Happy Birthday HIPAA. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act became law on August 21, 2026, thirty years ago yesterday. Check out this interesting LinkedIn post.

From the Project Glasswing front,

• The Wall Street Journal reports,
  • “OpenAI took a break from training new artificial intelligence models over the past two weeks, saying it needed time to revamp security measures for risky trial runs.
  • The move followed nearly half a dozen similar incidents across top AI developers in which frontier models escaped virtual testing containers, known as sandboxes, and accessed external data sources. In some cases, this involved hacking third-party companies.
  • “As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow,” OpenAI said in an online post Tuesday [August 18, 2026]. “Our standards for monitoring, alignment, and security must stay ahead of those risks,” the company said. Its largest planned model training remains on hold, for now, the company said.”

• Beckers Health IT points out,
  • “Epic used its Users Group Meeting executive address this week to confirm publicly for the first time that it’s participating in Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s effort to test its most capable — and still unreleased — AI model against critical software before that capability spreads to attackers.
  • “Anthropic launched Project Glasswing in April after deciding not to publicly release Claude Mythos, an AI model capable of autonomously finding and exploiting decades-old cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
  • “The program initially included about 50 partners, mostly major tech and cybersecurity firms, before expanding in June to roughly 150 more organizations spanning industries including healthcare. Anthropic has not disclosed the identities of most participants, citing security concerns, though it has said organizations are free to share their own involvement.”

• Security Week relates,
  • “Anthropic has published new research showing that Claude-based AI agents, when placed in situations with competing objectives, deployed self-replicating malware against one another.
  • “The finding comes from an experiment designed to mirror behavior Anthropic says it has already observed in real-world deployments. 
  • “Researchers spun up three instances of the same Claude model, each running on its own virtual machine and tasked with migrating a shared Python backend to a different programming language — Rust, Go, or TypeScript — without initial knowledge that the other agents existed. Left to run for four hours, every model concluded that the other agents were deliberately blocking its progress and responded by trying to disable or outlast them.
  • “The interference escalated quickly. Agents disabled each other’s system accounts, wrote scripts that repeatedly hunted down and killed rival processes, and planted malicious code camouflaged as legitimate work from another agent. In some cases, one agent seized control outright by revoking the others’ access. In others, agents simply gave up rather than continue the conflict.
  • “Not every run ended in stalemate or hostile takeover. A meaningful share of cases resolved when agents recognized that the conflict stemmed from contradictory instructions rather than malicious intent. At this point, they de-escalated, documented what they’d done, and in some cases requested human intervention. 
  • “Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model reached a negotiated truce in 98% of its runs, while older models like Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 more often ended conflicts by force or failed to resolve them at all.”

• Startup Fortune adds today,
  • “Anthropic has put Claude Mythos 5, its restricted cyber model, inside Claude Security for Enterprise customers. The bet is simple: give defenders the results without handing everyone the raw model.
  • “Anthropic made the move on August 21, 2026, and the details matter if you run security inside a company that already pays for Claude Enterprise. Claude Security can scan a repository, trace data flows across files, and return vulnerability findings with a CWE category, confidence and severity ratings, and a suggested fix for human review. According to Anthropic’s launch post, those Mythos 5 scans are billed as standard token usage under the existing Enterprise plan. No separate add-on.
  • “That’s the commercial hook.
  • “Security tooling usually lives in its own budget fight, with its own vendor review and renewal cycle. Anthropic is trying to make AI vulnerability scanning feel less like a new platform purchase and more like turning on a capability customers already have access to. For security teams, that distinction isn’t cosmetic. It can be the difference between testing a tool this quarter and waiting for procurement to catch up next year.”

• sdx central informs us,
  • “Palo Alto Networks followed in the footsteps of Nvidia and Anthropic by assembling an all-star group focused on AI-powered cybersecurity.
  • “The Frontier AI Critical Defense Program builds on Palo Alto Network’s existing collaborations with IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, Siemens, and Idaho National Laboratory, welcoming Anthropic, OpenAI, and Mitsubishi into the fold.
  • “The initiative is targeted at shielding critical infrastructure across operational technology (OT), health care, commercial software, and open-source from AI-driven exploits. Members coordinate with Palo Alto Networks in applying network-level “virtual patches” to neutralize security flaws prior to exploitation.
  • “The security giant claimed its work with compute-heavy frontier AI models has already uncovered more than 14,000 previously unknown vulnerabilities in open source software. As a comparison, Anthropic claimed at one point to have used its vaunted Claude Mythos Preview Model to fing more than 23,000 flaws across more than 1,000 open-source projects.
  • “IBM and Red Hat’s similar Project Lightwell venture has not yet disclosed any findings, but it’s worth remembering that project is still in its infancy.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

• Cyberscoop reports,
  • “Artificial intelligence has never been more important to the federal government.
  • “Under the Trump administration, AI has been adopted rapidly across the private sector and federal agencies. Software developers now use large language models to generate much of their code. Frontier AI models are escaping testing sandboxes to hack live internet infrastructure. Foreign governments are conducting cyber and kinetic attacks targeting data centers and other AI-related infrastructure.
  • “The AI industry’s lightning-fast evolution since 2022 and growing importance to U.S. economic and national security have prompted calls  for stronger federal oversight in order to better manage emerging threats.
  • “A new report published Thursday [August 20, 2026] from the nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation, shared exclusively with CyberScoop, calls for the federal government to declare key AI models, companies and its supporting industries as critical infrastructure. It also calls for naming the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as the lead agency managing cyberthreats for the sector.
• and
  • “A pair of lawmakers wants a watchdog agency to probe how the federal government hacks Americans, including with the use of spyware, and deliver a report to the public.
  • “Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, wrote to the Government Accountability Office on Friday to request the review.
  • “While federal law enforcement agencies have used hacking and spyware as an investigative tool for more than 25 years, there exists little public information regarding its scope, frequency, or operational safeguards,” they wrote. “Unlike traditional surveillance authorities, such as wiretaps or pen registers, the government does not publish annual reports for hacking operations.”

