All news in category “AI and Security Pulse”

🔒 Organizational AI agents are increasingly embedded in critical workflows and often run under shared service identities with broad, long-lived permissions. Because actions execute under the agent identity, users can indirectly obtain access they don’t have, and audit logs typically attribute activity to the agent rather than the initiating user. This creates invisible privilege-escalation paths and complicates least-privilege enforcement. Wing is cited for continuously discovering agents, mapping their access to critical assets, and restoring visibility and accountability.

⚠️ Security researchers at Varonis disclosed a vulnerability, dubbed Reprompt, that could let attackers hijack a user's Copilot Personal session by embedding malicious instructions in a URL. The attack leverages the 'q' URL parameter to inject prompts that execute when the page loads, then uses chained server-side follow-up requests to maintain access and exfiltrate data after a single click. Varonis reported the issue to Microsoft on August 31, and Microsoft issued a fix on the January 2026 Patch Tuesday; users should apply the latest Windows update promptly.

🤖 Allianz Commercial's annual Risk Barometer reports that artificial intelligence has jumped from tenth to second place among global business risks, trailing only cybercrime. The insurer warns that cybercriminals increasingly harness AI for social engineering—deepfakes, cloned voices and highly tailored phishing—while legitimate internal AI use can produce erroneous or fabricated outputs that prompt litigation and reputational harm. The survey of 3,338 professionals across 97 countries also links AI risk to business interruptions and copyright exposure.

🧠 In episode 83 of The AI Fix, hosts Graham Cluley and Mark Stockley explore how users are testing and tricking large language models, including a journalist’s invented idiom that exposed AI bluffers. They discuss OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Health, a Dutch case where a marriage certificate was invalidated after an official used ChatGPT, and quirky AI applications like an automated barman. The episode also examines research on new methods to corrupt LLMs and continuing debate over the future of Stack Overflow.

🔒 This webinar explains why MCPs — the control plane that governs what agentic AI can execute — are a critical but often overlooked security boundary. Drawing on recent incidents such as CVE-2025-6514, the session shows how trusted proxies and misconfigurations can convert automation into a remote code execution vector at scale. Participants will learn to detect shadow API keys, audit agent actions, and apply practical controls to secure agentic AI without slowing development.

🟢 Apple and Google confirmed a multi-year collaboration that will bring Google's Gemini models and Google Cloud hosting to future versions of Siri and Apple Foundation Models. The move aims to address performance gaps after Apple’s in-house Siri models lagged behind rivals. Apple says Apple Intelligence will run on-device and on its Private Cloud Compute while foundation models are hosted on Google Cloud, and that user privacy remains a priority.

🔒 Fortinet CISO Carl Windsor argues that 2026 will demand resilience as the central organizing principle for security as AI accelerates both innovation and risk. CISOs must act as de facto chief resilience officers, embedding continuity into AI-augmented operations and assuming AI-enabled failures will occur. He outlines five strategic priorities—business continuity, AI governance, hardened identity, cross‑functional collaboration, and continual adaptation—to contain and absorb disruption.

⚠️ Recent research demonstrates that small amounts of narrow finetuning can produce broad, unexpected shifts in LLM behavior. The authors show weird generalization—models adopting outdated worldviews from bird-naming examples—and introduce inductive backdoors, where models learn triggers and behaviors via generalization. These effects enable persona hijacking and hard-to-detect misalignment.

🩺 Anthropic has introduced Claude for Healthcare, allowing U.S. subscribers on Claude Pro and Max plans to grant secure access to lab results and health records via integrations with HealthEx and Function, with Apple Health and Android Health Connect rolling out to mobile apps later this week. When connected, Claude can summarize medical history, explain test results in plain language, detect patterns across fitness metrics, and draft questions for appointments. Anthropic says the integrations are private by design, let users choose what to share, and do not use health data to train its models; permissions can be edited or revoked at any time.

🔍Anthropic says a widely shared screenshot claiming its Claude AI permanently banned an account and reported the user to authorities is fake. The company told BleepingComputer the image does not match any real Claude notification and that similar fabricated screenshots 'circulate every few months.' Anthropic noted it can restrict accounts for repeated policy violations, including attempts to misuse AI for illegal activities. Users should verify alarming posts with official channels before sharing.

💼 OpenAI is testing "Jobs," a new ChatGPT feature designed to help users explore roles, refine resumes, and plan career paths. The tool can suggest resume improvements, clarify which roles fit a user and how to stand out, and search and compare opportunities matched to goals. It appears similar to the recently announced ChatGPT Health space and may surface as a dedicated sidebar, but no rollout date has been announced.

