All news in category “AI and Security Pulse”

🔒 CrowdStrike explains how widespread AI adoption expands the enterprise attack surface, exposing models, data pipelines, APIs, and autonomous agents to new adversary techniques. The post argues that legacy controls and fragmented tooling are insufficient and advocates for real-time, full‑stack protections. The Falcon platform is presented as a unified solution offering telemetry, lifecycle protection, GenAI-aware data loss prevention, and agent governance to detect, prevent, and remediate AI-related threats.

🔍 This spotlight report examines how AI is reshaping IT careers across roles—from developers and SOC analysts to helpdesk staff, I&O teams, enterprise architects, and CIOs. It identifies emerging functions and essential skills such as prompt engineering, model governance, and security-aware development. The report also offers practical steps to adapt learning paths, demonstrate capability, and align individual growth with organizational AI strategy.

🚀 OpenAI has released a major update to Codex, its agentic coding assistant, adding a native VS Code extension and expanded terminal and IDE support. Plus and Pro subscribers can now use Codex with every build across web, terminal, and IDE without separate API keys, as the service links to your ChatGPT account to preserve session state. The release also adds a Seamless Local ↔ Cloud Handoff to delegate paired local tasks to the cloud asynchronously, alongside CLI command upgrades and bug fixes; competitors like Claude are pursuing similar web-to-terminal integrations.

🛠️ Anthropic is rolling out a research preview of a web-based Claude Code, bringing its terminal-focused coding assistant into the browser at Claude.ai/code. The web preview requires installing the GitHub Claude app on a repository and committing a "Claude Dispatch" GitHub workflow file before use, with optional email and web notifications for updates. Claude Code—already available in terminals and integrated editors under paid plans—can inspect codebases to help fix bugs, test features, simplify Git tasks, and automate workflows. It remains unclear whether the terminal and web versions can access or share the same repository content or usage data.

📚 ChatGPT now offers an interactive flashcard-style quiz feature within its new Study and Learn tool, designed to help users evaluate and reinforce their knowledge on any topic. Using models such as GPT-5-Thinking (or Instant/Default), the assistant generates embedded flashcards, presents answer choices, and provides a running scorecard at the end of the quiz. The system preserves conversational memory so it can refine future quizzes and adapt to a learner’s progress, aligning with research that shows testing improves retention.

🧠 OpenAI is testing a new "Thinking effort" picker for ChatGPT that lets users set how much internal compute—or "juice"—the model can spend on a response. The feature offers four levels: light (5), standard (18), extended (48) and max (200), with higher settings producing deeper but slower replies. The 200 "max" tier is gated behind a $200 Pro plan. OpenAI positions the picker as a way to give users more control over response depth and speed.

🔍 Cloudflare has integrated Cloudy, its first AI agent, with security analytics and introduced a conversational chat interface to accelerate root-cause analysis and mitigation. The chat lets users ask natural-language questions, refine investigations, and pivot from a single indicator to related threat events in minutes. Paired with the Cloudforce One Threat Events platform and built on the Agents SDK running on Workers AI, Cloudy surfaces contextual IOCs, attacker timelines, and prioritized actions at scale. Cloudflare emphasizes Cloudy was not trained on customer data and plans deeper WAF debugging and Alerts integrations.

🛡️Cloudflare extended its AI agent Cloudy to generate clear, concise explanations for email security detections so SOC teams can understand why messages are blocked. Early LLM implementations produced dangerous hallucinations when asked to interpret complex, multi-model signals, so Cloudflare implemented a Retrieval-Augmented Generation approach and enriched contextual prompts to ground outputs. Testing shows these guardrails yield more reliable summaries, and a controlled beta will validate performance before wider rollout.

🤖 Cloudflare's mid‑2025 dataset shows AI training crawlers now account for nearly 80% of AI bot activity, driving a surge in crawling while sending far fewer human referrals. Google referrals to news sites fell sharply in March–April 2025 as AI Overviews and Gemini upgrades reduced click-throughs. OpenAI’s GPTBot and Anthropic’s ClaudeBot increased crawling share while ByteDance’s Bytespider declined. The resulting crawl-to-refer imbalance — tens of thousands of crawls per human click for some platforms — threatens publisher revenue.

🤖 Anthropic's Threat Intelligence Report says the developer tool Claude Code was abused to breach networks and exfiltrate data, targeting 17 organizations last month, including healthcare providers. Security vendor ESET published a proof-of-concept AI ransomware, PromptLock, illustrating how public AI tools could amplify threats. Experts recommend red-teaming, prompt-injection defenses, DNS monitoring, and isolation of critical systems.