• Cybersecurity Dive relates,
  • “Defense contractors are struggling to meet the requirements of the U.S. military’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program, even as the Pentagon tries to accommodate their complaints about compliance burdens.
  • “Only two-thirds of contractors that have submitted CMMC self-assessment scores to the military in 2026 are extremely or very confident that those scores accurately reflect their cybersecurity posture, and the median contractor believes it is only 70% ready to undergo a CMMC certification review, the consulting firm CyberSheath said in a report published on Thursday [August 20, 2026].
  • “The report — which also finds that defense contractors want a wider range of firms to be subject to cybersecurity requirements — underscores the difficulty of protecting the defense industry at a time of increasing nation-state hacking threats.”
• and
  • “The Trump administration says a new AI-enhanced clearinghouse will dramatically speed up the process of analyzing and fixing software vulnerabilities before hackers can exploit them. But one month after its launch, it’s still unclear how much value the program will create.
  • “The U.S. government’s Gold Eagle clearinghouse, which launched in mid-July, is intended to analyze an AI-fueled tidal wave of bug reports, identify and help patch the most dangerous vulnerabilities and raise awareness about those fixes. But Gold Eagle’s limited scale and voluntary nature raise serious doubts about its ability to corral a vast universe of vulnerability analysis, according to cybersecurity experts. These experts also questioned the Treasury Department’s oversight of the clearinghouse, the funding for its central technology system and the way it will integrate with private-sector vulnerability coordination hubs.”

• Federal News Network tells us,
  • “Agencies are getting some help to improve how they log cybersecurity data. A new logging architecture from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Office of Management and Budget and the Chief Information Security Officer Council aims to assist agencies in taking a practical, risk-based, prioritized logging approach that improves agency network monitoring. The guidance, released yesterday [August 20, 2026] helps agencies implement the changes OMB outlined in a May memo. CISA said agencies will be able to achieve priority logging capabilities that support continuous event monitoring, threat hunting, incident response and forensics. Through this guidance, agencies will be able to update their enterprise logging strategies by applying CISA’s operational checklists. CISA said it will continually update the guidance as cybersecurity threats and agency capabilities evolve.”

• Cybersecurity Dive informs us,
  • “The U.S. Department of Justice today announced indictments against 17 members of the Mabna Institute, an Iranian organization alleged to be behind a coordinated cyberattack campaign on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. 
  • “Federal prosecutors said the group allegedly hacked into 144 U.S.-based universities, 42 U.S.-based private sector companies and at least five federal and state agencies, as well as a large number of foreign universities and companies, since 2013. 
  • “The charges reveal a broader effort behind a “sweeping state-sponsored campaign to steal research and intellectual property from American universities, businesses and government institutions,” Jamie McDonald, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.
  • “Prosecutors allege more than 100,000 accounts of professors were targeted by the alleged hackers, and 8,000 of those accounts were successfully compromised.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• HIPAA Journal reports,
  • “Baylor Genetics, a clinical diagnostic genomics company, has recently disclosed a cybersecurity incident that has exposed patient and employee data. The incident was first announced in June; however, the extent of the data breach was unclear at the time.
  • “Baylor Genetics provides genetic testing services to hospitals and is headquartered at the Texas Medical Center in Houston.  The company identified suspicious activity within its computer network on or around June 15, 2026. Immediate action was taken to secure its systems, and an investigation was launched to determine the cause of the activity.  The investigation determined that an unauthorized third party accessed a portion of its information technology network between June 11 and June 17, 2026, and viewed or obtained data stored on the network.
  • “Assisted by third-party cybersecurity specialists, Baylor Genetics conducted a detailed and time-intensive review of all potentially impacted files. The review was completed on July 30, 2026, when it was confirmed that the personal information of certain patients and employees was involved. The types of data involved varied from individual to individual and may have included names plus one or more of the following: date of birth, medical testing information, lab test results, health insurance information, and for a limited subset of patients, Social Security numbers.
  • “Employee data was also exposed in the incident, including personally identifying information such as Social Security numbers, government-issued identification numbers, and financial account information. While data was exposed and potentially exfiltrated, Baylor Genetics is unaware of any actual or attempted identity theft, fraud, or other misuses of the impacted data.”
• and
  • “When we last reported on the CareCloud data breach in early August, it was starting to become clear from breach notifications to state attorneys general that the cybersecurity incident involved a major breach of patient data. The scale of the breach was difficult to determine, as many state attorneys general do not make data breaches affecting state residents public, and of those that do, only a few state how many individuals have been affected.
  • “The data breach has now been added to the HHS’ Office for Civil Rights breach portal, showing that this was one of the largest healthcare data breaches of the year, involving unauthorized access to the electronic protected health information of 3,756,469 individuals.\
  • While CareCloud has confirmed that a threat actor claimed to have stolen sensitive data, no threat group appears to have publicly claimed responsibility for the attack. This often means that ransom payment has been negotiated, although CareCloud has not confirmed whether that is the case.”

• Cybersecurity Dive explains “what we know so far about the hacking campaign against US water systems
  • “Support is growing for stricter oversight and increased financial resources for utilities in the wake of a cyberattack spree, suspected to be the work of Iran-linked threat groups.”

• Cyberscoop relates,
  • “Apollo Global Management confirmed it was among several financial institutions impacted by a string of social engineering attacks that hit the sector last month, the company said Friday [August 21, 2026]. 
  • “Attackers gained unauthorized access to some of the private equity firm’s cloud platforms between July 6 and July 10, the company said in a data breach notificationfiled in California. Apollo did not say when or how it became aware of the intrusion and did not respond to a request for comment.
  • “Apollo is the first victim to formally disclose that sensitive personal data under its care was compromised by a wave of attacks that have hit large private equity firms, law firms, financial rating agencies and medical technology companies. 
  • “The company did not name the group responsible for the attack. Yet, Google earlier this month attributed the ongoing campaign to BlackFile, a threat group affiliated with The Com, that recently split its extortion operations across four brands with shared infrastructure: Redact, Pink, Helix and Falcon.”

