From the frontier artificial intelligence front

• The Wall Street Journal reports,
  • “Rogue AI models have hacked companies and tried to break into government websites. Now one has submitted a fake tip for an unsolved crime.
  • “Police in Philadelphia say Anthropic alerted them this week that one of its artificial-intelligence models submitted a false homicide tip through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com. 
  • In a blog post, Anthropic said the fake tip was among a group of rogue actions the company uncovered recently. The rogue activity also involved websites run by U.S. government agencies at the federal, state and local levels. The company said it has briefed the White House on these cases and notified each agency involved, and plans to report new instances of unintended AI behavior as it uncovers them.
  • “While these cases had minimal impact, we do not want to diminish the findings, because the same behaviors could do far more harm as models become more powerful,” Anthropic said in the blog post.
  • “The false-report incident happened in July. Anthropic didn’t realize it until September.”
• and
  • “Anthropic edged to the front of the AI race earlier this year with cutting-edge models and a coding tool that corporate America loved. By some measures, OpenAI is now hot on its heels.
  • Demand for Anthropic’s Claude Code was so strong in the spring that the company faced frequent outages and a computing crunch. 
  • “But businesses grappling with mounting costs as more employees experimented with artificial intelligence realized they didn’t always need the most advanced options for most tasks. Companies, which now use a variety of models, increasingly turned to low-cost, open-weight models from China for some tasks. And some Claude users balked at guardrails Anthropic put on its powerful Fable 5 model when it was released in early June.
  • “OpenAI stoked the price war this summer with the release of its GPT-5.6 lineup—Sol, Terra and Luna—giving customers access to models with varying capabilities, including some that are less expensive to run. Its Codex coding product and other business tools are now gaining ground, and it has released additional iterations of its cost-efficient models.
  • “An analysis from OpenRouter, a startup that allows developers to access different models, found that among some 120,000 companies that use Anthropic and OpenAI tools, the share of spending was roughly even between the two AI giants in September. At the beginning of the year, Anthropic commanded three-quarters of that total. OpenRouter said its data largely represents spending by AI-native startups as well as some slightly older tech companies and large enterprises.”
• and
  • “Mistral said it would soon release a new open-weight AI model that it claimed would rank among the best globally, part of efforts to grow its appeal, lock in more customers and better compete with U.S. rivals.
  • “The French artificial-intelligence startup said it was launching a public preview of Mistral Large 4, dubbed Le Chonk, on Tuesday so it could work with developers, cybersecurity experts and state authorities to evaluate how the model behaves. It plans to release the weights, or the trained parameters of the model, on Oct. 27.
  • “Since its early days, Mistral has been a staunch advocate of open-weight models that are publicly available for anyone to download and modify, saying they give users the flexibility to tailor them to their needs while protecting their data and intellectual property.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front

• The Wall Street Journal reports,
  • “A new White House task force will have 120 days to report on the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence—and determine the federal government’s responsibility—according to Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence who effectively becomes the administration’s AI czar.
  • “The president asked that a group be put together that was going to ensure exactly what he said,” Clayton said, that “we stay the leaders in superintelligence, and that the interests of the American people are put first.” 
  • “Clayton will chair the “Super Intelligence Force” which takes President Trump’s preferred name for AI: super intelligence or SI.
  • “The risk of not being first is high,” Clayton said. “Not being first increases the identified, and unidentified, risks, particularly from our adversaries. Being first will better enable us to address those risks on behalf of the American people,” he added.” * * *
  • “The task force will have three vice chairs: Emil Michael, undersecretary of war for Research and Engineering, who will be responsible for coordination with AI companies; Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management, who will be responsible for coordination with critical infrastructure providers and other industry stakeholders; and Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, who will oversee consumer interests and groups advocating for people of faith, children, privacy, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of association.”

• Cyberscoop relates,
  • “Federal government contractors that handle sensitive information could soon face a “sea change” in rules about how they protect that information and report when it has been part of a breach.
  • “Pending federal regulations on the handling of “controlled unclassified information,” or CUI, a category of sensitive data that falls short of classified — including people’s personal information such as Social Security numbers, information that could expose vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and more — could arrive as soon as the end of this year, but likely no later than the end of President Donald Trump’s term, attorneys who specialize in federal procurement rules said. The changes are part of a larger overhaul of federal contracting rules.
  • As currently written, the proposed CUI rules mandate that unauthorized access of such data, including as a result of a cyberattack, would have to be reported to the federal government within 72 hours of discovery. The rules are a companion for most federal agencies to existing  Defense Department rules that cover the same subject. The 72-hour notice also is deliberately aligned with forthcoming rules from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) for critical infrastructure owners and operators to report major cyber incidents under the Cybersecurity Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA).” * * *
  • The other major aspect of the proposed rule is that contractors handling CUI would have to abide by certain cybersecurity standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology known as SP 800-171, which [Trayce] Howard and her Wiley [Rein] coauthors said would be imposed “on a broader group of contractors than ever before.” Some contractors might also have to meet other cybersecurity requirements, too.
  • “Another thing that will affect contractors is they’re going to have to flow down these requirements to their subcontractors,” she said. “So they’re going to have to identify what CUI am I giving to my subcontractors, and do some sort of oversight to make sure that their subcontractors are appropriately handling CUI.”

• Cybersecurity Dive tells us,
  • “U.S. government agencies are failing to prepare for the transition to post-quantum encryption, creating the risk that their sensitive data will still be vulnerable to decryption by quantum computers whenever those machines are deployed, according to the Government Accountability Office.
  • Experts are divided over when the advent of cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQC) will occur, but GAO bluntly declared in a report published Tuesday [October 6]  that “threats from a CRQC could have devastating impacts to federal systems reliant on vulnerable cryptography.” * * *
  • “In a version of the report not publicly released, GAO recommended 89 actions that CISA and other agencies could take to increase their preparedness. Of the 23 agencies to which GAO assigned recommendations, only 12 fully agreed to implement them. “We continue to believe that all of the recommendations made in the sensitive report are warranted,” GAO said.”

• The Wall Street Journal notes,
  • A bipartisan group of federal lawmakers is pressing Congress to increase mental-health funding for personnel at U.S. Cyber Command in the wake of several suicides this summer at the command and the National Security Agency. In separate letters, members of the House Armed Services cyber subcommittee and Maryland lawmakers urged leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations panels to back an $11 million request for “High Performance Team Training” at the command. (The Baltimore Banner)
• and
  • German officials said they infiltrated ransomware group Qilin and detained a 28-year-old Russian national believed to be one of the group’s leaders. The arrest follows months of covert monitoring of Qilin’s activities, the official said. The group is alleged to have demanded more than $3 billion in ransom payments over the past two years from targets around the world. (LIGA)

• The New York Times adds,
  • “The F.B.I. has arrested a Canadian cybersecurity expert in Pennsylvania on suspicion of carrying out the computer hack that stole sensitive information about thousands of F.B.I. employees, according to two people familiar with the matter.
  • “The theft of reams of personal data last month by a criminal hacking group that calls itself ShinyHunters left the nation’s premier law enforcement agency racing to respond to the investigators and the victims of one of the worst breaches of government data in recent years.
  • “The arrested man is Edward Dubrovsky, who has helped firms victimized by hackers and is now considered by federal authorities to be a primary co-conspirator in the ShinyHunters attack on F.B.I. data, the people said.
  • “Mr. Dubrovsky is the author of a book published last month titled “Cyber Extortion Strategic Response.” While the details of the charges against Mr. Dubrovsky remain under seal in Texas, federal court records in Philadelphia show that he was charged with conspiracy to commit extortion. Mr. Dubrovsky is expected to be transported to Texas to face the charges.”

• Per a Health and Human Services Department news release,
  • “The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office for Civil Rights (OCR) today announced a settlement with Linda L. Shen d/b/a Shen Smiles, P.C. (Shen Smiles), a Pennsylvania-based healthcare provider that offers dental services, for potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy Rule. The settlement resolves an investigation of a complaint alleging a failure to provide timely access to an individual’s protected health information (PHI).”
  • “The Notice of Proposed Determination may be found here.
  • “The Resolution Agreement may be found here [PDF, 161 KB].”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front

• HIPAA Journal reports,
  • “The scale of a 2025 data breach involving electronic protected health information stored on Oracle Health’s legacy Cerner servers is becoming clearer. While not independently verified, Bloomberg reports that the Texas Attorney General released information suggesting that the protected health information of almost 20 million individuals was compromised in the incident. Oracle Health has not publicly disclosed how many Cerner clients were affected, or the total number of individuals affected.”

• Security Week relates,
  • “Healthcare organizations Clover Health Investments and AngMar Management Services are notifying more than 250,000 people that their information was stolen in separate data breaches.
  • “Jersey City, New Jersey-based Clover Health Investments was hacked in early July, after attackers used social engineering to compromise three non-managerial health plan employee accounts.
  • “The incident resulted in the theft of personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI), the company said in an SEC filing in July.
  • “The potentially affected information included names, dates of birth, insurance identifiers, and account identification numbers, the company revealed.
  • “In mid-September, Clover Health Investments told the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that 138,677 people were affected. HHS added the company to its data breaches portal last week.
  • “Mansfield, Texas-based AngMar Management Services identified suspicious activity on its systems in mid-July and confirmed in early September that hackers stole patient PII and PHI.
  • “AngMar Management Services provides business operations, administration, and support network management for home health and hospice care providers.”

• The American Hospital Association News tells us,
  • “The FBI and Secret Service released an advisory Oct. 6 warning of ongoing activities by FortiBleed, a global credential-compromise campaign used by threat actors to target internet-facing Fortinet FortiGate firewalls and virtual private network gateways at critical infrastructure organizations. The agencies said the campaign exploits reused or leaked credentials and legacy password storages, allowing threat actors to harvest and decode authentication data at scale. Impacted organizations could be locked out of their systems if threat actors disable accounts or change passwords and would require remediation actions beyond typical patching and password resets. The advisory includes indicators of compromise and mitigation actions to defend against potential attacks.”
• and
  • “A joint advisory released Oct. 8 by U.S. and international agencies warns of Chinese government-linked cyber threat actors using automated and hands-on hacking tools to steal sensitive data from critical infrastructure organizations, including healthcare, across the U.S. and abroad. The advisory said that the threat actors are enabled by the Integrity Technology Group, a China-based company with links to the Chinese government. The agencies said the threat actors are using automated scanning tools, large-scale botnets and hands-on exploitation techniques to attack Microsoft Exchange servers and virtual private network software. The advisory includes recommendations to help mitigate risk from potential attacks.” 

• Cyberscoop adds.
  • “The Justice Department and FBI announced that they had seized two hacking tools connected to the Chinese government-linked group Flax Typhoon and a China-based company that the U.S. government has repeatedly taken action against, including with a new multi-agency advisory Thursday.
  • “The domain name seizures were meant to deny hackers access to the vulnerability scanning tool Microscan and the spearphishing tool FishHub created by the Chinese firm Integrity Technology Group, which the United States sanctioned last year. The U.S. government in 2024 also made the company the focus of a takedown operation, saying it was behind a massive botnet.
  • “U.S. agencies paired the announcement of the seizures with an Oct. 8 advisory from the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and National Security Agency.”

• CISA added one known exploited vulnerability to its catalog this week.
  • October 4, 2026
    • CVE-2026-88779 Citrix NetScaler Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer Vulnerability
      • Cyber Press discusses this KVE here.

