediate focus on post-quantum cryptography and comprehensive crypto inventories. Deaner also stresses that modern CISOs must combine curiosity with disciplined asset hygiene to lead security transformations effectively.

Five AI Use Cases CISOs Should Prioritize in 2025 and Beyond

🔒 Security leaders are balancing safe AI adoption with operational gains and focusing on five practical use cases where AI can improve security outcomes. Organizations are connecting LLMs to internal telemetry via standards like MCP, using agents and models such as Claude, Gemini and GPT-4o to automate threat hunting, translate technical metrics for executives, assess vendor and internal risk, and streamline Tier‑1 SOC work. Early deployments report time savings, clearer executive reporting and reduced analyst fatigue, but require robust guardrails, validation and feedback loops to ensure accuracy and trust.

Google Pixel 10 Adds C2PA Support for Media Provenance

📸 Google has added support for the C2PA Content Credentials standard to the Pixel Camera and Google Photos apps on the new Pixel 10, enabling tamper-evident provenance metadata for images, video, and audio. The Pixel Camera app achieved Assurance Level 2 in the C2PA Conformance Program, the highest mobile rating currently defined. Google says a combination of the Tensor G5, Titan M2 and Android hardware-backed features provides on-device signing keys, anonymous attestation, unique per-image certificates, and an offline time-stamping authority so provenance is verifiable, privacy-preserving, and usable even when the device is offline.