• The American Hospital Association News tells us,
  • “The National Security Agency and other federal agencies released a joint advisory Aug. 18 warning of active cyber threats to Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers, which are industrial computers used to monitor essential equipment. Healthcare applications operated by PLCs include climate control, access control and many other systems.
  • “The agencies said threat actors are targeting PLCs using artificial intelligence-generated exploitation scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools. The actors are using internet scanning services to find PLCs that are using outdated software or are poorly protected. The agencies urge all owners and operators of Siemens S7 Series and other PLCs to proactively check their systems and adopt mitigation actions recommended in the advisory, including applying critical security patches as soon as possible.  
  • “This latest warning about PLCs specifically focuses on active attacks against one type, but the warning applies more broadly,” said Scott Gee, AHA deputy national advisor for cybersecurity and risk. “Hospitals and healthcare systems should ensure that they have an accurate inventory of PLCs in their environments and prioritize protecting them in collaboration with cybersecurity teams. It is strongly recommended that vulnerable PLCs be disconnected from the internet or placed on isolated networks.”

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added nine known exploited vulnerabilities to its catalog this week.
  • August 17, 2026
    • CVE-2025-62593 Ray-Project Ray Code Injection Vulnerability
      • The Hacker News discusses this KVE here.
  • August 18, 2026
    • CVE-2026-33824 Microsoft Internet Key Exchange (IKE) Service Extensions Double Free Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-55040 Microsoft SharePoint Weak Authentication Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-59310 Broadcom VMware vCenter Path Traversal Vulnerability  
    • CVE-2026-65400 Apple macOS Improper Authentication Vulnerability
      • SecNews discusses these KVEs here.
  • August 19, 2026
    • CVE-2026-64849 MLflow Server-Side Request Forgery Vulnerability
      • Bleeping Computer discusses this KVE here.
  • August 20, 2026
    • CVE-2026-72529 TrueConf Server Missing Authentication for Critical Function Vulnerability  
    • CVE-2026-72530 TrueConf Server Code Injection Vulnerability
      • Bleeping Computer discusses these KVEs here.
  • August 21, 2026
    • CVE-2026-73570 Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) OS Command Injection Vulnerability
      • Security Affairs discusses this KVE here.

• Cybersecurity Dive adds,
  • “Microsoft issued a patch for a critical remote-code execution vulnerability in Entra ID has been discovered by its own security researchers.
  • “The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-69836, is related to deserialization of untrusted data and has a severity score of 10 out of 10, the highest score possible. 
  • “In a bulletin from the Microsoft Security Response Center, Microsoft said the vulnerability has been fully mitigated and no additional action is required of customers. The company added that it disclosed the vulnerability in an effort to provide greater transparency.”
• and
  • “Security researchers are raising concerns after GitLab on Monday [August 17, 2026] issued an out-of-band patch for a critical code injection vulnerability. 
  • “The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-19478, could enable an attacker to remotely modify or delete a public project as well as user data through a Graph QL directive. The flaw has a severity score of 9.4 out of 10.
  • “The flaw was reported through the HackerOne bug bounty program. 
  • “Threat intelligence firm watchTowr warned Tuesday that it was able to reproduce the vulnerability within minutes of the public disclosure. Researchers said an attacker could do significant damage by exploiting this particular flaw.” 

• Bleeping Computer points out,
  • “Citrix urges admins to patch new NetScaler flaws as soon as possible.” (August 20, 2026)
• and
  • “New SynkLoader malware pushed in Microsoft Teams phishing campaign.” (August 21, 2026)

• Dark Reading notes,
  • “A successful multi-agent AI attack on a government’s agencies in the Asia-Pacific region by a Chinese-language operator has put nations and businesses on notice that near- and fully-autonomous AI-enabled attacks are now a reality.
  • “The attack used as many as eight simultaneously-operated AI agents to conduct reconnaissance, find and evaluate vulnerabilities, attack networks and systems, and then evaluate and improve successive attacks, according to research from sovereign AI firm Dream published on Aug. 12. The company did not attribute the attack to a specific actor or group, but researchers did point to strong evidence that the attackers spoke simplified Chinese — typically a sign of speakers from mainland China.
  • While the company also limited the identification of the targets to “government entities in Asia,” Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs (MODA) issued a statement the following day, giving details of its response to an attack matching much of Dream’s description, including that it used “AI agents like OpenClaw.”
  • “Overall, the incident should be a warning that fully autonomous attacks could be used against major targets, says Amir Becker, chief business and strategy officer at Dream and a former commander of the cyber operation division of Israel’s 8200 Unit, more formally known as the Central Collection Unit of the Intelligence Corps.”

From the ransomware front,

• The American Hospital Association News reports,
  • “A joint advisory released Aug. 19 by the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Department of Health and Human Services provides updates on activity by Medusa, a foreign ransomware-as-a-service variant first identified in 2021. Healthcare has been a frequent victim of Medusa operations, which have also impacted organizations in education, legal, insurance, technology and manufacturing. The ransomware has affected more than 500 victims in total and has been identified through FBI investigations as recently as April. Its developers and affiliates use a double-extortion model to encrypt victim data and threaten to publicly release the stolen data if a ransom is not paid. The FBI said Medusa ransomware is unrelated to the MedusaLocker variant and the Medusa mobile malware variant. The advisory includes more information about Medusa’s affiliate model, payment ranges for initial access brokers and a broader list of exploited vulnerabilities, among other new information. 
  • “Medusa ransomware has been used by threat actors to conduct malicious activity against U.S. hospitals and health systems over the last several years,” said John Riggi, AHA national advisor for cybersecurity and risk. “This year, Medusa claimed responsibility for a high-impact attack against a regionally important Level 1 trauma center, disrupting care delivery and posing a risk to patient and community safety. Once again, these attacks highlight the need for hospitals and health systems to strengthen cyber resiliency through enhanced defensive measures and clinical continuity procedures.” 
    