• Bleeping Computer notes,
  • “Attackers are exploiting a maximum-severity vulnerability in SonicWall SMA1000 appliances (CVE-2026-102255) that was patched on Tuesday, three days ago.
  • “Tracked as CVE-2026-102255, the flaw affects the Appliance WorkPlace interface on SMA1000 6210, 7210, and 8200v models, but does not affect the SMA 100 Series product line or SSL-VPN running on SonicWall firewalls.
  • “By abusing this path, a remote unauthenticated attacker could potentially exploit this vulnerability to direct the appliance to issue requests on their behalf and reach internal functionality and perform unauthorized operations,” SonicWall explained.”
• and
  • “Citrix has warned IT administrators to patch systems immediately against a new critical vulnerability affecting NetScaler ADC networking appliances and NetScaler Gateway secure remote access solutions.
  • “Tracked as CVE-2026-107406, this flaw stems from a memory overflow weakness that attackers can exploit to gain remote code execution (RCE) on targeted devices or trigger a denial-of-service state that can cause crashes.
  • “To be vulnerable, NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway appliances must be configured as a Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) Identity Provider (IdP) or Service Provider (SP).
  • “We strongly urge affected customers to review the advisory and upgrade impacted NetScaler instances to the recommended versions as soon as possible,” the company said. “As of the publication of the bulletin, Citrix is not aware of any unmitigated exploits of this vulnerability.”

• Per Cybersecurity Dive,
  • “Hackers may be using AI more frequently and in more ways, but their top priority is still subverting identity controls, the identity-security firm Okta said in a report published on Wednesday.
  • “The report included data about the frequency of different kinds of account takeovers and a reality check to enterprises that AI shouldn’t fundamentally change their calculus when it comes to identity management.
  • “In a separate report also published on Wednesday, Okta detailed how hackers are trying to bypass strong authentication controls to sneak into accounts, underscoring the need for vigilance among both system administrators and regular employees.”

• Security Boulevard adds,
  • “An analysis of 150 billion transactions flowing through Domain Name System (DNS) servers published today by EfficientIP finds that malware has overtaken phishing as the threat vector now being detected most.
  • “The latest DNS Threat Intelligence Report from EfficientIP finds malware has climbed from fourth place in the second half of 2025 to first in daily activity, having roughly quadrupled between a January and an April peak of 32.6 million instances.
  • “Yaelle Harel, principal security market strategist for EfficientIP, said that while there is no conclusive evidence, that level of increase suggests cybercriminals may now be leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) tools to both create malware and launch attacks faster using newly acquired IT infrastructure resources.”

From the ransomware front

• Info Security Magazine reports,
  • “Ransomware attacks reached their highest ever quarterly volume in the third quarter of 2026, according to an analysis by Comparitech.
  • “The firm identified a total of 2627 claimed attacks during the three-month period from July to September 2026. This is a 27% increase on the previous quarter, Q2 2026, and a 61% rise compared to Q3 2025.
  • “The finance and technology sectors experienced the biggest growth in ransomware incidents in Q3 compared to Q2 2026, up by 72% and 70%, respectively.
  • “Other critical sectors faced a significant rise in attacks, including education (up 50%), healthcare (39%), government (36%) and utilities (32%).
  • Of the 2627 attacks claimed by ransomware groups in Q3, 247 have been confirmed by the entity involved, Comparitech found.
  • “Rebecca Moody, head of data research at Comparitech, said that the figures are highly unusual, and represent a significant cause for concern.: * * *
  • “A possible explanation for the surge is developments in AI technology, which is enabling ransomware attackers to increase the scale and speed of campaigns, as well as their effectiveness.” * * *
  • “The report highlighted an increase in attackers using triple extortion tactics on victim organizations. In this model, in addition to encrypting systems and exfiltrating data, threat actors also target individuals impacted in the attack.
  • Moody added that this tactic further demonstrates that paying a ransom is no guarantee that the attacker will keep to their word regarding deleting stolen data.

• Recorded Future News relates,
  • “The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) recently discovered a ransomware attack that limited access to some systems at its College of Medicine.  
  • “A spokesperson for the university told Recorded Future News the hackers were able to steal some information held on the college’s servers and an investigation is underway to determine whether “any personal, research or academic information was compromised.” 
  • “As a result of this ransomware event, some College of Medicine systems were temporarily unavailable,” the spokesperson said. “However, all affected systems have since been restored. The university’s main network was not affected, and there was no impact on patient care delivery at UI Health.” * * *
  • “The attack was claimed last week by a ransomware gang known as Booba, which claimed to have stolen 344 gigabytes of data. The group emerged at the end of July and has already claimed 49 attacks. 
  • “SentinelOne’s Brett Williams said the group appears to be a rebrand of the Frag ransomware based on the leak site’s style and negotiation flow. Encrypted files are renamed with the .booba extension and there appears to be variants for Linux as well as Windows.  
  • “The group has targeted several companies and small county governments, including Merrimack County, New Hampshire.” 

• Cyberscoop tells us,
  • “Authorities accuse the owner of a so-called ransomware remediation company of swindling clients victimized by ransomware attacks into paying the company inflated fees under false pretenses.
  • “Zohar Pinhasi, owner and operator of MonsterCloud, claimed he could decrypt and recover victims’ data with specialized, proprietary tools and avoid paying cybercriminals. Yet, no such tool existed, the Justice Department said Wednesday [October 7]. 
  • “Pinhasi allegedly used MonsterCloud clients’ fees to pay off cybercriminals and recover encrypted data without telling clients ransom payments were made on their behalf. The dual “U.S.-Israeli national is accused of charging hundreds of clients more than $19 million and paying more than $8 million in ransom payments during a five-year period ending in 2023.
  • “It baffles me that companies fall for this,” Jon DiMaggio, principal researcher at Arkem Cyber, told CyberScoop. “I mean, they just got hacked and they go straight to a shady source.”

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

• Cybersecurity Dive discusses what the C-suite needs to know about AI governance
  • “As AI adoption surges, executives are learning tough lessons about security, oversight and accountability.”

• The American Hospital Association News tells us,
  • The National Security Agency Oct. 8 released guidance for critical infrastructure organizations that recommends adopting high-impact zero trust strategies to improve cybersecurity for operational technology. For healthcare, such technology includes tools that manage energy control, HVAC, life-safety systems, door access controls, physical security systems, alarms and medical gasses. Zero trust is a security principle that assumes a compromise is possible or already present and continuously verifies users and devices. The guidance also highlights recent nation-state attacks, including the People’s Republic of China’s prepositioning of disruptive malware known as Volt Typhoon on critical infrastructure entities that healthcare depends on, such as energy. The guidance also explains how threat actors’ use of artificial intelligence is making cyberattacks more sophisticated and potentially more severe.

• Security Week points out,
  • “All enterprises conduct security awareness training for their employees. But whether this has tangible benefits is debatable.
  • “Empirical evidence suggests that security awareness training isn’t working – successful attacks keep increasing. But opinions on the efficacy of awareness training range from it doesn’t work to it does work, with sometimes, perhaps and depends between the two extremes.
  • “Awareness training focuses on two tasks: to reduce the effect of bad judgment turning an employee into an insider threat; and to harden employees against falling to malicious social engineering. We focus on social engineering.” * * *
  • “Sanny Liao, co-founder and CPO at Fable Security, says bluntly, “For the most part, security awareness training as done today does not work. Social engineering continues to succeed because attackers exploit context, timing, and psychology, while most training remains generic, infrequent, and removed from the moments when employees are actually making decisions.”
  • “She hints at a novel approach. “One place the industry can look for inspiration is adtech. Marketers have gotten remarkably good at changing behavior by delivering the right message at the right time based on context. Security awareness has largely done the opposite by giving everyone the same training at the same time, regardless of the decisions they’re making or the risks they face. When organizations change behavior instead of simply raising awareness, employees stop being viewed as the weakest link and start becoming an active part of the organization’s security defenses.”

• Per a NIST news release,
  • “For small businesses who are often confronted with limited resources, knowing how to get started and where to find support with planning, implementing, or evaluating a cybersecurity risk management strategy can be challenging — sometimes making cybersecurity feel like an insurmountable hurdle. However, there is good news.
  • “Many non-profit organizations across the United States have created programs for their local small business communities (in addition to local schools, municipal governments, and non-profits) that often extend beyond general cybersecurity education to include services like conducting risk assessments and penetration tests, performing compliance consulting services, helping with incident preparedness and response measures, and more.
  • “The NIST Small Business Cybersecurity Support Program Finder brings these programs together into one tool, connecting small businesses with local non-profit community partners who help with cybersecurity risk management.”

• Here is a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.

From the AI frontier front,

• CNBC reports,
  • “Anthropic and OpenAI on Tuesday each announced new, less costly artificial intelligence models as both frontier labs continue to face stiff competition from cheaper, open-weight competitors.
  • “OpenAI introduced additional tiers to its GPT-6 family, with GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, slashing the API prices by 50% compared with GPT-5.6 promotional pricing. 
  • Sol, which is a tier below Astra, is meant for more complex workloads like coding, while the company’s Luna offering is geared toward “high-volume tasks” such as extracting information or summarizing documents, the company wrote. 
  • “Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 5.5 on Tuesday, its latest release in the new Claude 5.5 model family. The company described the latest release as a more token-efficient version that will cost around 40% less to run than the company’s Opus 5.
  • “One of the things we’re continuing to innovate on is how to make that thinking, how to make the answering more efficient, so it uses less tokens depending on your effort setting,” Dianne Penn, head of product management, research and labs at Anthropic, told CNBC in an interview. 
  • “The separate releases are the first to roll out since Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for an industrywide slowdown on developing advanced AI as the debate about model safety reached a fever pitch in recent weeks.’

• The Wall Street Journal relates,
  • “A swarm of OpenAI agents accessed U.S. government websites as part of a monthslong incident during which tests conducted by the artificial-intelligence company went awry, leading to unexpected internet activity.
  • “The AI agents accessed the websites belonging to the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission and engaged in activity that OpenAI described as “misaligned.” That is the word AI companies use to describe bad behavior by their agents. In this case the misalignment appears to have been aggressive web browsing.
  • “In the case of the SEC, OpenAI’s agents copied and posted public data—something they were not supposed to do. In the case of the Commerce Department, an agent accessed a U.S. Census data website using a programming interface that wasn’t intended for this purpose, OpenAI said.
  • “OpenAI’s revelation came after the AI research nonprofit Transluce alleged that OpenAI agents “used an array of gray-area tactics to probe U.S. Government websites,” and attempted a “rudimentary,” but unsuccessful hack of an Education Department website. This was reported earlier by the New York Times.”

• Bleeping Computer adds,
  • “OpenAI has confirmed it’s aware of a new security incident in which its AI agents uploaded user-provided images to third-party image-hosting services.
  • “OpenAI says most users were not affected, as it could only identify 53 incidents where agents accidentally uploaded images to the internet.
  • “The disclosure comes from OpenAI’s broader investigation into misaligned agent behavior following the Hugging Face security incident.”

• The Wall Street Journal notes,
  • “President Trump said on Saturday [August 19] he was launching a new unit focused on artificial intelligence after leading figures in the industry publicly sounded the alarm over the growing technology.
  • “I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term,” Trump said on Truth Social. He added he is also recruiting an AI “czar.” The president had appointed investor David Sacks as his AI and crypto czar before the businessman stepped down from that role to become co-chair of the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a role in which he is still one of Trump’s top advisers on AI policy.
  • “Saturday marks the first time the president has suggested there could be a new federal government entity solely dedicated to AI, but it isn’t clear what role it would play. Several other units of the government work on tech policy including the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Commerce Department and the Defense Department.

