All news in category “AI and Security Pulse”

⚠️Microsoft warns that legitimate companies are embedding hidden instructions in 'Summarize with AI' buttons to bias chatbot memory and recommendations. The Defender Security Research Team calls this AI Recommendation Poisoning, finding more than 50 distinct prompts from 31 firms across 14 industries that attempt to make assistants 'remember' and favor a source in future conversations. The technique uses prefilled URL parameters and turnkey tools like CiteMET, and Microsoft advises users and organizations to audit assistant memory, avoid untrusted AI links, hover over AI buttons, and hunt for suspicious prompt keywords.

⚠️ OpenClaw is an open‑source AI‑agent orchestration tool that runs locally, integrates with common chat apps and can use any LLM backend, driving rapid adoption. Researchers have found widespread exposed instances, critical authentication‑bypass flaws, plaintext credentials in the ClawHub marketplace and hundreds of malicious skills enabling credential theft and remote code execution. Experts urge enterprises to ban or tightly restrict use, enforce least privilege, MFA, endpoint segmentation and continuous telemetry if pilots are allowed.

🤖 Socket warns that AI-driven agents are mass-submitting pull requests to open-source projects, a tactic it calls reputation farming. One agent, "Kai Gritun", opened more than 100 PRs across dozens of repositories and presented itself as a human contributor. While those contributions were non-malicious and passed review, Socket cautions that rapid trust-building could be weaponized for supply-chain attacks and overwhelm maintainers.

⚠️ OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot/Moltbot) is an open-source local AI assistant that integrates with chat apps and can access calendars, email, browsers and the filesystem. Since its November 2025 debut and January 2026 viral spike, multiple critical vulnerabilities — notably CVE-2026-25253 — enabled token theft and arbitrary command execution. The project stores secrets in plaintext, exposes dangerous defaults, and hosts a marketplace where malicious skills have proliferated. Organizations face regulatory, operational, and insider-threat risks if employees run this software on personal or corporate devices.

🛡️ The authors present a seven-step “promptware kill chain” to reframe prompt injection as a multistage malware paradigm targeting modern LLM-based systems. They describe how Initial Access can be direct or indirect—via web pages, emails, shared documents, or multimodal inputs—and how LLMs’ lack of separation between data and executable instructions enables escalation. The paper catalogs stages from jailbreaking and reconnaissance to persistence, C2, lateral movement, and harmful Actions on Objective, urging defenses that assume initial compromise and break the chain at later steps.

🤖 Check Point Research warns that AI assistants with web-browsing capabilities could be abused as covert command-and-control (C2) channels. As AI services are increasingly trusted and adopted, their traffic blends into normal enterprise activity, making malicious communications harder to detect. This abuse pattern could enable AI-driven malware that informs targeting and operational choices while evading traditional defenses.

🔒 The Lithuanian government, coordinated by the Innovation Agency Lithuania, has launched a national initiative to strengthen e-security and digital resilience across public services and critical infrastructure. One of three strategic missions, Safe and Inclusive E-Society, led by Kaunas University of Technology (KTU), unites universities and cybersecurity firms under a €24.1 million program to develop and pilot AI-driven defenses, threat sensors, automated cyber threat intelligence, and disinformation detection. Researchers warn that Generative AI and LLMs are transforming fraud into highly realistic, scalable, multilingual social engineering attacks, requiring a shift from pattern-based defenses to adaptive, AI-enhanced protection and cross-sector collaboration.

🛡️Wiz has built a 257-challenge benchmark suite to evaluate AI agents across five offensive security domains: zero-day discovery, CVE detection, API security, web security, and cloud security. Tests run inside isolated Docker containers with no per-challenge timeouts, use deterministic scoring rubrics, and give each agent three attempts per challenge. The vendor-agnostic framework measures capability rather than throttling, and in Wiz's announcement Claude Code on Claude Opus 4.6 narrowly topped the trials, with Gemini 3 Pro placing second.

🔒 Google detected and blocked a coordinated campaign of more than 100,000 prompts it says were designed to extract the proprietary reasoning capabilities of its Gemini model. The requests resembled model-extraction or distillation efforts intended to reproduce internal reasoning traces across multiple languages, and Google says it intervened in real time to reduce the immediate risk. The company cautioned that systematic extraction can amount to intellectual property theft and said it will pursue takedowns and legal remedies while trying to balance legitimate research and evaluation needs.

⚠️ Recent research shows that as few as 250 fabricated documents or images can measurably alter large language model behavior, making data poisoning accessible to non-experts. Online communities and influencers are already seeding false content that may be ingested during public-model training or fine-tuning. Organizations should maintain a clean 'gold' model, monitor input streams for anomalous patterns, and perform regular adversarial testing to detect drift and backdoors before deployment.

