All news with #adversary emulation tag

🔐 As AI-enabled attacks scale and accelerate, CISOs face a surge in exploitable vulnerabilities and must rethink vulnerability management. Experts argue that annual compliance pen tests are no longer sufficient; organizations need continuous, automated offensive security—pen testing, red teaming, and attack path validation—to prove exploitability in production. Human expertise remains critical to guide AI tools and develop future offensive security talent.

🔒 OpenAI disclosed it disrupted a coordinated distillation campaign that illicitly attempted to extract protected reasoning from its models. The activity, traced to early July 2026 and linked by OpenAI to individuals associated with Moonshot AI, scaled in late July before being halted on July 28. OpenAI described the attack as adversarial distillation and implemented mitigations, closed a replay pathway, and banned fraudulent accounts to prevent further extraction and replay of encrypted reasoning.

🔒 Offensive AI is shifting tools from drafting to autonomous action. Agentic systems can gather intelligence, craft tailored social engineering, and run exploit chains without human hands, expanding capability to unskilled actors while accelerating expert operations. Defenders must test protections with live adversarial use to understand real resilience and retain human judgment where agents remain prone to confident errors.

🔎 Adversarial AI has transformed targeted attacks into high-speed, automated campaigns that no longer require elite technical operators. Existing security architectures—fragmented, tool-heavy, and visibility-poor—fail to show defenders the chained attack paths attackers can exploit. The author argues for shifting from vulnerability counting to Exposure Management, prioritizing remediation by real exploitability and mapping environments as attacker-seen networks. Defenders retain an advantage if they synthesize cross-boundary telemetry and continuously assess validated attack paths to critical assets.

🔒 Ransomware operators are shifting from noisy, disruptive attacks to covert, long-term intrusions focused on data theft and extortion. Picus Security's Red-Teaming report—based on simulations and analysis of 1.1 million malware files and 15.5 million MITRE-mapped actions—finds most common techniques aim to remain undetected. Adversaries increasingly chain vulnerabilities, route C2 through trusted services like OpenAI and AWS, and favor persistence over immediate encryption, though some vendors dispute a reduction in overall activity.

🔐 Google’s newest GTIG AI Threat Tracker outlines rising adversarial misuse of AI, documenting how threat actors are distilling models, experimenting with agentic capabilities, and integrating AI into malware and social engineering. The report highlights activity from groups including APT31, North Korean and Iranian actors, and malware families such as HONESTCUE. It underscores growing risks from model extraction, the emergence of illicit jailbreak services like Xanthorox, and recommends that AI providers monitor API access and adopt robust defenses.

🔍 Offensive security is becoming central to enterprise defenses as CISOs increasingly add red teams and institutionalize purple teaming to surface gaps and harden controls. Practices range from traditional vulnerability management and pen testing to adversary emulation, social engineering assessments, and security-tool evasion testing. Vendors are embedding automation, analytics, and AI to boost effectiveness and lower barriers to entry. While budget, skills, and the risk of finding unfixable flaws remain obstacles, leaders say OffSec produces the data-driven evidence needed to prioritize remediation and counter more sophisticated, AI-enabled attacks.