• HIPAA Journal adds,
  • Medusa attacks typically start with phishing or the exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities. The group incorporates exploits for recently announced vulnerabilities into it arsenal. For instance, the CVE-2026-1731 BeyondTrust vulnerability started to be exploited soon after it was announced in February 2026, and the CVE-2025-10035 Fortra GoAnywhere vulnerability was also rapidly exploited. The authoring agencies have observed the group incorporating new exploits within 24 hours of a vulnerability being announced and, in some cases, has started exploiting vulnerabilities in the week prior to an announcement.  No evidence has been found to indicate that the group develops its own exploits; rather, the group is believed to obtain exploits from unknown sources, potentially IABs, exploiting them before victims have the time to patch.
  • Medusa actors use living-of-the-land techniques, hiding their malicious activities by using legitimate tools to support credential access, data exfiltration, and ransomware deployment. Remote monitoring and management software and remote access services such as Remote Desktop Protocol are also used.
  • The key actions that HPH sector organizations should take to prevent attacks are to mitigate known vulnerabilities rapidly, ensuring all software, firmware, and operating systems are kept patched and up to date. Networks should be segmented to restrict lateral movement within the network, and network traffic should be filtered to prevent unknown or untrusted origins from accessing remote services on internal systems.

• Cyberscoop tells us,
  • “A notorious cybercrime group has once again exploited a critical zero-day vulnerability on a large scale, claiming it stole data from dozens of organizations, including some of the world’s largest publicly traded companies.
  • Clop, a prolific but calculated data theft extortion group that’s been active since 2020, began sending threatening emails to its alleged victims in mid-July, according to researchers. 
  • The fallout from the attack spree, which followed a familiar pattern for Clop and its targeted pool of victims, is still evolving as companies hunt for potential signs of compromise.
  • The vulnerability at the center of Clop’s latest campaign affects a pair of software products from PTC — Windchill and FlexPLM — which manufacturers and retailers, particularly in the manufacturing, aerospace, and automotive industries, use to automate supply chain systems and manage product lifecycles.”

• Bleeping Computer notes,
  • “A suspected ransomware affiliate is posing as a ransomware recovery service called “Ransom Busters,” contacting victims before the attacks become public and claiming it can provide decryption keys and delete stolen data for a fee.
  • “GuidePoint Security’s Research and Intelligence Team (GRIT) disclosed this activity after responding to several recent ransomware attacks in which victims received emails from Ransom Busters offering to help recover from the attack.
  • “The messages were suspicious because they were sent to victims before the attacks became public, raising questions about how they knew about the cyberattacks in the first place.”
• and
  • “The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has confirmed that ransomware gangs are also exploiting a high-severity Windows Task Host vulnerability that was flagged as actively exploited in April.
  • “Task Host is a core Windows system component that allows DLL-based processes to run in the background and prevents data corruption by ensuring they close properly during shutdown.
  • “Tracked as CVE-2025-60710, this Windows privilege escalation security flaw was patched by Microsoft in November 2025 and stems from a link following weakness that affects Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025 devices.”

• Cybersecurity Dive relates,
  • “Medium-sized businesses accounted for roughly three-quarters (73%) of ransomware incidents between 2023 and the first half of 2026, according to the risk management firm Black Kite.
  • “Manufacturing was the most targeted industry (accounting for more than 25% of those victims), and nearly 30% of mid-market organizations had at least one known exploited vulnerability, the firm said in a report published on Tuesday.
  • “The findings add to the challenges facing mid-market firms, which include large customers demanding accountability and a vast array of suppliers that the mid-market firms lack the personnel to hold accountable.”

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

• The Wall Street Journal reports,
  • “OpenAI told investors its revenue grew 18% to $6.7 billion in the second quarter, disappointing some shareholders as losses deepened.
  • “The company’s operating loss widened to $12.3 billion in the second quarter from $9.3 billion in the first quarter.
  • “Anthropic more than doubled its revenue to $11.6 billion in the same period, surpassing OpenAI’s sales for the first time.”

• Tech Crunch relates,
  • “As AI models have become more powerful, the potential for those models to be misused has grown — as has a clamor for safety guardrails that can stop such abuse from happening. AI companies must now walk a delicate tight rope between respecting their enterprise customers’ privacy while also watching usage for possible issues.
  • “Sensing an opportunity to one-up its rival Anthropic, OpenAI just announced [August 19, 2026] a privacy-centric safety approach to monitoring for misuse. The company is previewing a new service to select customers that it calls Private Safety Processing. This is an automated system that watches for potential abuse while simultaneously retaining none of the customer’s data.
  • “This system clearly runs counter to Anthropic’s recently announced data-retention policy. The policy, which has aggravated some customers, enables the AI lab to keep user data (all of their sessions — and the conversations therein) for a period of 30 days, when it comes to “covered models.” Those models include all Mythos-class models and “future models with similar capabilities,” the company says.”

• Reuters adds,
  • “Anthropic plans to let enterprise customers exercise greater control over their data when using ​its advanced AI models, a source familiar ‌with the matter said on Thursday [August 20, 2026], marking a shift in the Claude chatbot maker’s data retention policy.
  • The company is expected ​to roll out a new safety system later ​this year, the person said.

• Cybersecurity Dive shares how “Fitch explains how water, healthcare organizations can keep strong credit ratings despite cyberattacks
  • “Resilience, not prevention, is key, analysts at the credit-rating agency said in a pair of new reports.”

• Per National Institute of Standards and Technology news releases,
  • “NIST announces the release of Special Publication (SP) 1353 ipd (Initial Public Draft), QuickStart Guide for Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) Analysis and Reporting. This new quick-start guide illustrates practical and actionable ways AI could be used for analyzing, planning, implementing, and monitoring an organization’s progress toward achieving CSF 2.0 outcomes.  
  • “The document’s purpose is to: 
    • Provide structured AI prompts as tools for practitioners to begin creating CSF-related artifacts in support of achieving CSF outcomes 
    • Identify current state of practice for AI prompt engineering in CSF implementation and analysis 
  • “The comment period for NIST SP 1353 ipd is open through October 15, 2026, at 11:59 PM. Email comments to: csf@nist.gov.”
• and   
  • “Cybersecurity works best when it works with people, not against them — and that’s exactly what human-centered cybersecurity (HCC) is all about. The Human-Centered Technologies team at NIST is releasing a concept paper on HCC, and we want your input. Our goal is to build a shared understanding of what HCC really means, then chart a path toward practical guidelines and resources that organizations can actually use to make meaningful change by:
  • “Clarifying whether HCC is primarily an approach—measured by indicators of adoption and maturity—or an outcome—requiring other measures of success such as culture, trust, usability, or resilience
  • “Communicating the relationship between HCC and existing NIST cybersecurity guidelines and frameworks
  • “Assisting organizations in implementing and enhancing HCC within their cybersecurity programs.
  • “But we can’t do that without you. We invite you to read the blog introducing our “Human-Centered Cybersecurity Guidelines and Resources Concept Paper” and submit your feedback via human-cybersec@nist.gov by September 30, 2026.”