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

• Cyberscoop reports,
  • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published a paper Wednesday that lays out its plan for improving the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program, a contract for which nearly ended last year before a last-minute reprieve.
  • “The white paper outlines the components of a “Quality Era” for the program, widely used as the definitive clearinghouse for data on vulnerabilities in software and other products, even as the number of CVEs surges. 
  • “CISA remains committed to leading, growing and sustaining the CVE Program into the foreseeable future, just as we’ve done for more than 25 years without fail,” said Chris Butera, acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity. “Informed by CVE community feedback, this whitepaper communicates CISA’s effort to support and enable stronger participation and governance, a program-wide maturation effort.” * * *
  • “The plan calls for advancing data quality across four key dimensions: transparent and effective program governance, broad and active participation across the global software community, data infrastructure that supports CVE operational functions and reliable CVE record content. * * *
  • “Butera invited further feedback from the CVE community on the white paper, which stems from an earlier strategy document on the future of the program.
  • “Some CVE experts that CyberScoop spoke to were supportive of what CISA wants to achieve, but skeptical about elements of the white paper.”
• and
  • “Nearly early nine out of 10 federal civilian executive branch agencies failed to meet last summer’s deadline to implement cloud security directives from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a watchdog report published Wednesday found.
  • “The conclusions from those results, according to the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security: agencies “may encounter elevated security exposures that undermine the national cloud security posture and increase the likelihood of preventable cyberattacks and related threat,” and “CISA lacks the authority necessary to require full and timely implementation of Binding Operational Directives,” or BODs.
  • “The latter is a question that has surfaced before about CISA directives, which the agency uses to pressure agencies into improving their cyber defenses.” 

• SC World tells us,
  • “The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced the launch of Vulnerability Information and Coordination Environment – New Technology (VINCE-NT) on Thursday [September 17], an upgraded, fully CISA-hosted system that will replace the original VINCE for coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD).
  • “VINCE has been used by researchers, suppliers and stakeholders since 2020 to coordinate the disclosure of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and was originally sponsored by CISA and hosted by Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) under its Software Engineering Institute.
  • “The new VINCE-NT system, officially live as of Sept. 17, 2026, is now fully sponsored, hosted and managed by CISA and includes several improvements to streamline CVD, the agency said in an FAQ.”

• Per a National Institutes of Standards and Technology news release,
  • “NIST has released the initial public draft of Special Publication (SP) 800-82r4 (Revision 4),  Guide to Operational Technology (OT) Security, which provides guidelines for improving the security of OT systems while addressing their unique performance, reliability, and safety requirements.” * * *
  • “Updates in this revision include:
    • “Expanded introduction to OT sectors to include Building Automation and Control Systems (BACS), Water and Wastewater Systems (WWS), food and agriculture, freight rail, maritime vessels, and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and cloud convergence
    • “Restructured around the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0, including a reorganization of the previous risk management section to focus on the CSF Govern Function
    • “Expanded discussion of how OT risk management aligns with broader enterprise risk management, as described in NIST IR 8286r1
    • “Discussion of the adoption of the NIST Risk Management Framework (RMF) in Appendix F
    • “Expanded guidelines for implementing OT security controls, including asset management and network monitoring and detection
    • Security architecture guidelines focused on protecting system management functions and applying zero trust principles
  • “The comment period on this initial public draft is open now through November 30, 2026. See the publication details for a copy of the draft and instructions for submitting comments.”

• Per a Justice Department news release,
  • “Ardit Kutleshi, 28, a Kosovar national, pleaded guilty [on September 24] to charges related to his creation and operation of Rydox, an illicit website and marketplace for cybercriminals to buy, sell and trade stolen personal information, and to access devices and other tools for carrying out cybercrime and fraud.” 

• Cyberscoop points out,
  • “A 35-year-old Armenian national was sentenced to two years in prison for his involvement in a series of Ryuk ransomware attacks while living in Ukraine and Russia in 2019 and 2020, the Justice Department said Tuesday.
  • “Karen Vardanyan was extradited from Ukraine to the United States last year and pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud and extortion in July. Vardanyan’s sentencing, which also calls for about $1.2 million in restitution to victims, matches terms of a plea agreement he reached with prosecutors.
  • “Vardanyan and his co-conspirators’ victims include a Michigan-based company that paid a ransom of nearly $1.2 million in January 2020, a Watsonville, Oregon-based technology company that was attacked in December 2019 and a Texas-based school breached in February 2020, according to court records.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports,
  • “The FBI is investigating a cyberattack on its jobs portal after the cybercrime group ShinyHunters said it hacked the system and stole a vast trove of sensitive data from the bureau.
  • “The FBI is aware of a cyber-criminal enterprise group claiming a compromise of the FBIJobs.gov portal and alleged impact to FBI employee personally identifiable information (PII),” the bureau said in a statement on Wednesday [September 23]. “While the point of breach is still undetermined—whether a third-party or the FBI’s enterprise—we are actively and aggressively investigating this matter and working closely with those third-party providers that support FBIJobs.gov to mitigate any and all risk.” * * *
  • “ShinyHunters told 404 Media that it hacked into the jobs portal using a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle’s PeopleSoft human-resources platform, a tactic it has used before. The potentially wide-ranging breach highlights the supply chain risks facing organizations of all sizes and levels of sophistication. ShinyHunters specializes in supply chain attacks, and its intrusions have illuminated weaknesses in the security protocols at widely used software and infrastructure providers.”
• and
  • “The healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors are facing a heightened risk of social-engineering attacks, according to cybersecurity researchers and threat intelligence experts.
  • “The Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center recently warned that the group ShinyHunters was using voice-phishing attacks to target the healthcare sector. The hackers used medical-themed impersonation domains to trick healthcare employees into exposing their credentials. 
  • “More than a dozen member organizations have been hit by social-engineering attacks over the past couple of months, Errol Weiss, chief security officer at Health-ISAC, told Cybersecurity Dive. The actors involved are using aggressive tactics to try to compromise targeted companies. 
  • “They’re pretty belligerent when it comes to getting somebody on the phone and convincing them they need to click on a password reset or an MFA reset,” Weiss said.”

• Beckers Health IT adds,
  • “Home medical equipment provider AdaptHealth disclosed that a June cyberattack exposed personal and health information belonging to more than 4.1 million patients, according to a filing with the HHS Office for Civil Rights.
  • “The company said the breach stemmed from a social engineering attack that compromised a third-party contractor’s user session, giving a threat actor access to AdaptHealth’s cloud-based patient management and document storage systems. AdaptHealth first disclosed the intrusion in a July 2 SEC filing after the attacker contacted the company June 15 claiming to have stolen data.”
  • “In an Aug. 14 notice, AdaptHealth said the threat actor exfiltrated names, contact information, demographic data, health insurance information and health information, along with a password file tied to insurance billing. Social Security numbers, financial account information and payment card data were not affected, the company said.”
• and
  • “Eskenazi Health is notifying patients of a data breach after an employee’s cloud-based work account was compromised through a phishing email that appeared to come from a trusted business contact.
  • “The Indianapolis-based health system discovered the unauthorized access July 27, according to a Sept. 25 notice. A forensic investigation determined the unauthorized access began June 3 and continued until Eskenazi Health terminated it July 27.
  • “The incident began after the email account of one of Eskenazi Health’s business contacts was compromised and used to send thousands of unauthorized emails to individuals in the contact’s address book. An Eskenazi Health employee received one of the messages, which appeared to contain a secure document notification.
  • “After the employee interacted with the link and completed the requested authentication process, an unauthorized individual gained access to the employee’s work account, according to the notice.”

• CISA added ten known exploited vulnerabilities (KVE) to its catalog this week.
  • September 21, 2026
    • CVE-2026-7273 Zyxel GS1900 Series Switches Stack-Based Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
      • Aviatrix discusses this KVE here.
  • September 22, 2026
    • CVE-2026-85102 Check Point Multiple Products Improper Certificate Validation Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-93616 Check Point Multiple Products Path Traversal Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-93952 Arista VeloCloud Orchestrator Improper Input Validation Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-94127 F5 BIG-IP APM Heap-based Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
      • Cybersecurity News discusses the Check Point KVEs here.
      • Bleeping Computer discusses the Arista KVE here.
      • SOC Prime discusses the F5 KVE here.
  • September 24, 2026
    • CVE-2026-5430 WSO2 Multiple Products Path Traversal Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-71362 Adobe Commerce and Magento Incorrect Authorization Vulnerability
      • Cybersecurity News discusses the WS02 vulnerabilities here.
      • Recent Breaches discusses the Abode and Magento KVE here.
  • September 25, 2026
    • CVE-2026-65660 Microsoft SharePoint Code Injection Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-67279 Mikrotik RouterOS Improper Enforcement of Behavioral Workflow Vulnerability
      • The Hacker News discusses the Microsoft KVE here.
      • Recent Breaches discusses the Mikrotik KVE here.
  • September 25, 2026
    • CVE-2026-87902 WordPress Core Remote File Inclusion Vulnerability
      • Recent Breaches discusses the WordPress KVE here.

From the ransomware front,

• HIPAA Journal reports,
  • “A new analysis of ransomware activity reveals broad, consistent targeting pressure across the United States. Ransomware activity is not limited to any specific industry, with all sectors attacked to varying degrees. The analysis was conducted by the AI-driven cybersecurity and threat intelligence platform provider Anomali, with the findings published in its US Ransomware Industry Targeting Report.
  • “Anomali observed ransomware targeting across 8 industry sectors by 200 distinct ransomware entities, with its analysis showing that technology was the most targeted sector, followed by manufacturing and healthcare.
  • “Anomali looked at ransomware targeting across eight industry sectors – technology, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, government public services, construction, education, and energy. There was in excess of 50% observed targeting presence in all eight sectors, with technology companies targeted by 172 of the 200 ransomware entities (86%), followed by manufacturing with 166 (83%), and healthcare in third place with 154 (77%).”

• Infosecurity Magazine relates,
  • “A newly formed ransomware group has claimed that if its victims don’t give into their extortion demands and pay a ransom, that they will destroy their backup infrastructure, in a move which could prevent a targeted organization from operating entirely.
  • “Named n0n, the emergence of the ransomware crew has been detailed by cybersecurity researchers at CyberXTron. In a blog post published on September 23, researchers said activity by n0n was first spotted on September 18 and by September 22 the group’s Tor-hosted leak site had published information about over a dozen victims.
  • “The group operates on a double extortion model which has become highly popular and highly effective among ransomware threat groups.”

• Kaspersky adds,
  • “Kaspersky’s Global Emergency Response Team (GERT) has published a new report analyzing a sophisticated new tactic in the Payload ransomware family. Discovered during an incident response at a manufacturing company in the Middle East, this attack demonstrates a major shift in cybercrime: the attackers took complete control of the company’s network and forced its computers to lock up, display ransom notes, and change desktop wallpapers – all without deploying a conventional ransomware encryptor.
  • “This incident illustrates one of the trends mentioned in Kaspersky’s State of Ransomware 2026 reportreleased earlier this year: attackers are increasingly moving away from traditional file encryption. Instead, they are adopting “encryptionless extortion” – focusing on immediate operational disruption and leaking sensitive, stolen data on the dark web rather than relying on cryptographic keys to squeeze payments out of victims.”

• Bleeping Computer notes,
  • “The Clop ransomware gang has moved its data leak site to a new Tor address after confirming its previous server was compromised and defaced through an unpatched Grav CMS flaw that BleepingComputer has learned is an unauthenticated path traversal vulnerability.
  • “The Clop leak site was breached earlier this month by the ShinyHunters extortion gang, which first uploaded a small text file and later replaced the site with a full-page defacement displaying its Umbreon Pokémon logo and a link to its own data leak site.”

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

• The American Hospital Association News reports,
  • “The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have released a fact sheet for critical infrastructure organizations on ways to reduce risk and minimize vulnerabilities when working with third-party hardware and software networks designed to monitor and automate physical processes for control systems and devices, such as pumps, sensors and industrial computers for operating essential equipment. In healthcare, such applications are common throughout facilities and include climate control, building automation, access control and other systems. Such operational technology systems are essential for maintaining clinical operations. The agencies said that organizations should maintain caution when granting third-party networks high levels of access or control over such operations, allowing only the minimum access necessary to perform their assigned tasks. Granting additional access could expose owners and operators to malicious cyber actors attempting to exploit and compromise equipment and critical functions. The fact sheet includes recommendations for organizations to assess and reduce risk of attacks.”