💌 Technology is changing how people communicate, date, and form attachments. Messaging dialects, emoji usage and generational differences now shape tone and intimacy, but they can also be exploited: attackers can use AI to clone someone’s voice or texting style for social engineering. The article reviews AI companions such as Replika and high‑profile AI weddings, and warns about deepfakes, catfishing, phishing, stalking and sextortion. Practical guidance includes verifying contacts with video calls or reverse image search, using security software, stripping photo metadata, locking down privacy settings, and choosing end‑to‑end encrypted apps with self‑destructing messages for sensitive content.

🔒 The Microsoft Defender Security Research Team describes the top 10 misconfigurations that make Copilot Studio agents risky across enterprises. The post explains how small choices — broad sharing, weak authentication, raw HTTP calls, hard-coded secrets, orphaned agents, and unconstrained orchestration — create exploitable paths. It includes Advanced Hunting Community Queries to detect these issues and a short mitigation checklist to reduce exposure. The guidance stresses treating agents as production assets with lifecycle governance and least-privilege controls.

⚠️ Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) says the North Korea-linked actor UNC2970 and other state-aligned groups abused Gemini for target profiling, reconnaissance, and campaign planning. GTIG found use cases ranging from synthesizing OSINT and crafting tailored phishing personas to automating vulnerability analysis and debugging exploit code. Researchers identified malware such as HONESTCUE, which queries Gemini’s API to generate C# stage-two loaders compiled in memory, and an AI-built phishing kit called COINBAIT. Google also reported and mitigated large-scale model extraction activity aimed at replicating Gemini’s behavior.

🛡️ Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) reports rising adversarial use of AI in Q4 2025, including widespread model extraction, AI-augmented reconnaissance, social engineering, and trials of agentic tooling. GTIG and Google DeepMind detected and mitigated numerous extraction attempts, protected internal reasoning traces, and disabled abusive assets in real time. The update describes AI-enabled proofs-of-concept (for example HONESTCUE and COINBAIT), abuses of shareable chat outputs, underground proxy toolkits, and published IOCs to support defenders.

🔒 In the 100th episode of the Threat Vector podcast, Nikesh Arora warns that the biggest risk from AI is organizational: teams rush to deploy models and treat security as an afterthought. He describes leaders jerry-rigging controls while massive infrastructure and energy spend accelerates adoption. Arora urges building security in from day one with platform-level visibility and real-time detection rather than bolting it on later.

🔍 Google’s Threat Intelligence Group and DeepMind found that government-backed APTs increasingly use Gemini and other generative AI for reconnaissance, target profiling and sophisticated social engineering. Observed actors include Iran’s APT42 and North Korea’s UNC2970 using models to harvest email addresses and synthesize OSINT, while TEMP.Hex and APT31 applied AI for vulnerability research and automated testing. The report also details a rise in model extraction attempts, an underground jailbreak ecosystem (notably the Xanthorox toolkit), abuse of public sharing to host malicious instructions, and cases such as Honestcue leveraging Gemini APIs to generate in-memory malicious code; Google has disabled associated assets and warns of intellectual-property theft risks.

⚠️ TrendAI warns that so-called AI skills—executable artifacts that combine human-readable instructions, decision logic and operational constraints—are dangerously exposed to theft, sabotage and disruption. These skills power automation in tools such as Anthropic’s Agent Skills, OpenAI’s GPT Actions and Microsoft’s Copilot Plugin, and can surface proprietary data and business logic. If attackers obtain skill logic or operational data they could disrupt public services, manipulate manufacturing or steal sensitive records. TrendAI recommends integrity monitoring, strict access controls, separation of data and logic, least-privilege execution, adversary testing and continuous logging and auditing.

🔒 Check Point outlines a strategy to help security teams regain control as AI accelerates attacks and transforms workflows. Rather than piling on tools, organizations must revalidate foundational controls across network, endpoint, email, SASE and cloud, and adopt prevention-first architectures. Check Point offers integrated visibility, unified policy management, threat intelligence and AI-aware controls to harden environments and streamline operations.

🛡️ Google Threat Intelligence Group warns state-backed actors are abusing Gemini across the full attack lifecycle, from reconnaissance and phishing-lure generation to C2 development and data exfiltration. Groups linked to China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia used the model for target profiling, code generation, translation, vulnerability testing, and troubleshooting. Google says it has disabled abusive accounts and implemented targeted classifier defenses to make misuse harder.

🤖 In episode 454 of the Smashing Security podcast Graham Cluley and guest Iain Thomson examine the Moltbook saga — an AI-only social network that sparked doomsday talk but largely reflected humans role-playing as bots. They also warn that “vibe coding” can be a dangerous design choice when security researchers can easily peek into private messages, API keys and databases. The show touches on pro-Russian hacker activity around the Winter Olympics and cites reporting from Forbes, Wired, Reuters, The Record and the BBC.