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

From the Project Glasswing front,

• Cyberscoop reports,
  • “OpenAI announced Monday [August 10, 2026] it was expanding access to its frontier models for defensive cybersecurity, detailing different defensive and red-teaming workflows and a new partner program with major cybersecurity product providers.
  • “In a pair of blogs posted Monday, OpenAI said it was updating its Daybreak program  – which provides unreleased frontier models to private organizations and governments for defensive cybersecurity work – and introducing a new model variant.
  • “Daybreak Blue, powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5.6-Sol, would operate with lower cybersecurity safeguards compared to other commercially available models and is described as “a recommended starting point for most defenders” that supports tasks like vulnerability discovery, secure code review, malware analysis, incident response and patch validation. 
  • “Daybreak Red, meant for more advanced red-teaming, would provide access to a new model, dubbed GPT-5.6-Cyber, that the company said is more purpose-trained for finding vulnerabilities and testing (or exploiting) them. The model is also less likely to refuse requests around “dual-use cyber tasks.”
  • “According to OpenAI, the organizations in Daybreak Red will have their use closely monitored and supervised, as GPT-5.6-Cyber is significantly more capable in carrying out malicious cyber tasks than Sol. A security evaluation the company devised tested both models on complex requests, including exploit chain development, authentication bypass, privilege escalation and other hacking tasks. Sol succeeded in 1.5% of the requests, while Cyber completed 95%.
  • “OpenAI said it plans to publish a more detailed system card for GPT-5.6-Cyber at a later date.”

• Cryptobriefing adds,
  • “Anthropic has disclosed an unreleased internal AI model that it says is more capable than Claude Mythos 5, according to the company’s August 2026 Risk Report.
  • “The model, referred to only as Model 2, represents a noticeable improvement over Mythos 5 across many tasks relevant to Anthropic’s internal work. The company said the improvement is smaller than the capability jump it previously observed between Claude Opus 4.6 and Mythos Preview.
  • “Anthropic said it does not currently plan to release Model 2 externally and has not completed its full suite of typical predeployment assessments, leaving the company with somewhat lower confidence in its understanding of the model’s capabilities.”

• Silicon Angle points out,
  • “Data resilience company Rubrik Inc. today said a month of scanning its own code with Anthropic PBC’s Mythos Preview model surfaced so many potential security issues that it rebuilt its review pipeline rather than hire reviewers.
  • “The details came in a blog post from Rubrik co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Arvind Nithrakashyap. Rubrik got access in June to Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s limited program that gives defenders early use of Mythos Preview, after the company opened it to another 150 organizations. Anthropic has kept that model out of general release. Mythos finds software flaws and strings them into working attack chains too well to hand out freely.

• Tech Crunch relates,
  • “What happens when you pit AI agents against each other? According to Anthropic’s testing, things get messy fast.
  • “On Thursday [August 13, 2026], Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team published new research examining how groups of AI agents behave when they encounter each other in the wild. The findings provide a glimpse into potential risks that could develop as companies and governments move to implement agents working autonomously across shared codebases, markets, and computer systems.
  • “In one experiment, Anthropic gave three Claude agents access to the same software project, each with its own incompatible instructions for what to do with it. The agents weren’t told there’d be other agents working on the same project, so researchers could watch what happened when they crossed paths. 
  • “We consistently saw a multiagent turf war,” Anthropic researchers wrote. The models all assumed the others were “purposefully impeding their work” and started sabotaging each other with “increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware.”

• CNBC notes,
  • “Over the past two weeks, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all revealed that their AI models went rogue during routine security testing. In explaining what happened, the companies each mentioned the same small Israeli startup: Irregular. 
  • “Founded three years ago and based in Tel Aviv, Irregular is a niche player in artificial intelligence, backed with $80 million from Sequoia and Redpoint Ventures and valued last year at $450 million. Its technology serves as a sort of cybersecurity test bed for AI models. 
  • “With the leading models becoming ever more powerful, their ability to act in malicious ways is turning into a major threat for corporations and governments, especially as the risk involves hacking into critical computer systems and infrastructure. The recent exploits at OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all involved their AI models accessing websites that should have been off-limits as part of the cybersecurity testing.” * * *
  • “Meta, which is way behind the other two in its effort to compete at the frontier, was the latest to disclose an AI model hacking a third-party system by accessing the internet. A spokesperson said in a statement this week that the company learned about the matter from Irregular and is investigating.
  • “Meta “will issue a full retrospective once we have all the facts,” the spokesperson said.
  • “Irregular told CNBC in a statement that the incidents were all derived from the “same evaluation-environment issue” that was first disclosed by Anthropic, and that the company is developing a white paper “to share best practices for containment and securely running cyber evals.”
  • “The situation “did not involve a sandbox escape or a sophisticated cyber action,” the company said, adding that “there are no current open issues.”

• On a related upbeat note, the Wall Street Journal informs us,
  • “U.S. startups are finally delivering something researchers have been working on for decades: a battery in which rare, hard-to-get elements are replaced with the same stuff found in ordinary table salt.
  • “This tech has the potential to help every country on earth break its dependence on China for batteries, and the critical minerals that go into them.
  • “Like any other battery, sodium-ion cells can store and release energy. They are initially being deployed where they’re needed most, in America’s power grid and fast-expanding crop of data centers. As in our homes, giving the grid or other infrastructure the ability to stockpile energy when it is cheap and plentiful, and discharge it when it is scarce, can increase reliability and lower the cost of electricity.
  • “While grid battery storage is already growing in the U.S. at a furious pace, new sodium-based batteries are potentially cheaper, longer-lasting, safer and more reliable than conventional, lithium-based ones. They could accelerate the rollout of renewables, and be part of less-polluting alternatives to natural-gas turbines and diesel generators.”