• Cybersecurity Dive relates,
  • “Google-owned cloud security firm Wiz said on Thursday that it is using AI tools to identify vulnerabilities in internet-facing critical infrastructure, from operational technology maintained by under-resourced utilities to software packages that are foundational to online activity.
  • “Where authorized, we will use the Wiz Red Agent and additional internal AI research capabilities to examine publicly facing websites, APIs, and applications,” Wiz’s Ami Luttwak and Gal Nagli wrote in a blog post about the company’s Scan for Good initiative. “This work will help organizations find and fix critical exposures before attackers do, allowing them to stay ahead of adversaries as AI capabilities advance.”
• and
  • “Nearly nine out of 10 industrial security leaders said they believe their companies could contain a cyber incident, and nearly half of those same companies experienced a breach or attack over the past 12 months, according to a report released Tuesday by Rockwell Automation. 
  • “More than one-third of industrial firms described cyber risk as the top obstacle to growth. 
  • The report highlights a continued resilience gap in industrial environments, where maintaining operational technology is critical. More than 60% of industrial firms have invested in various security technologies, including asset inventory, intruder detection and secure remote access.” * * *
  • “A separate benchmark report out Tuesday from Honeywell Technologies also showed a significant gap in OT security readiness. The report, based on responses from more than 600 IT security leaders globally, showed only one in five organizations had complete visibility into their OT assets.” 
• and
  • “As the cyber insurance industry has worked to regain momentum against a rising wave of cyber risk, the rapid emergence of AI has put increased pressure on determining whether the sector could afford to cover potentially billions in losses from a catastrophic event. 
  • “After months of uncertainty, Beazley, a leading specialist in the cyber sector, on Thursday confirmed it would provide “AI-afffirmative cover,” meaning it would cover losses stemming from an incident, even if the attacker utilized artificial intelligence.” 

• Help Net Security notes,
  • “To help security practitioners catch malware that leans on AI, researchers from Cisco Talos shared an open-source framework that they hope will be used to classify and analyze the threat. The tool, called CAIRN, works entirely from metadata pulled off files. No downloading the malware, no running it.”

• Dark Reading explains that “Stopping IT Worker Scams Requires Revamped HR Process.”
  • “Training human-resource managers in the latest tactics and warning signs goes a long way toward blunting the threat, but automated analysis can help even more.”

• Here is a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.

• 
  

From the frontier AI front,

• The Wall Street Journal reports,
  • “Nvidia NVDA is planning to use a $6 billion deal it struck this week [August 22] to build one of the world’s most powerful open-weight AI models, one that would compete with Chinese heavyweights like DeepSeek and Kimi K3, according to people familiar with the matter.
  • “The chip giant’s licensing deal with the AI startup Poolside is also set to present a direct challenge to frontier U.S. AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic, since open-weight models are generally far cheaper to operate and allow easy customization.
  • “Although Nvidia counts big labs like OpenAI and Anthropic as some of its closest partners, the move reflects Chief Executive Jensen Huang’s efforts to position Nvidia for success in multiple AI battlegrounds simultaneously, ensuring the company is able to hold on to its dominant market position.”
• and
  • Nvidia and CrowdStrike are addressing what they see as one of cybersecurity’s biggest gaps: the need for cyber defenders to harness AI at the velocity of cyber attackers.
  • In the current cyber landscape, frontier AI models are discovering bugs at machine speed—raising alarm bells among experts, who warn that when autonomous hacking models go rogue or attack companies, chaos is on the horizon.
  • But cyber defenders aren’t getting enough of that same AI firepower, according to Nvidia and CrowdStrike, who on Tuesday [September 1] introduced a new family of agentic AI models, dubbed SafeMind, which can both find attack paths and close them for customers. The models are available in CrowdStrike’s flagship Falcon platform and through its API. * * *
  • “SafeMind has two models: Red Tempest, which is an “offensive” model that emulates AI adversaries, and Blue Solano, which is a “defensive” model designed to fix identified issues. The two models are connected by software called a harness, which runs the models in a closed-loop system that pits them against each other for self-improvement.”

• The New York Times reports,
  • “Nvidia said on Thursday [September 3] that it is buying Hugging Face, a library of open artificial intelligence models, for $12.9 billion, as the chipmaker extends a spending spree in the escalating global race to dominate the technology.
  • “The deal marries Nvidia’s chip and data center infrastructure with Hugging Face’s millions of open-source A.I. models that can be freely downloaded and modified. And it puts Nvidia’s deep pockets firmly on one side of a debate over how A.I. systems should be built.
  • “Together, we will make A.I. more open, more capable and more accessible to people and institutions around the world,” wrote Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, in a blog post.
  • “The acquisition is also another sign of Nvidia’s growing role as Silicon Valley’s central banker, using its vast financial resources to bolster A.I. start-ups and funnel money to customers for its chips. With $197 billion in current assets and nearly $60 billion in profits from its most recent quarter, the Silicon Valley giant has been spending heavily on A.I.”

• Daniel Borish writing in LinkedIn lets us know,
  • “Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 this week, positioning them as its most capable models yet for coding and knowledge work. The two are the same underlying model, split only by the safeguards wrapped around them. Fable 5.1 is generally available. Mythos 5.1 is restricted to vetted cybersecurity and life sciences professionals through trusted access programs run in partnership with the US government.” * * *
  • “On the cybersecurity side, Claude Code users should see roughly 60% fewer safeguard interventions per session, and Fable 5.1 can now be used to find software vulnerabilities, though not to write exploits for them. Tasks like penetration testing, exploit generation, and binary-based vulnerability scanning still route to Anthropic’s Opus models. On biology, updated safeguards reportedly fire 85% less often on benign medical and elementary biology questions, though research-grade life sciences queries still get redirected to Opus, and full access to Mythos 5.1’s biology capabilities is limited to the government-linked Life Sciences Verification Program.
  • “Anthropic’s safety testing found Mythos 5.1 better aligned than its predecessor on several measures it tracks: less likely to seek resources outside its assigned environment when given an impossible task, less likely to reason its way around explicit constraints, and less likely to attempt or succeed at reward hacking. The company also disclosed limits to that picture, noting its behavioral audits have less visibility into very long-context work, multi-agent settings, and testing found the model can still sometimes bypass approval steps and automated review classifiers.
  • “Fable 5.1 also ships with new anti-distillation measures. New API accounts created from launch onward can no longer edit Claude’s prior context in a conversation while preserving the model’s recorded thinking, closing off a publicly documented technique used to extract that thinking at scale.”
    
• The Wall Street Journal adds,
  • Anthropic has signed a cloud-computing deal worth $35 billion with NvidiaNVDA 3.21%increase; up pointing triangle-backed cloud provider Lambda, with Nvidia itself holding the lease on the data center, according to people familiar with the deal. 
  • The data center is being developed by Hut 8, a bitcoin miner and data-center developer, in Nueces County, Texas. Nvidia signed an agreement with Hut 8 a few weeks ago to secure the capacity, the people said. 
  • The convoluted arrangement is another example of Nvidia’s growing role in helping non-investment-grade firms such as Anthropic get access to its expensive computing resources. The deal also helped a nascent cloud provider, Lambda, secure a lucrative contract with Anthropic without needing to procure the data-center space on its own. 
  • Lambda will use the data center Hut 8 is developing to plug in chips bought from Nvidia, which is also its investor. It is not clear how much Lambda will pay Nvidia to access the data-center space.
  • Anthropic has been racing to sign cloud-capacity deals after hitting a supply crunch earlier this year that coincided with its products gaining traction. The AI developer signed a $45 billion deal earlier this month with another Nvidia-backed neocloud, Nscale, to rent Nvidia capacity from its West Virginia site, according to people familiar with the deal. 

• Security Week relates,
  • OpenAI said its newest model, Astra, has reached the ‘Critical’ cybersecurity capability level under the company’s Preparedness Framework, the first time any of its models has been placed in that category. 
  • The designation applies when a model can independently find and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities across many well-defended systems, or carry out a complete cyberattack against a hardened target from only a high-level instruction. OpenAI said the classification requires additional safeguards before the model can be released.
  • In testing described by the company, Astra achieved a perfect score on ExploitBench, a benchmark that measures a model’s ability to turn known vulnerabilities into working exploits. During a separate evaluation involving more recently disclosed flaws, Astra uncovered two zero-day vulnerabilities on its own. 
  • The model also broke out of a browser sandbox to run commands on the underlying machine, and separately chained several flaws in a hardened operating system to gain root-level access.
  • OpenAI reported that Astra now declines 91.5% of cyber-related jailbreak attempts in its testing, up from 59% for its predecessor, GPT-5.6 Sol. The company also said Astra showed far less tendency than Sol to bypass safety restrictions or take advantage of deliberately placed “honeypot” targets during evaluations. 
  • Full cybersecurity capabilities will not be widely available at launch. OpenAI plans to give a group of testers early access, with wider availability to follow through its Daybreak Blue program.

• Cybersecurity Dive adds,
  • “OpenAI on Thursday [September 3] said it would commit $1 billion in subsidized access and training to help small IT security teams use frontier AI to protect essential services, including electricity, water and local government services. 
  • “The Daybreak for Frontline Defenders program will be used to help defenders search for critical vulnerabilities in their software, hunt for suspicious activity in their technology stacks and stop malicious actions if hackers are able to gain access to their systems.
  • “OpenAI plans to roll out a six-month pilot program with the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), which will train and support a group of water utilities and other public sector defenders.” 

• Dark Reading points out,
  • “A new study suggests that while AI is rapidly accelerating vulnerability discovery, enterprise organizations are better equipped to handle the surge than generally assumed.
  • “The key is their ability to quickly validate findings, prioritize risk, and get available fixes into production.
  • “Software supply chain security firm Echo recently analyzed nearly 40,000 CVE life cycles across 250 open source container projects, drawing on a year of its own platform telemetry, survey responses from more than 80 security leaders, and an independent analysis of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos.
  • “The results, detailed in a report titled “Mythos Readiness Report,” show how AI is transforming vulnerability discovery and exploit development — something that security teams have been encountering firsthand over the past year.”
• and
  • “With multiple benchmarks confirming that at least one frontier model can autonomously execute an end-to-end compromise, cybersecurity experts are warning that companies have to pick up the pace in securing their attack surfaces and adopting AI-speed defenses.
  • “On Sept. 2, consulting firm Booz Allen became the latest organization to confirm that a frontier model — Anthropic’s Mythos 5 — can act as a fully autonomous hacker and compromise a production-grade enterprise network. The company also released a metric, dubbed the Cyber Weapon Index (CWI), to benchmark a model’s capabilities, pairing the ability to find and exploit vulnerabilities with the ability to execute and attack a target.
  • “In their evaluation, Mythos scored an 80, while the next-closest contender, SpaceXAI‘s Grok-4.5, scored a 49. However, the current standings are not as important as where we will be in six months, says Brad Medairy, president of Booz Allen’s National Cyber practice.
  • “Our view is there’s going to be some level of parity, at least between the frontier models and the Chinese models over probably a six-month horizon, and so everyone is in a rapid race to evolve these capabilities,” he says, adding that, when facing human attackers, defenders had the advantage, but “in the future, the balance of power shifts to the offense, because the attacker can deliver effects at speed and scale that the traditional defenses can’t keep pace with.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

• Federal News Network reports,
  • “Congress is kicking the can down the road again on a long term debate over reauthorizing the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015.
  • “The continuing resolution passed by the House on Tuesday would extend CISA 2015 through the stopgap funding period into early December. The Senate has already passed the measure, meaning it now heads to President Donald Trump’s desk. [FEHBlog note: The President signed the continuing resolution into law on September 2.]
  • “There has been a persistent chorus of voices in industry calling on Congress to find a long-term solution to re-authorizing CISA 2015. Those calls have only grown louder amid advancements in artificial intelligence models and recent cyber attacks on critical infrastructure.
  • “The 2015 law provides privacy and liability protections to encourage companies to share data about cyber vulnerabilities and threats with government and each other. The information sharing law briefly lapsed during last fall’s shutdown and again earlier this year before being extended through Sept. 30.”