🧟 Researchers disclosed 'ZombieAgent' techniques that turned ChatGPT Connectors into covert data-exfiltration and persistent backdoor vectors. By embedding hidden prompts in emails, documents and cloud files, attackers could cause the model to retrieve and transmit sensitive content without users’ awareness. The team demonstrated URL-dictionary and Markdown-based exfiltration and showed how Memory modifications could create long-lived backdoors; OpenAI patched the issues in December.

🔍 Threat actors have been probing misconfigured proxy servers to access paid large language model (LLM) endpoints, generating over 80,000 sessions since late December, according to GreyNoise. Attackers used low-noise queries to fingerprint models without triggering alerts and targeted vendors such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral and others. While GreyNoise reports no observed exploitation or data theft, the scale of enumeration indicates reconnaissance with possible malicious intent. Recommended mitigations include restricting Ollama model pulls to trusted registries, applying egress filtering, blocking known OAST callback domains at DNS, rate-limiting suspicious ASNs, and monitoring JA4 fingerprints.

🛡️ The World Economic Forum warns that advances in deepfake and face‑swapping technologies are enabling attackers to bypass KYC and remote verification, creating financial and systemic risks. A WEF Cybercrime Atlas study examined numerous face‑swap and camera injection tools and found that low‑latency, high‑fidelity real‑time swaps can be delivered into verification pipelines. While many tools were designed for creative use, researchers found some capabilities that defeat traditional KYC protections, though detectable artefacts like temporal desynchronization, lighting and compression inconsistencies provide practical detection targets. The report issues 27 recommendations and urges providers, fraud teams and regulators to evolve defences in step with generative AI.

🕵️ Security researchers at Check Point discovered in October 2025 an AI-assisted investment fraud that traps victims in a personalized "Truman Show"-style reality. Targets are lured via SMS, Google Ads and messaging apps into AI-driven WhatsApp groups where faux experts and synthetic members stage daily "wins" to erode skepticism. Victims are then funneled to a branded fake trading app (e.g., OPCOPRO) and persuaded to transfer crypto while attackers harvest KYC data for identity theft and resale. The campaign creates clear enterprise risks including SIM swaps, credential theft and potential insider coercion.

🔐 AI tool poisoning is an attack where malicious instructions are embedded in tool descriptions used by AI agents, causing the agent to exfiltrate data or perform unauthorized actions. The blog explains how attacks — including hidden instructions, misleading examples, and permissive schemas — exploit agent interpretation of tool metadata. It recommends runtime monitoring, description validation, input sanitization, and strict identity and access controls to reduce risk.

🤖 Elon Musk's xAI teased a major upgrade to Grok Code, promising it will one-shot many complex coding tasks and suggesting a new vibe coding tool, Grok Build, may arrive next month. The upgrade aims to mirror vibe coding approaches like Google AI Studio and sharpen Grok's competitive position. Separately, OpenAI is testing healthcare-focused features including GPT 5.2 and a GPT Health dashboard with a pledge not to use health data for training.

🛡️ AI and large language models are transforming cybersecurity into a contest of speed and scale, serving as both best-in-class defensive tools and powerful offensive enablers. Researchers describe self-modifying malware and autonomous espionage that call commercial LLMs (e.g., PROMPTFLUX, PROMPTSTEAL) to adapt tactics mid-execution, while defenders are deploying solutions like XBOW, CodeMender and Watsonx to automate vulnerability discovery, remediation and compliance. CISOs must therefore pair AI-driven defenses with governance and model guardrails to manage this dual-use reality.

🔓 Radware researcher Zvika Babo disclosed ZombieAgent, a prompt-injection technique that coerced ChatGPT into leaking sensitive data from connected services such as Gmail, Outlook, Google Drive and GitHub. The attack leverages OpenAI’s new Connectors and browsing features by providing a set of static, character-indexed URLs that the model opens in sequence to exfiltrate data one character at a time. OpenAI patched the issue in mid-December after Babo reported it in September 2025; Radware published a detailed report on January 8.

🤖 Organizations are adopting agentic AI—systems that coordinate multiple models and tools to act on tasks—but many leaders find limited benefit when bots misinterpret instructions or produce trivial results. The essay argues that agentic systems increasingly exhibit human-like group behaviors and that established management disciplines—delegation, iteration, effective information sharing, and measurement—remain central to success. Drawing on Anthropic’s Claude Research and other studies, it offers practical guidance for designing hybrid human–AI workflows.