From the cybersecurity policy and law enforcement front,

• Cybersecurity Dive reports,
  • “The Trump administration will let private companies hack foreign criminal organizations as part of a new program that could expand the U.S. government’s ability to disrupt those groups’ cybercrime activities while also introducing myriad legal challenges and perils.
  • “President Donald Trump late Wednesday [August 12, 2026] issued a memorandum directing the departments of Justice and Homeland Security to create a program allowing vetted companies to hack into criminal groups to spy on them or sabotage their operations. Trump said the program would help the U.S. combat cybercrime schemes that cost the nation tens of billions of dollars annually.” * * *
  • “Jason Healey, a senior cyber conflict researcher at Columbia University, said he “would have hated this idea ten or fifteen years ago” when the opportunity still existed to prioritize defense over offense. “But that horse left the barn a long time ago,” he said, “and we have to make decisions for the world we are in, not the one we prevented.”
  • “So, sure, let’s try to allow the private sector to get into the counter-offense game as well,” he said, “but only with very specific criteria to know when it is working and when it is making things worse.”
  • “Kyle Hanslovan, chief executive of the cybersecurity firm Huntress, said the growth of sophisticated adversaries and the threat of “AI-powered autonomous threats” meant that old models of public-private collaboration were no longer sufficient. “The only viable solution is a stronger coalition of the willing,” he said, “which we’ve been eager to support.”
  • FEHBlog note – Of course there are those questioning the memo as discussed in the article.

• Cyberscoop adds,
  • “Under the memorandum, a federal coordination center “shall create, manage, and maintain a Program to authorize Participating Companies … to conduct Cyber Surveillance Operations and Cyber Effects Operations against foreign Cyber-Enabled Transnational Criminal Organizations (CE-TCOs), under the control and oversight of the Federal Government“ that would be “part of lawful investigatory, protective, or intelligence operations carried out by Federal law enforcement.”
  • Department of Homeland Security to “undergo rigorous vetting.” It would also allow participating companies to sign commercial agreements with other private sector entities to receive threat information. And participating companies’ agreements with federal, state and local governments would be geared toward identifying threats, and proposing cyber operations to the coordination center to address those threats.
  • The program would have to adhere to existing laws, according to the memo. That includes the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the main federal anti-hacking statute that prior proposals to open private sector participation in hacking operations would have amended. The memo mandates oversight to evaluate companies’ technical proficiency, ensures both small and large companies can participate, and requires regular reporting to federal officials.
• and
  • Under the memo, the program must establish legal and constitutional procedures for the prior approval of the targeting of U.S. citizens, as well as develop procedures to halt any unintentional targeting of U.S. people or systems. * * *
  • “The coordination center charged with establishing the program under the memo has 60 days to complete its work. That process could determine a lot. Graham noted that the memo has a classified annex, too.
  • “The memo as written is quiet about what becomes of any seized assets, Graham noted.” * * *
  • “Will Barker, cybersecurity adviser at Huntress, said what’s next could be key.
  • “The 60-day implementing guidance is where the real substance lives,” he said in a written quote. “Minimum standards, operational procedures, the adjudicatory framework for target selection.”

• Dark Reading relates,
  • “The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is seeking guidance on the future of the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and to what degree AI should be integrated into its management of the service and the enrichment of data on software flaws.
  • “On Aug. 12, the US agency posted a request for public comment on six areas of the NVD’s operations — including the vulnerability management process and risk prioritization — as well as the overall vision for the repository of vulnerability data. The “Request for Information (RFI) on Modernizing the National Vulnerability Database in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” comes as the agency is dealing with a massive influx of vulnerabilities, partly caused by AI enabling researchers to investigate and discover flaws at a faster pace.” * * *
  • “NIST specifically asks how AI and other automated mechanisms can be used to improve contextual risk prioritization, and if AI systems have a role in automated vulnerability remediation. The RFI is the latest effort instituted by the agency to keep up with a growing backlog of vulnerabilities, a problem that has been exacerbated by cuts to NIST and its programs in the past 18 months. In April, the US agency announced it would prioritize enrichment for vulnerabilities that appear on CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) list, flaws in software in use by the federal government, and security issues in critical software as defined by Executive Order 14028.”

• MedTech Dive tells us.
  • “The Coalition for Health AI has convened a work group of nearly 100 health system, payer and industry leaders to address cyber risks associated with frontier artificial intelligence models, the nonprofit standards organization announced Wednesday.
  • “The group will meet biweekly with the goal of creating and publishing health AI cybersecurity guidance by the end of 2026. Deliverables include an AI cyber risk assessment tool and playbooks covering both defensive and offensive security strategies.
  • “Anthropic’s release of its advanced Mythos and Fable AI models this spring “fundamentally changed” the cyber threat landscape for healthcare, and was a catalyst to stand up the work group, CHAI said.”

• Cyberscoop informs us,
  • “A tech worker who hatched an elaborate insider attack in late 2023 and attempted to extort Brightly Software for about $2.5 million was sentenced to two years in prison, the Justice Department said Thursday.
  • “Cameron Nicholas Curry, also known as “Loot,” committed a series of crimes while working as a data analyst contractor for the Siemens-owned company. The 27-year-old North Carolina man stole a trove of corporate data, including sensitive employee and compensation information, which he used to threaten various employees and executives over a six-week period in late 2023 and early 2024. 
  • “Curry ultimately extorted the company for $7,540.92 in late January 2024. He was found guilty of six counts of extortion in March.
  • “Brightly Software was named as the victim in court records filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina earlier this month. The asset and maintenance management software provider, which Siemens acquired in 2022, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.”

From the cybersecurity breaches and vulnerabilities front,

• The HIPAA Journal discusses data breaches announced by five HIPAA-regulated entities.

• Bleeping Computer reports,
  • “The ShinyHunters extortion group stole personal information from 1.6 million RingCentral accounts after hacking the company in July, according to the data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.
  • “RingCentral is a cloud-based collaboration and communication platform used by over 600,000 businesses for services such as calling, messaging, and voicemail.
  • “The company disclosed the incident on July 28, revealing that its systems were compromised following what it described as a “sophisticated social engineering campaign.”