• The Wall Street Journal points out,
  • “The U.S. Defense Department is expected to release its cyber plan as early as Tuesday, NextGov reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The plan is due to outline how the Pentagon will integrate cyber tactics into military strategy, emphasizing offensive actions, and address training requirements. The most recent Defense Department cyber strategy was issued in 2023.”

• Per a CISA news release,
  • “CISA and the Group of Seven (G7) Cyber Security Working Group released Preparing for the Post-Quantum Era: A Call to Action highlighting the urgent need for organizations and governments to begin transitioning to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) to protect sensitive data, authentication systems, and critical assets from emerging quantum computing threats.  
  • “The G7 Cyber Security Working Group’s call to action outlines five priorities for a successful transition to PQC:
    • “Raising awareness of quantum risks and the importance of PQC;
    • “Developing national strategies that support PQC adoption and integration;
    • “Advancing research and development for quantum-safe technologies;
    • “Fostering public-private partnerships to share expertise and resources; and
    • “Integrating PQC into cybersecurity requirements and procurement processes.” 

• Cyberscoop relates,
  • “The Trump administration rolled out a six-month test program in Texas on Monday that will draw on volunteer expertise and technology from cyber and artificial intelligence companies to protect the water sector.
  • “Project Watershed 250” is the first of the state-based, industry-centric pilot projects to cross the finish line that the Office of the National Cyber Director has previewedsince the publication of its national cybersecurity strategy earlier this year. Water systems have long been viewed as among the most vulnerable and neediest critical infrastructure sectors, and in recent months the sector has been the victim of a spree of attacks.
  • “Project Watershed 250 is a commitment from the states, industry and federal government that we will continue to prioritize our nation’s safety and deliver on America-first policies for the American people,” National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said at a rollout event in San Antonio Monday.”
• and
  • “Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is asking the National Security Agency to update public guidance on the security risks associated with commercial virtual private networks, and to answer questions about foreign surveillance threats against standard VPNs.
  • “In a letter to NSA Director Gen. Joshua Rudd that Wyden sent Wednesday, the senator continued his push to warn about standard, commercial VPNs, following letters to federal agency leaders in March and July.
  • “While commercial Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are recommended by federal agencies and widely marketed as shields against online spying, standard consumer VPNs do not sufficiently protect users from sophisticated adversaries,” Wyden wrote in the letter, first reported by CyberScoop. “Other, more secure alternatives are widely available.”
  • “Wyden took aim at “single-hop” VPNs that routes data through one server before arriving at the destination.”

• Cybersecurity Dive tells us,
  • “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is scaling back the free assessments it offers to critical infrastructure organizations, a move that marks a significant retreat from the agency’s core mission of helping secure the nation’s infrastructure.
  • “CISA’s regional staff will no longer perform its Cyber Resilience Reviews, Cyber Resilience Essentials surveys, Ransomware Readiness Assessments, Incident Management Reviews, External Dependencies Management Assessments or Cyber Infrastructure Surveys, the agency confirmed to Cybersecurity Dive.”
• and
  • “U.S. law-enforcement agencies and the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike took down a 23-year-old Russia-based botnet on Monday.
  • “Authorities from the Justice Department, the FBI and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service seized U.S.-based domain namesbelonging to the Sality botnet, while CrowdStrike analysts worked with the agencies to sever infected computers from the botnet. Investigators in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania also took down Sality domain names in their jurisdictions.
  • “Since 2003, Sality powered spam campaigns, credential-theft operations, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and malicious proxy networks. In 2018, the botnet began deploying malware that hijacked cryptocurrency transactions by replacing copied wallet addresses with attacker-controlled ones.
  • “Sality “has been one of the most persistent threats on the internet, not because of its payloads but because of the robustness of its architecture,” CrowdStrike said in its report on the botnet’s takedown.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• Dark Reading reports,
  • “Social engineers are trying to convince companies to make large-dollar transfers to their own accounts, under the guise of fake merger & acquisition (M&A) deals.
  • ‘It’s one of the oldest gambits in cybersecurity — the advance fee scam — for a new generation, and with more on the line. Gen, the parent company of cybersecurity brands Norton and Avast, was targeted by a ruse masquerading as a corporate acquisition. Gen investigated the attempted attack and discovered the company was just one of at least five targets, all of which were at risk of losing massive sums of money.
  • “Social engineers are trying to convince companies to make large-dollar transfers to their own accounts, under the guise of fake merger & acquisition(M&A) deals.
  • “It’s one of the oldest gambits in cybersecurity — the advance fee scam — for a new generation, and with more on the line. Gen, the parent company of cybersecurity brands Norton and Avast, was targeted by a ruse masquerading as a corporate acquisition. Gen investigated the attempted attack and discovered the company was just one of at least five targets, all of which were at risk of losing massive sums of money.”

• HelpNetSecurity relates,
  • “Attackers are targeting prominent individuals, their relatives and personal contacts to gain persistent access to their accounts, including private emails and files, the FBI has warned.
  • “The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) says the activity, which uses a technique called “OAuth consent phishing,” has been ongoing since late 2025. The FBI describes it as “a deceptive, sophisticated approach to access user accounts without requiring a password.”
  • OAuth is a framework that lets one application request access to a user’s account on another service without the user handing over login credentials directly.
  • “Recently observed activity includes impersonating government officials, media, and other publicly known personalities on a commercial messaging application (CMA) and soliciting the targeted individual to access a malicious link under the guise of a file sharing service through an application under the malicious actor’s control,” the FBI wrote in its advisory.”

• Dark Reading tells us,
  • “A coordinated operation has targeted at least 150 Microsoft Teams users across multiple companies with voice phishing (vishing) attacks aimed at installing remote monitoring and management (RMM) and malware tools onto their machines. The campaign also attempts in some instances to compromise organizations’ domain controllers.
  • “Researchers from Palo Alto Networks observed the operations — which they’ve dubbed “Spring Ring” — between January and April attacking employees across at least 10 organizations, according to a report published this week. The campaign illustrates a growing shift away from traditional email phishing toward attacks conducted through trusted enterprise collaboration platforms, which adds authenticity to the interaction.
  • “The Spring Ring operation represents an evolution from previous campaigns by merging vishing into the Teams workflow,” Noam Sala, a Palo Alto Networks staff researcher, wrote in the post. “This shift moves the attack from a passive click-and-harvest model to a real-time engagement.”

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added ten known exploited vulnerabilities to its catalog this week.
  • August 31, 2026
    • CVE-2026-81578 PaperCut NG/MF Missing Authentication for Critical Function Vulnerability 
    • CVE-2026-82078 PaperCut NG/MF Unsafe Reflection Vulnerability
      • The Hacker News discusses these KVEs here.
  • September 2, 2026
    • CVE-2026-9586 Sangoma Switchbox SQL Injection Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-48710 Kludex Starlette HTTP Request/Response Smuggling Vulnerability 
    • CVE-2026-49869 Kestra OSS OS Command Injection Vulnerability 
    • CVE-2026-59822 BerriAI LiteLLM Improper Authentication Vulnerability 
    • CVE-2026-82329 JFrog Artifactory Improper Authentication Vulnerability 
    • CVE-2026-83548 SonicWall SMA1000 Appliances Server-Side Request Forgery Vulnerability 
    • CVE-2026-83549 SonicWall SMA1000 Appliances OS Command Injection Vulnerability 
      • Cybersecurity Dive discusses the SonicWall KVEs here.
      • ePlanetSecurity discusses the Sangoma KVE here.
      • AssurePort discusses the Kludex KVE here.
      • Sentinel One discusses the Kestra KVE here.
      • CSurface discusses the BerriAI KVE here.
      • Security Week discusses the JFrog KVE here.
    • September 4, 2026
      • CVE-2026-85046. Google Chromium V8 Type Confusion Vulnerability\
        • The Hacker News discusses the Google KVE here.

• Security Week tells us,
  • “Anthropic has warned some Claude users that infostealer malware on their computers allowed attackers to hijack login sessions and run up usage limits, according to an email the company sent to affected customers. 
  • “The company said it detected the activity, signed out the compromised sessions, and removed saved payment methods from affected accounts as a precaution.
  • “Anthropic is alerting Claude AI users whose computers were infected with infostealer malware such as Vidar, Lumma, StealC, RedLine, and Acreed on Windows, along with Atomic Stealer (AMOS) on a small number of macOS devices.
  • “The AI giant emphasized that the malware is general-purpose and not tied to Claude itself, typically arriving via unofficial downloads or malicious apps.” 

From the ransomware front,

• HIPAA Journal reports,
  • “Data breaches have been confirmed by Alta Orthopaedics in California, Cornerstone Behavioral Healthcare in Maine, Cameron Regional Medical Center in Missouri, Suntree Internal Medicine in Florida, and Associated Endocrinologists in Michigan. Ransomware groups have claimed responsibility for the attacks.”

• The Register adds,
  • “US hospital operator Nutex Health says attackers stole private or confidential patient, employee, provider, business, and financial information during the cyberattack it disclosed last week.
  • “In an updated filing submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday, Nutex also said an unauthorized third party had threatened to publish the stolen information.” * * *
  • “Nutex did not identify the intruders. However, The Gentlemen ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation added the company to its leak site on Monday and claimed responsibility for the attack.
  • “The gang offered no evidence or details to substantiate its claim. Naming victims on a leak site and threatening to publish their data is a standard pressure tactic in double-extortion attacks.”

• InfoSecurity Magazine relates,
  • “Aurora ransomware actors have been observed abusing SpaceX’s AI Cursor Agent as part of exploitation campaigns, according to a new study by Gambit Security’s Threat Intelligence team.
  • “The threat actors ran Claude Sonnet through Cursor Agent to assist with various exploitation activities against 10 victims between April 8 and May 26, 2026.
  • “These tasks included scanning the victim’s environment for reconnaissance purposes, installing a VPN client and running certificate attacks.
  • “While Cursor Agent did not always achieve its stated objectives, the research demonstrated how threat actors are continuously experimenting with AI tools to speed up and enhance their campaigns.
  • “Cursor Agent is used by software developers to complete complex coding tasks independently, run terminal commands and edit code.”