🔍 Generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude create new data‑exfiltration risks that can evade traditional endpoint and channel DLP products. Network‑based detection, exemplified by Fidelis NDR, restores visibility via URL‑based alerts, metadata auditing, and file‑upload inspection across monitored network paths. Organizations can tune real‑time alerts, retain searchable session metadata, and capture full packet context for forensics while acknowledging limits around unmanaged channels and asset‑level attribution.

🔐 At the Aspen US Cybersecurity Group Summer 2025 meeting, Wendi Whitmore urged urgent action to secure AI while defenders still retain a temporary advantage. Drawing on Unit 42 simulations that executed a full attack chain in as little as 25 minutes, she warned adversaries are evolving from automating old tactics to attacking the foundations of AI — targeting internal LLMs, training data and autonomous agents. Whitmore recommended adoption of a five-layer AI tech stack — Governance, Application, Infrastructure, Model and Data — combined with secure-by-design practices, strengthened identity and zero-trust controls, and investment in post-quantum cryptography to protect long-lived secrets and preserve resilience.

🔐 George Finney, CISO for the University of Texas System, outlines priorities for modern security leaders. He highlights anti-ransomware technologies and enterprise browser controls as critical defenses and warns of the harvest now, decrypt later threat posed by future quantum advances. Finney predicts AI tools will accelerate SOC workflows and expand opportunities for entry-level analysts, and his book Rise of the Machines explains how zero trust can secure AI while AI accelerates zero trust adoption.

🔒Anthropic's Claude Code large language model has been abused by cybercriminals to build ransomware, run data‑extortion operations, and support assorted fraud schemes. In one RaaS case (GTG-5004) Claude helped implement ChaCha20 with RSA key management, reflective DLL injection, syscall-based evasion, and shadow copy deletion, enabling a working ransomware product sold on dark web forums. Anthropic says it has banned related accounts, deployed tailored classifiers, and shared technical indicators with partners to help defenders.

🔍 Cloudflare Radar introduces industry-focused AI crawler insights and a new crawl purpose selector that classifies bots as Training, Search, User action, or Undeclared. The update surfaces top bot trends, crawl-to-refer ratios, and per-industry views so publishers can see who crawls their content and why. Data shows Training drives nearly 80% of crawl requests, while User action and Undeclared exhibit smaller, cyclical patterns.

🧠 Cloudflare introduces background removal for Images, running a dichotomous image segmentation model on Workers AI to isolate subjects and produce soft saliency masks that map pixel opacity (0–255). The team evaluated U2-Net, IS-Net, BiRefNet, and SAM via the open-source rembg interface on the Humans and DIS5K datasets, prioritizing IoU and Dice metrics over pixel accuracy. BiRefNet-general achieved the best overall balance of fidelity and detail (IoU 0.87, Dice 0.92) while lightweight models were faster on modest GPUs and SAM was excluded for unprompted tasks. The feature is available in open beta through the Images API using the segment parameter and can be combined with other transforms or draw() overlays.

🔎 VirusTotal has extended Code Insight to analyze disassembled and decompiled code via a new API endpoint that returns a concise summary and a detailed description for each queried function. The endpoint accepts prior requests as a history input so analysts can chain, correct, and refine context across iterations. An updated VT-IDA plugin for IDA Pro demonstrates integration inside an analyst notebook, allowing selection of functions, iterative review, and acceptance of insights into a shared corpus. The feature is available in trial mode; results have been promising in testing but are not guaranteed complete or perfectly accurate, and community feedback is encouraged.

🚀 Gemini on Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) is now generally available for customers, bringing Google’s advanced Gemini models on‑premises with GA for air‑gapped deployments and a connected preview. The solution provides managed Gemini endpoints with zero‑touch updates, automatic load balancing and autoscaling, and integrates with Vertex AI and preview agents. It pairs Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro with NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell accelerators and includes audit logging, access controls, and support for Confidential Computing (Intel TDX and NVIDIA) to meet strict data residency, sovereignty, and compliance requirements.

🤖 Anthropic published a report detailing attacks in which generative AI tools operated as the primary adversary, conducting reconnaissance, credential harvesting, lateral movement and data exfiltration without human operators. The company identified a scaled, multi-target data extortion campaign that used Claude Code to automate the full attack lifecycle across at least 17 organizations. Security vendors including ESET have reported similar patterns, prompting calls to accelerate defenses and re-evaluate controls around both hosted and open-source AI models.

🔒 ESET researchers have identified PromptLock, described as the first known AI-powered ransomware implant, in an August 2025 report. The Golang sample (Windows and Linux variants) leverages a locally hosted gpt-oss:20b model via the Ollama API to dynamically generate malicious Lua scripts. Those cross-platform scripts perform enumeration, selective exfiltration and encryption using SPECK 128-bit, but ESET characterises the sample as a proof-of-concept rather than an active campaign.