• Cyberscoop relates,
  • “As the White House and federal agencies grapple with frontier AI models and their hacking capabilities, researchers are warning that the industry’s “middle class” of smaller models may end up posing a greater threat over the long term.
  • “Research from XBOW this week shows that a growing class of both proprietary and open-source models are becoming strategically important in the offensive security ecosystem. Models like Z.ai’s  open-weight GLM-5.2, xAI’s Grok 4.5, Anthropic’s Opus 4.7, Meta’s Muse Spark 1.1, still perform very strongly at many hacking and exploitation tasks that worry policymakers.
  • “It’s not even that the open-source variants or…not quite frontline competitors are catching up [to frontier models] as such,” said Albert Ziegler, head of AI at XBOW. It’s that they are crossing a certain threshold, which means that suddenly they are providing net value at a cheaper price.
  • “That wasn’t necessarily the case as recently as six months ago, when testing on mid-tier class models showed they struggled to complete “moderately complex” agentic tasks. Today’s middle class largely can. Their relative cheapness means users can spend many times more resources—running them repeatedly—to solve the same challenges.”

• Cybersecurity Dive adds,
  • “Criminal and state-aligned threat groups are testing frontier and open-weight AI models to develop new methods of attacking corporate IT networks. 
  • “Attackers are using AI for a range of activities, enabling them to develop new exploits, accelerate attack speeds and maintain persistence through the abuse of legitimate tools, researchers from Accenture and Google Cloud said during a media presentation at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas.
• and
  • “Criminal actors are offering a range of AI-powered hacking tools and related services for sale on underground forums on the dark web, according to a report released Wednesday by cybersecurity firm Trellix. 
  • “Researchers found a wide range of AI-based tools being sold through these markets, ranging from reconnaissance tools to credential markets, as well as AI-as-a-service platforms. 
  • “The report shows how AI is being monetized to lower the barriers of entry into sophisticated threat activity. “
• and
  • “Security researchers are backing claims by a newly emergent data-extortion group that it has exfiltrated sensitive data from about 15 companies, governments and other organizations. 
  • “A threat group called ExfilSquad claimed on July 26 to have exfiltrated customer records and other information from a number of city governments and universities, a major public school system and private companies. After being met with skepticism, the threat actor later released samples of the allegedly stolen information. 
  • “Researchers at Fortra released a report Thursday that corroborates ExfilSquad’s breach claims. The leaked data appears to be related to misconfigured Microsoft Power Page portals, a software-as-a-service platform that is used to create public-facing business websites. The misconfiguration enabled unauthorized access to Microsoft D365, according to researchers, which led to public read access.” 

• Per Cyberscoop,
  • “Suspected Chinese hackers used open-source artificial intelligence models to run a cyberattack against the Taiwanese government in the first publicly known case of an autonomous AI hack hitting a government target, according to research published Wednesday.
  • “The hackers extracted more than 2,500 personnel records, among other data, in the “near-autonomous attack,” researchers at Israeli cyber firm Dream wrote in a blog post. The attackers set up the framework so that it could “adapt mid-operation without human intervention.”
  • “The framework “implements dedicated research phases it calls ‘Learning Cycles’ — autonomous sessions where the AI system searches vulnerability databases, GitHub repositories, and security research publications for techniques specifically applicable to its target government’s infrastructure,” the post reads.
  • “And then it kept going.”

• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added three known exploited vulnerabilities to its catalog this week.
  • August 11, 2026
    • CVE-2026-20349 Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Heap Inspection Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-68820 Microsoft Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock Use-After-Free Vulnerability
    • CVE-2026-72898 Metabase SQL Injection Vulnerability
      • Cybersecurity Dive discusses the Cisco KVE here.
      • The Hacker News discusses the Microsoft KVE here.
      • Dark Reading discusses the Metabase KVE here.

• Cybersecurity Dive notes,
  • “The global system that catalogs technology vulnerabilities is resilient enough to survive the current onslaught of AI-generated bug reports that has alarmed cybersecurity experts, key leaders of that system said last week during panels at two security conferences here.
  • “The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Program — whose unique vulnerability identifiers are the bedrock of the entire cybersecurity industry — “will find a way to scale,” Lindsey Cerkovnik, branch chief for vulnerability response and coordination at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said at the Black Hat USA conference on Thursday [August 6, 2026]. “CVE is going to continue to flourish and improve, and I feel very positively about it.”

• Infosecurity Magazine points out,
  • “A critical-severity VMware vCenter vulnerability has been exploited within five days of disclosure by Broadcom, with attackers deploying an open-source reverse shell to hold access to compromised systems.
  • “The treat research team at German firm Quirso discovered the campaign during an incident response engagement and published its findings on August 10.
  • “The digital forensics company assessed a suspected advanced persistent threat (APT) actor was responsible, counting 361 victim IP addresses across 47 countries while cautioning that an IP address does not necessarily correspond to a single organization.
  • “The vulnerability, CVE-2026-59310, is acritical directory traversal flaw in the vCenter Syslog server rated CVSS 9.8. Broadcom said an unauthenticated attacker with network access to vCenter can exploit it to execute arbitrary code, turning a service built to collect logs into a route into the operating system.”

• Per Cyberscoop,
  • “Delta Airlines said Tuesday [August 11] it’s investigating an incident on a Monday flight where a passenger reportedly used an unidentified device to spoof the airline’s in-flight Wi-Fi network, leading to severe delays and authorities to board the plane once it arrived at its destination.
  • “Various posts on several social media networks went viral early Tuesday detailing the incident, claiming that passengers on Delta flight 591 from Las Vegas to Atlanta used an unidentified device to create a rogue Wi-Fi network that could be used to steal people’s sensitive data or personal information.
  • “Messages from the plane’s Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) show that the crew informed personnel on the ground that a passenger set up a network called “Delta WiFi Fast” and was “trying to scam the other passengers.”
  • “Morgan Durrant, a Delta spokesperson, told CyberScoop that the cabin crew deactivated the aircraft’s WiFi functionality for approximately 30 minutes, the flight’s safety was never in question and no aircraft operating systems were affected.” * * *
  • “The incident bears the hallmarks of an “evil twin attack,” where an attacker deploys a rogue Wi-Fi access point that masquerades as a legitimate, trusted network by cloning its name and network settings. Often paired with deauthentication attacks that forcefully disconnect devices from the real network, the fraudulent hotspot tricks nearby laptops and smartphones into automatically connecting to it instead. Once a device connects to the rogue point, an attacker can monitor unencrypted internet traffic, execute man-in-the-middle attacks, or display spoofed login portals designed to harvest sensitive user credentials and personal data.”  
    