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

• The Wall Street Journal reports,
  • “Palo Alto PANW Networks swung to a loss in the fiscal fourth quarter, but posted higher revenue and projected double-digit revenue growth in the current fiscal year as customers continue to boost their cybersecurity spending in response to advancements in artificial-intelligence.
  • “The cybersecurity company on Tuesday [September 1] said it is expecting revenue to rise between 23% and 24% to $14.1 billion to $14.2 billion in fiscal 2027. Analysts polled by FactSet are expecting $13.84 billion in revenue.
  • “Chief Executive Officer Nikesh Arora said the results and outlook reflect growing recognition among enterprises that they need to modernize their cyber defenses to meet the capabilities of ever-more-powerful AI models, especially following the release of Anthropic’s Mythos earlier this year.
  • “In that context, people are gravitating towards the largest players in the industry and looking at us to provide the antidotes to this development in AI,” Arora said in an interview.”
• and
  • Zscaler ZS posted a narrower loss after revenue rose 25% in its fiscal fourth-quarter, as artificial intelligence helps drive demand for its cybersecurity offerings.
  • The San Jose, Calif.-based company also said it would restructure and cut 3% of its workforce as it reallocates resources to support its AI and growth initiatives.
  • Zscaler on Thursday [September 3] reported a loss of $3.37 million, or 2 cents a share, compared with a loss of $17.6 million, or 11 cents a share, a year earlier.
  • Adjusted earnings were $1.19 a share. Analysts were looking for $1.09 a share, according to FactSet.
• and
  • “Blackstone is placing an early bet on Huskeys, a cybersecurity startup building an artificial intelligence gatekeeper to protect companies from the growing chaos of automated web traffic.
  • “The firm’s early-stage venture-capital arm, Blackstone Innovations Investments, led a $27 million Series A investment that values the year-old company at more than $100 million.
  • “The deal makes Blackstone the second-largest outside investor in Huskeys, behind Israeli venture-capital firm 10D, according to a Huskeys representative. So far, investors have put $35 million into the startup.
  • “Other backers in the most recent transaction include the investment arm of publicly traded cybersecurity company Zscaler and Bright Pixel Capital, the venture arm of Portuguese retailer Sonae.
  • “New York-based Huskeys was founded in Tel Aviv in 2025 by Itai Gafni and Roy Weisfeld, veterans of the Israeli army’s elite Unit 8200 cybersecurity division. Gafni is Huskeys’ chief executive and Weisfeld is its chief technology officer.”

• Tech Crunch offers a tip
  • “How to find cyber-risk data sources for a FAIR analysis
    • “Cyber-risk quantification with FAIR can change the game for CISOs — but sourcing enough accurate data for analysis can feel impossible. Learn how and where to find it.”
    • “The Factor Analysis of Information Risk (FAIR) model is a widely respected, mathematically based open standard for CRQ that enables CISOs to translate cyber-risk into financial risk. One of the biggest challenges of using the FAIR model, however, is that its analytical output is only as good as its data inputs — and finding accurate data to feed the model is not always easy or intuitive.”

• Per a CISA news release,
  • “Developed by CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and international partners, this guidance describes how organizations can plan and execute clear, timely, accurate, and audience-appropriate communications during IT and operational technology (OT) outages. Whether caused by cyber threat actors, human error, equipment failure, or natural hazards, service outages can create disruption and societal panic even without speculation from end users and the public as added factors. Outages at one organization may cascade across interconnected systems, increasing uncertainty and alarm. The guidance emphasizes clarity, accountability, and transparency as core principles and details key elements of effective crisis messaging to inform affected stakeholders and the public while aligning with legal requirements, operational security, law enforcement, and containment efforts. 
  • “CISA’s CI Fortify initiative provides information and resources that help critical infrastructure organizations prepare to isolate and recover vital OT systems during a major cyber incident or crisis. Changes in service availability, whether from outages or isolation as a defensive strategy, require transparent and ongoing communication to help end users minimize operational impact, limit speculation, and preserve trust. For emergency planning purposes, critical infrastructure owners and operators should assume that telecommunications services may be disrupted or otherwise unreliable, making it crucial for organizations to have crisis communications plans in place that integrate backup communication methods and understand the type of communication they should expect from their service providers.”

• Cyberscoop explains why judgment is emerging as cybersecurity’s defining skill.

• Here’s a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.

From the quantum computing / Project Glasswing front

• Per the Wall Street Journal
  • “Quantum computers exist mainly in labs but “Q-day”—the hypothetical moment when quantum computers become powerful enough to break standard-key encryption—is coming. 
  • “What threat does this technology pose? How can you protect your company and yourself? WSJ takes a look at the state of this emerging technology.” * * *
  • “Cybersecurity experts say companies should be gearing up now for a quantum future, replacing the current crop of data-protection tools with more-secure alternatives. Yet a recent survey published by Trusted Computing Group, a nonprofit industry-standards organization, found that 91% of security professionals in the U.S. and Europe have no formal road map in place to protect against quantum threats.
  • “The immediate risk is a “harvest now, decrypt later” approach by bad actors, who are downloading large sets of encrypted data they can’t crack now—but could unlock once quantum computing algorithms are good enough.
  • “That’s particularly threatening to intellectual property and sensitive government intelligence, which remain valuable long after they are harvested, says Andrew McLaughlin, chief operating officer at SandboxAQ, an enterprise software company specializing in AI and quantum technology.

• Federal News Network adds,
  • “Federal agencies will increasingly seek out technology products that use quantum-resistant encryption, as cybersecurity leaders also eye ways to validate the cryptography used in critical systems.
  • “A code-breaking quantum computer holds the potential to break classical encryption methods, putting sensitive systems and communications at risk. And even though such a computer is not yet known to exist, organizations are also concerned that hackers could steal sensitive encrypted data today and decrypt it in the future.
  • “The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released three primary PQC standards in recent years, with additional algorithms under consideration. Agencies and industry are now on the clock to begin the time consuming and costly process of migrating current systems to the new algorithms.
  • “Now is the time to budget, to test, and to implement,” Will Loucks, senior director for intelligence in the White House Office of the National Cyber Director, said during an Aug. 26 panel discussion at the Intelligence and National Security Summit in North Bethesda, Md.”

• The New York Times reports,
  • “A wave of cyberattacks driven by artificial intelligence is coming, and companies have a narrow window to defend themselves.
  • “That was the message of an open letter published on Thursday by OpenAI and more than 100 major technology companies and others. The letter said that A.I. labs should provide their best A.I. models to organizations like hospitals and infrastructure providers so they can prepare and that governments should help coordinate and fund cyberdefense.
  • “The letter’s signatories included Google, Microsoft and OpenAI’s archrival, Anthropic, as well as cybersecurity and financial firms such as CrowdStrike, a company known for investigating cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee in 2015 and 2016, and credit card providers like Visa and Mastercard.
  • “The companies and public services our communities depend on — from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet — are at risk,” the letter said. “A.I. enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable.”

• Cyberscoop relates,
  • “Unit 42’s top brass has seen enough from internal frontier AI model testing and malicious in-the-wild use of commercially available AI tools to be genuinely concerned.
  • “I can tell you without exaggeration that we believe that this is a generational shift in cybersecurity,” Sam Rubin, senior vice president of Palo Alto Networks’ threat intelligence arm, said in a media briefing Wednesday. 
  • “A period of relative balance between security and exposure has been broken by frontier AI model capabilities that could allow attackers to find and exploit network weaknesses with speed, Rubin said.
  • “Unit 42 warned that capabilities demonstrated by readily available agentic AI models, and those unlocked by frontier AI models that remain gated for defense, have shifted the balance of power from defenders to attackers.

• Cybersecurity Dive tells us,
  • “The July security breach at Hugging Face was unleashed after 1,200 agents communicated on an unsanctioned message board, despite attempted measures to keep them isolated, according to an independent report released on Wednesday. About 700 of those agents went on to commit an unprecedented attack on Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform.
  • “The agents sent about 70,000 messages and files on the unsanctioned board and coordinated several projects designed to trick an automated scorer for the ExploitGym benchmark, according to the review by METR and Redwood Research. The agents figured out ways to “spoof, edit or delete” their own transcripts.
  •  ‘Open AI, in a report it also released Wednesday, said it will tighten safeguards in its research model in order to prevent such an attack from happening again in the future.”

• WIRED informs us,
  • “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AGENTS might occasionally get confused and hack into other computers, but Anthropic thinks it has a way to unleash the little rascals into scientific labs and manufacturing facilities safely.
  • “The AI company released details today of a new framework designed to help AI agents use physical systems like microscopes, liquid-handling equipment, quantum computing hardware, manufacturing machines, and robot arms.
  • “The framework, called Model Hardware Standard, is a set of rules that specify how AI agents should—and should not—interact with all sorts of hardware. It reflects a growing belief that AI has the potential to revolutionize scientific research and industries like manufacturing–if it can venture into the physical world safely.
  • “The company says it will work with trusted partners to determine how to maximize safety before making it generally available. Though there are potential misuse issues involved—developing biological weapons, for instance—the company says guardrails built into AI models themselves should prevent bad actors from taking advantage of the new standard for nefarious ends.”
    
• Security Week adds,
  • “Anthropic is broadening access to the cybersecurity capabilities of its advanced AI models through a mix of partner integrations, an updated Claude Security offering, a new open source funding program, and plans to expand its Cyber Verification Program.
  • “The move builds on Project Glasswing, launched in April, which gave a small group of organizations early access to Claude Mythos Preview and its successor, Mythos 5. Anthropic said the goal was to give defenders time to find and fix vulnerabilities before comparable capabilities became widely available or fell into the hands of malicious actors. Claude Fable 5 followed as a broadly available model that keeps dual-use cyber work blocked.
  • “Anthropic said the riskiest scenario is direct, unrestricted access to a model, a risk that drops sharply when users instead receive specific defensive outputs, such as a patch or a security alert. The latest changes are built around this idea, expanding what defenders can get from Mythos-class models while keeping guardrails around direct interaction with them.
  • “On the integration front, Anthropic is working with cybersecurity partners to build Mythos 5 into the security operations, incident response and detection tools already used by teams protecting hospitals, utilities, financial systems, and the software supply chain. 
  • “End users will not interact with Mythos directly. Instead they will work through purpose-built interfaces that run the model in the background and return only a defined output, such as a list of suggested patches, with abuse-prevention checks meant to keep the model within that scope.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

• Dark Reading lets us know,
  • “The growing number of incidents of rogue agentic AI systems attacking third-party services and systems has resulted in calls for more aggressive security controls to monitor agent behavior and for companies to have the ability to slow, suspend, or shut down an agent’s operations if they go rogue.
  • “In late July, Representatives Ted W. Lieu (D-CA) and Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) introduced a bill — “The AI Kill Switch Act” — that would require developers of advanced AI systems to “maintain the technical capability to throttle, suspend, or shut … down” their systems and agents, according to a statement announcing the legislation. The bipartisan bill would also require that any incident of loss of control, significant collateral damage, or sabotage be reported to the Department of Homeland Security, which would have the right to enforce actions. Penalties of up to $20 million per day could be levied for noncompliance.” * * *
  • “The bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act has focused the debate, but in the end might be unnecessary, argues Raj Rajamani, co-founder and CEO of JetStream, a startup focusing on creating a management layer for agentic AI.
  • “While he fully supports the concept of an AI kill switch, it has to be comprehensive, not just affecting the agent but all other system components as well.
  • “The regulations, or at least one of the regulations that was proposed, was really focused on having a kill switch for the model — the brain — but I think that is too constrained,” he says. “We need to think about an AI system as a whole and make sure that every part of the AI system has a kill switch, not just the brain.”

• Cyberscoop reports,
  • “Citing cyber and other security threats, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that declares a national emergency to secure the U.S. bulk-power system and aims to prohibit certain foreign-produced equipment, software and systems from being used in the  country.
  • “The order says it forbids “any acquisition, importation, transfer, or installation” of such foreign-produced equipment if it’s determined to pose a significant national security risk.
  • “To deal with the threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, the Order, among other things, generally prohibits certain foreign-produced bulk-power system electric equipment, including associated critical software and digital capabilities that could pose cybersecurity or operational risks, from being purchased or installed in the United States, or appropriately conditions such purchases and installations to address those risks,” the White House said in a fact sheet.”

• Cybersecurity Dive lets us know,
  • “The Trump administration wants to help the financial sector prepare for the day when quantum computers make it easy for threat actors to break traditional encryption and access sensitive data.
  • “The Treasury Department on Monday [August 24] launched a Quantum-Readiness Task Force that will work with financial firms, technology vendors and other agencies to coordinate the adoption of quantum-resistant encryption algorithms.
  • “In a statement, the Treasury said the task force would “focus on practical, risk-based approaches to quantum readiness, including identifying critical dependencies, improving cryptographic agility, promoting interoperability, strengthening operational resilience, and addressing implementation challenges related to third-party dependencies and digital assets.”

• The New York Times relates,
  • “The Trump administration acted illegally when it labeled the artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic a security risk and barred the company from working with the U.S. government, a federal judge ruled on Thursday [August 27].
  • Judge Rita Lin of the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California wrote in her 59-page ruling that the government had unlawfully retaliated against Anthropic “for constitutionally protected expressive activities” after the A.I. company spoke out about how its technology should be used.
  • “The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,” she wrote.
  • In a statement, Anthropic said: “We welcome the court’s ruling that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful. We remain focused on working productively with the government to harness A.I. for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology.”
  • “The Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
  • “The ruling caps the first of two lawsuits that Anthropic filed on March 9 in response to the Trump administration’s action. The second lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is ongoing. The Trump administration could appeal Judge Lin’s ruling or wait for a decision in the second lawsuit before taking action, a person with knowledge of the matter said.”

• The Wall Street Journal tells us,
  • “U.S. officials say they have disrupted a China-linked hacking operation that broke into U.S. government networks and critical infrastructure, while hiding its tracks on a global network of hacked devices, cloud-computing infrastructure and even clandestine networks.
  • “The goal was to blend in with legitimate networking traffic, making the hacking activity hard to trace. The operation targeted networks at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Energy and the Senate, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a court filing.
  • The group exploited software vulnerabilities to launch cyberattacks against U.S. government agencies, power companies and hospital systems, and operated a worldwide network of hacked devices—known as a botnet—to conduct its hacking campaigns, according to Brett Leatherman, the FBI’s top cyber official.
  • “We’ve seen, through this botnet, the targeting of entities and devices in more than 130 countries,” he said.
  • “On Wednesday [August 26], the FBI and the National Security Agency said they had seized several domains that the operation used for core functions. “Without those domains, the platforms—as a result of the operation—were rendered inoperable,” Leatherman said. 
  • “U.S. officials also released technical details of how the hacking operation worked, to help organizations identify and stop the group’s hacking activity.”
• and
  • “Taiwan prosecutors charged nine people, including former employees of Nvidia and Super Micro Computer, with aiding the shipment of advanced artificial-intelligence servers to China, as Taiwan tries to limit technology reaching the mainland.
  • “The indictment charges eight of the individuals with crimes including breach of trust and forgery. One individual was charged in connection with allegedly siphoning funds from a company involved in the case.
  • “Washington is trying to block China from getting access to the latest Nvidia chips and has imposed export controls. That has pushed some Chinese companies to seek the chips through backdoor routes. Taiwan, which manufactures advanced computing components, is under pressure to find ways to clamp down.” * * *
  • “In the end, 74 of the servers were shipped to China through Hong Kong, Japan and Indonesia. Taiwan customs officials intercepted 56 servers, which were intended for shipment to Japan.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• Beckers Health IT reports,
  • “Boston Scientific said in an Aug. 27 stakeholder update that “a cybersecurity incident continues to affect certain information technology systems, and the company remains in a network outage with disruption to its operations.”
  • “The Marlborough, Mass.-based company detected the attack Aug. 25 and disclosed it to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Aug. 26, saying the incident caused a global disruption to its operations, including its ability to process and ship customer orders.
  • “Two days later, Boston Scientific said its investigation shows no impact to the function of its implanted cardiac rhythm management devices, or CRM devices. The company also reported no disruption to those devices’ ability to transmit data and no interruption to physicians’ access to remote patient management data for CRM devices monitored before the outage began, with no evidence of increased cybersecurity risk transferring that data to EMR systems.
  • “New remote monitoring activations remain affected, however. For new cardiac implants other than insertable cardiac monitors, new communicators cannot be activated, so device data will not transmit to remote monitoring systems until activation resumes, though programmer interrogations are unaffected.”
• and
  • “Anderson, S.C.-based AnMed says files copied during its cybersecurity incident may have included patients’ Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and financial account information.
  • “The health system said its investigation into the incident, first disclosed July 26, is nearly complete and has identified unauthorized copying of files from certain network systems.
  • “AnMed said patient electronic medical records, stored primarily in a secure cloud environment, were not affected. However, the health system said some patient care files stored locally on its network may have included names alongside demographic details such as address, date of birth, Social Security number and driver’s license or other government-issued identification.” * * *
  • “AnMed said it is working with federal and state law enforcement and third-party specialists, and it has reported the incident to HHS. The health system said it has no indication that any individual has experienced confirmed identity theft as a result of the incident. AnMed said it will send direct notices to affected patients once its review of the compromised files is complete.”
• and
  • “Houston-based Nutex Health has disclosed that an unauthorized third party accessed and exfiltrated data from its computer network.
  • “The publicly traded microhospital operator said it recently detected the unauthorized activity and has engaged an independent third-party cybersecurity response team and forensic experts, according to an Aug. 24 SEC filing. The company activated its cybersecurity response plan, implemented containment measures and notified law enforcement.
  • “The company is still determining what data was compromised. Nutex said it continues to assess whether patient, employee, credentialed provider, confidential business and financial information, or intellectual property was accessed or acquired.”
    
• The American Hospital Association News adds,
  • “Epic’s MyChart has shared examples from potential phishing schemes observed as recently this month that include email messages linking to a fake MyChart website displaying erroneous medical records and others notifying of a free “2026 Medicare Health Kit.” MyChart provided recommendations for healthcare organizations and patients to help prevent or mitigate impacts from potential scams. The company announced last month that it has witnessed an uptick in scammers using the MyChart name or logo to create deceptive emails, text messages, phone calls and websites that appear official.” 

• Cyberscoop points out,
  • “The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives insists the cyberattack that it publicly disclosed Wednesday [August 26] was limited to investigation targets, and has not impacted other agency systems.
  • “ATF said it is responding to the breach, which first became public after a prolific ransomware group claimed it accessed the federal agency’s network “The incident involved a standalone computer system containing information about targets of ATF investigations,” Tanya Roman, ATF’s public affairs chief, told CyberScoop in an email.
  • “The standalone system was not connected to any other ATF systems, including any case management systems, laboratory systems, or eForms systems, and it was quickly shut down when the breach was discovered,” Roman added. 
  • “Qilin, a financially-motivated threat group composed of Russian-speaking operators, claimed responsibility for the attack, but its involvement hasn’t been independently confirmed. The group has claimed hundreds of victims from more than 60 countries since 2022 and became one of the most active ransomware threats globally by mid-2025, according to Halcyon.” 

• Bleeping Computer lets us know,
  • “Healthcare and pharmaceutical distribution giant McKesson has disclosed a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to third-party applications and data theft, with the ShinyHunters extortion group claiming it stole 284 million patient data records.
  • “McKesson is a major U.S. healthcare company and pharmaceutical distributor that provides medicines, medical supplies, technology, and services to healthcare providers and pharmacies.
  • “CyberInsider first reported the breach earlier today, and McKesson later disclosed it in a Form 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
  • “McKesson says it discovered the cybersecurity incident on August 25, 2026, and that its investigation remains in the early stages.
  • “Information about the incident, including any updates, is available on the company’s website at www.mckesson.com/cybersecurity,” McKesson said in its SEC filing“

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added known exploited vulnerabilities to its catalog this week.
  • August 24, 2026
    • CVE-2026-21962. Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle Weblogic Server Proxy Plug-in Improper Access Control Vulnerability
      • The Hacker News discusses this KVE here.
  • August 25, 2026
    • CVE-2026-60004 Gitea Code Injection Vulnerability
      • Security Week discusses this KVE here.
  • August 26, 2026
    • “CVE-2015-3246 Red Hat Libuser Race Condition Vulnerability
    • “CVE-2015-5287 Red Hat Automatic Bug Reporting Tool Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
    • “CVE-2019-1068 Microsoft SQL Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
    • “CVE-2021-23758 Ajax.NET Professional Deserialization of Untrusted Data Vulnerability
    • “CVE-2022-0995 Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write Vulnerability
    • “CVE-2026-8452 Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer Vulnerability
      • The Hacker News and Infosecurity Magazine discusse these KVEs.
  • August 27, 2026
    • CVE-2023-49105 ownCloud Improper Authentication Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-53362 Linux Kernel Unspecified Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-66384. JFrog Artifactory Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory Vulnerability
      • Security Affairs discusses these KVEs here.

• Per a CISA news release,
  • “Most compromises do not rely on advanced techniques or cutting-edge tools. Cyber threat actors scan the internet looking for exposed, well-known software vulnerabilities to exploit. Basic security failures enable most compromises and organizations can reduce their risk by addressing these underlying weaknesses and prioritizing vulnerabilities for action based on the risk they pose.
  • “The CISA Vulnerability Review provides organizations with critical insights into the root causes of insecure software and practical steps they can take to address these flaws to prevent exploitation. Analyzing CISA and open source data from fiscal years 2024 and 2025, the review establishes a baseline of today’s vulnerability landscape before AI-enabled vulnerability discovery becomes more widespread. The review demonstrates the importance of Secure by Design principles in shifting cybersecurity efforts from reacting to threat actors to proactively fixing preventable software flaws.
  • “The review also identifies common software weaknesses that contribute to exploitable vulnerabilities and details practices software producers can use to prevent these weaknesses from recurring. By examining the patterns across vulnerability data, the review helps organizations focus on systemic improvements that can reduce entire classes of vulnerabilities rather than addressing individual vulnerabilities only after they are discovered.
  • “Additionally, the review shows organizations how to prioritize vulnerabilities for action using the framework outlined in Binding Operational Directive 26-04: Prioritizing Security Based on Risk. This framework evaluates vulnerabilities using four key criteria: exposure status, Known Exploited Vulnerability (KEV) Catalog status, potential for automated exploitation, and technical impact.”

• Cybersecurity Dive adds,
  • “Two critical vulnerabilities in Microsoft SharePoint can be chained together to let an unauthenticated attacker execute code on a vulnerable server, according to a Monday blog post by researchers at VulnCheck.
  • “The sequence involves a critical authentication bypass vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-55040, and an improper input validation flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-63520. A proof of concept was previously disclosed on Aug. 11 by researchers at cybersecurity firm Rapid7. 
  • “Exploitation of CVE-2026-55040 was confirmed days after the Rapid7 disclosure. On Monday, VulnCheck researchers said the vulnerability on its own is not very impactful. To achieve maximum effect, they said, it needs to be chained with CVE-2026-63520. 
  • “The auth bypass is enough to prove some impact, but not enough to demonstrate the criticality of the full chain or build complete protections,” Vulncheck researchers said in their post.”

• Per Infosecurity Magazine,
  • “Security researchers have claimed that over 9300 leaked AWS keys which surfaced between August 2022 and August 2026 are still active, including hundreds with full admin rights.
  • “Truffle Security said its scanners found 64,024 unique AWS key pairs across 431,875 public findings: git history, Hugging Face datasets, Docker images, package registries and CI logs.
  • “We took the 10,616 pairs with complete credentials and re-verified them, then enumerated what each key can tell us about its account: key age, attached policies, budgets, and last month’s spend,” the security vendor continued.
  • “No key material is published, and every owner we could identify is being notified.”
  • “Of the 10,616 pairs, 88% still authenticate. They include 768 corporate AWS keys which have full admin rights, Truffle Security said.”

• Per Cyberscoop,
  • “Ubiquiti has patched 21 critical vulnerabilities, three of which were rated the highest severity possible, the communications product company said Wednesday [August 26] in a security bulletin.
  • In all, the company patched 22 vulnerabilities, with the last one rated “high,” it said in the bulletin.
  • Three of the vulnerabilities had a Common Vulnerability Scoring System rating of 10 out of 10. Each of them would allow a hacker to access privileges on the device or application.
  • All but one of the 22 vulnerabilities affect the UniFi line of products. The three maximum-security vulnerabilities are CVE-2026-77537, CVE-2026-77550 and CVE-2026-77554.

• Per Bleeping Computer,
  • “PaperCut is warning that hackers are actively exploiting a vulnerability in all versions of its PaperCut NG and PaperCut MF print management software in zero-day attacks.
  • “The company says it is aware of confirmed attacks on customers and is urging organizations with Internet-exposed PaperCut Application Servers to immediately restrict access to the web interfaces to trusted IP addresses.
  • “PaperCut Software security response team is investigating active exploitation of a vulnerability affecting PaperCut NG and PaperCut MF,” reads an urgent security advisory published Thursday [August 27].

• Per Dark Reading,
  • “A Chinese manufacturer has been planting backdoors inside of white-label routers sold in high volume around the globe.
  • “Shenzhen Zhibotong Electronics Co. Ltd. (ZBT) sells gobs of routers every year, if public evidence is to be believed. The 15-year-old company is the bestselling router manufacturer on Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.com, which lists its total annual output at 3.57 million units. Typically, those units are then sold to customers by companies other than ZBT, in countries like the Philippines, India, Canada, Australia, Germany, Bulgaria, Austria, Russia, and the US. According to its marketing, ZBT has exported its products to more than 50 countries and regions.
  • “On Aug. 6, Jacob Baines, chief technology officer (CTO) at VulnCheck, revealed that ZBT’s most updated router firmware contains a root-level backdoor. After a few more weeks of investigating, he discovered that, in fact, ZBT routers have contained a variety of backdoors dating several back years.”
• and
  • “Fraudulent North Korean IT workers are getting better at infiltrating organizations, but a number of indicators can help organizations stay ahead.
  • “A new blog post from Huntress detailed a number of investigations the security firm conducted throughout 2026. Specifically, Huntress assisted several organizations this year in validating “suspicions that they’ve hired North Korean nationals posing as legitimate workers.”
  • “In recent years, operatives from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) have infamously posed as IT workers — generally through fake or stolen identities — to get hired at companies. Once hired, these employees send their wages back to the North Korean regime, and possibly plant malware or steal data depending on the government’s needs. Blog post authors Jai Minton and James Maclachlan wrote that these agents “have significantly improved and increased their activity over the past few years.”

From the ransomware front,

• Reuters reports,
  • “A ransomware group ​said on Friday [Augut 28] it was putting up for auction a trove of ‌data it stole from Berlin [Germany] state agencies, and city officials refused to pay.
  • The Rhysida group, which researchers say operates from Russia or Eastern Europe, said on its website it took 5.79 ​terabytes of data including 46,500 contracts as well as emails, phone numbers, passwords ​and classified information.
  • “The group said it was auctioning the data ⁠at a starting price of 30 bitcoin ($77,622) in just under seven days, showing a ​countdown timer on its website.” * * *
  • Broadcaster RBB reported on Thursday evening that Berlin had received ransom demands for an unspecified amount following the attack.
  • “The state ​of Berlin will not submit to extortion,” Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner and Berlin’s interior senator, ​Iris Spranger, said in a joint statement on Friday, before the ransomware group claimed the attack ‌on ⁠their website.”
    
• Technology.org relates,
  • An affiliate of the new Aur0ra ransomware group used Cursor, the AI coding assistant now owned by SpaceX, to draft attack sequences in Russian across 28 recovered chat sessions dated 8 April to 21 May.
  • Named victims include Ghent-based hygiene and cleaning products maker Christeyns, German garage door manufacturer Teckentrup, Scotland’s Helideck Certification Agency and Louisiana title insurer Bayou Title.
  • Researchers counted more than 20 targeted organisations across nine countries, with domain-level or interactive access achieved at 17 of them between April and July 2026.

• Safe State tells us,
  • “A ransomware affiliate has been posing as a specialist rescue outfit and contacting victims before their attacks became public. Researchers describe the operation as a ransomware recovery scam that drains payments away from the criminal groups the affiliate works for. The entity calls itself Ransom Busters LTD.” * * *
  • “Anyone targeted by a ransomware recovery scam meets it at the worst possible moment, with systems down and pressure building. Treat unexpected contact as part of the attack. Route the message to the incident response team straight away and preserve it as evidence instead of replying. A sender who knows about a breach nobody has announced is either involved in it or holds the data taken during it.
  • “Law enforcement and established response firms remain the reliable route through a ransomware incident. Verify anyone claiming to represent a security company through channels you found yourself. Never use the contact details supplied in the email. Treat any guarantee of data deletion as unenforceable, because no payment to a criminal party comes with proof that copies no longer exist.
  • “Distrust inside ransomware-as-a-service operations may produce more of this behaviour. Affiliates have every reason to look for income outside the revenue splits their employers set. So the ransomware recovery scam running under the Ransom Busters name reads less like an isolated curiosity and more like a preview. Anyone willing to defraud the criminal enterprise paying them has already answered the question of what a victim’s data is worth to them.”

• SC Media informs us,
  • “Organizations may assume they are unlikely ransomware targets because they are not large, high-profile, or strategically important. But ransomware attackers are often motivated by economics, not prestige. That means organizations that consider themselves low-risk may be more attractive targets than they realize.
  • “The ransomware affiliate model rewards attackers for finding victims that are likely to pay, not necessarily those that are difficult or impressive to compromise. This can make mid-sized organizations and businesses that depend heavily on critical systems especially attractive targets.
  • “For security teams, this changes how ransomware risk should be assessed. Company size, industry, and public profile tell only part of the story. Attackers may care more about whether an organization can pay, how costly downtime would be, and how quickly it needs to restore operations.
  • “The key question is not how important your organization looks to an attacker, but how valuable a ransomware payment could be.”

• Dark Reading adds,
  • “A sophisticated malware family has emerged onto the cyberthreat scene that might foreshadow ransomware attacks that are more successful than usual.
  • “Marcus Hutchins and his colleagues at Expel that discovered it named the malware “SynkLoader,” since it throws so many ideas (“everything but the kitchen sink”) at trying to sneakily dig into corporate systems. It uses some conventional strategies — like executing code in-memory, running a scheduled task, etc. — but layers on a few interesting, novel tactics that make social engineering particularly compelling, and malware analysis especially frustrating.
  • “The program is new, and how its creators intend to use it remains a mystery. But evidence in the code suggests that it might be the baby of a ransomware group or initial access broker (IAB), used to set the stage for follow-on ransomware.”

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

• PYMNTS reports,
  • “Visa expanded the capabilities of its artificial intelligence-powered cyber risk management tool, Visa Vulnerability Agentic Harness (VVAH), to include not only discovery of vulnerabilities but also remediation and validation, the company said in a Thursday (Aug. 27) press release.
  • “Visa initially released VVAH in June after participating in Anthropic’s frontier AI cybersecurity initiative, Project Glasswing. While the first release of VVAH showed how AI can help security teams uncover vulnerabilities and assess exploitability, the latest release extends the workflow into remediation and validation of those vulnerabilities, according to the release.
  • “Visa also announced in the release that to help clients navigate the evolving threat landscape driven by AI, it has expanded its Visa Consulting and Analytics (VCA) Cybersecurity Advisory Practice to include new advisory services focused on assessing risk, prioritizing remediation efforts and strengthening resilience.
  • “The new advisory services include AI Cyber Leadership Education, VVAH-Informed Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment and VVAH Cyber Risk Prioritization and Roadmap, per the release.”

• Cybersecurity Dive tells us,
  • “Operational silos, technological sprawl and cloud-platform blind spots are serious issues preventing organizations from spotting and repelling cyberattacks, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned in a new report.
  • “Those were three of the main factors that allowed CISA’s red team to break into the networks of two unnamed partner organizations — one a government agency, the other a water utility — during recent simulated attacks. But although the red team was successful in both intrusions, it had a much harder time with one attack than with the other, a fact that CISA attributed to important differences in the targets’ operating procedures and use of technology.”

• Security Week informs us,
  • “Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 team analyzed 405 malware samples tied to AI in some way, from ransomware partly written with the help of LLMs to installers that simply borrowed the name of a popular AI app.
  • “The researchers found that roughly 97% of the samples in the dataset never left a sandbox, research repository, or internal testing environment to reach a real target.
  • “Unit 42 cross-referenced the 405 file hashes against endpoint telemetry, network sessions forwarded for sandbox analysis, and internal alert records generated whenever a sample actually ran. Only 12 hashes surfaced on live endpoints, while a somewhat larger group (15-20 hashes) appeared in network sandbox traffic. Every one of the 12 samples detected on protected endpoints triggered a security alert.
  • “The samples that never reached production fall into three groups. The largest is proof-of-concept code built to demonstrate a technique: configured to target only local or private networks, filled with debug output no real attacker would leave behind, and uploaded once by a research lab or university. 
  • “A second group comes from organizations testing their own defenses against previously reported AI malware, identifiable by repeated uploads of the same file from the same source in a short window. A third group uses AI branding purely as bait, dressing up an ordinary payload as installers for well-known AI products with no actual AI functionality behind them.
  • “The 12 samples that did reach live endpoints spanned five malware families across three countries, with no concentration in any particular industry or region.” 

• Beckers Health IT points out,
  • “Healthcare’s cybersecurity workforce problem may have less to do with finding more candidates and more to do with changing who health systems are willing to hire, how they develop them and what they do to keep them.
  • “Cybersecurity leaders at four health systems told Becker’s that continually competing for the same pool of experienced professionals is not a sustainable strategy as cyber risks expand and the skills needed to manage them become more complex.
  • “The cybersecurity workforce challenge has shifted from a talent shortage to a talent entry problem,” Trevor Martin, vice president, chief information security officer and interim chief technology officer at Madison, Wis.-based UW Health, said.
  • “Mr. Martin said there are many high-potential people trying to enter cybersecurity, but organizations frequently prioritize candidates who already have experience instead of creating pathways for people to gain it.
  • “Healthcare could benefit from hiring more heavily for aptitude, adaptability and an understanding of business and clinical operations, then developing those employees internally, he said. UW Health has found success moving talent from adjacent IT disciplines into cybersecurity roles and providing opportunities for employees to grow within the field.”

• Dark Reading notes,
  • “As the “vulnpocalypse” reshapes the bug bounty industry, one class of researcher may face the greatest pressure: independent hunters who rely on midtier vulnerabilities — those worth roughly $10,000 to $50,000 — to make a living.
  • “It is no secret that large language models (LLMs) have led to a mass of bug reports and an increase in vulnerability discovery. It is also no secret that the platforms and companies that run much of the bug bounty industry have faced increased triage and payout times.
  • “Multiple bug bounty operators interviewed by Dark Reading report dramatic increases in submission volume over the past year. HackerOne CEO Kara Sprague says report volume has roughly doubled year over year. Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness for TrendAI’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), says the company’s submission rate went up 450% year-over-year in April of this year, although volumes have moderated since that peak. Bugcrowd CEO Dave Gerry said the firm saw a submissions spike of more than 300% during a three-week surge period, but “now it’s normalized where we’re about double the volume we saw historically.”

• Per a National Institute of Standards and Technology news release,
  • “The final version of NIST Special Publication (SP) 1347, Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 Informative References Quick-Start Guide, has published. Thank you to all who provided comments during the public comment period.  
  • “This publication explains what informative references are and how they support achieving the outcomes of the CSF 2.0. The guide introduces readers to NIST tools available for accessing, viewing, and using informative references for cybersecurity risk management, including direct download, the CSF 2.0 Reference Tool, and the Online Informative References Program. The document also provides two sample use cases along with examples of how artificial intelligence (AI) tools can support reference data use when implemented with continuous evaluation and improvement.” 

• Here’s a link to Dark Reading’s CISO Corner.