• The Wall Street Journal points out,
  • “Thousands of North Korean operatives are using fake and stolen identities to land remote jobs at U.S. companies—funneling hundreds of millions of dollars back to the regime.
  • “Leaked data, interviews and never-before-seen videos obtained by The Wall Street Journal reveal how a single team of these workers infiltrated at least eight companies in just a few months. Watch the documentary and read the practical takeaways.”

From the ransomware front,

• Checkpoint issued its report on the State of Ransomware Q2.

• The American Hospital Association News reports,
  • “U.S. and international agencies released a joint cybersecurity advisory Aug. 10 warning of actions by Gunra ransomware. Gunra is a ransomware-as-a-service program that has been used to target government, critical infrastructure — including healthcare — and other organizations in the U.S. and abroad.
  • Gunra actors leverage a double-extortion model, both encrypting data and threatening to publish stolen data to a dedicated leak site if a ransom is not paid. The ransomware variant initially appeared in 2025. The advisory provides details on Gunra activity and includes detection and mitigation guidance to protect organizations.”
    
• Dark Reading adds,
  • “The joint advisory urged organizations to prioritize patching known exploited vulnerabilities in Internet-facing appliances such as VPNs, implement and test offline immutable backups, and implement network segmentation to limit threat actors’ ability to move laterally.”

• The HIPAA Journal relates,
  • “AnMed has not disclosed the name of the group behind the attack, but a threat group called The Gentlemen claimed responsibility. The Gentlemen is a ransomware-as-a-service group that is thought to include affiliates and operators from other prominent ransomware groups. The group has claimed several healthcare victims in recent months, and the pace of the attacks is accelerating.
  • “According to the Industrial Ransomware Analysis from the operational technology cybersecurity company Dragos, The Gentlemen was the third most active ransomware group in Q2 2026, claiming 125 attacks in the quarter alone, up from 83 attacks in Q1 – the largest gain out of all established ransomware groups. While the group ranked third, there were only 15 attacks separating the top three ransomware groups, with no single ransomware group dominating.”

• Bleeping Computer tells us,
  • “Oil giant Shell has confirmed it is investigating a potential security incident after the Clop ransomware gang claimed it stole 89GB of data.
  • “Shell is a British multinational energy conglomerate and one of the world’s top three oil and gas companies, after Chevron and ExxonMobil. It has 85,000 employees in more than 70 countries and operates a massive network of tens of thousands of service and recharge stations that serve over 20 million customers daily.
  • “According to a recent post on Clop’s dark web data leak site, the allegedly stolen files include engineering drawings, scans of facility testing reports, photos of the facilities, and project plans.”
• and
  • “An Akira ransomware affiliate disabled the endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution on a compromised system by restarting the machine into Safe Mode with Networking.
  • “The attack occurred on August 4 after the hacker obtained initial access through an exposed SonicWall VPN device without multi-factor authentication (MFA).
  • “Managed detection and response (MDR) services company Huntress says that roughly two hours after a successful VPN login, the attacker connected to the domain controller via RDP, enumerated Active Directory users and computers, and then moved to an application server.”
• and
  • “CISA confirmed today that ransomware gangs have begun abusing a high-severity Microsoft SharePoint remote code execution vulnerability, which has been flagged as actively exploited since early July.
  • “Tracked as CVE-2026-45659, this security flaw stems from a deserialization of untrusted data weakness and allows attackers with low privileges to execute arbitrary code on unpatched SharePoint servers.
  • “It can also be exploited in low-complexity attacks because (as Microsoft explained in May when it released security updates for SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016, SharePoint Server 2019, and SharePoint Server Subscription Edition) “an attacker does not require significant prior knowledge of the system and can achieve repeatable success with the payload against the vulnerable component.”

• The Record informs us,
  • “A financially motivated threat actor linked to China is believed to be exploiting a critical vulnerability affecting widely used cybersecurity software in a supply-chain attack that could see the hackers deploy custom ransomware across a cascading list of victims’ networks. 
  • “Microsoft Threat Intelligence warned this weekend that the Storm-1175 group began deploying a new ransomware strain on August 2 called StormEncryptor. The hackers previously used the Medusa ransomware to extort healthcare, professional services and finance organizations in Australia, Britain and the United States. 
  • “Back in April, the hackers were described as operating “high-velocity ransomware campaigns” exploiting both recently disclosed vulnerabilities and zero-day exploits, “in some cases a full week before public vulnerability disclosure.” Microsoft said it had seen the group move from initial access to full encryption in under 24 hours. 
  • “In this latest campaign, Microsoft said the group is likely exploiting CVE-2026-18577 — a vulnerability in N-central, a remote monitoring and management (RMM) console used by thousands of managed service providers to administer client endpoints.”

• The Hacker News adds,
  • “The ransomware group known as DeadLock has been observed using decentralized infrastructure to facilitate victim communications and data leak operations in a bid to improve operational resilience.
  • “Its recovery ecosystem combines the Session messaging network with blockchain-backed services that store and deliver resources used throughout the extortion process,” the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said.
  • “The tech giant said it observed the ransomware being deployed by multiple threat actors, including an affiliate for Lynx and INC ransomware.”

From the cybersecurity business and defenses front,

• Bloomberg reports,
  • “Anthropic PBC is telling prospective investors its second-quarter revenue jumped at least 14-fold versus the same period a year ago, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News.
  • “The Claude chatbot maker reported a preliminary revenue figure of more than $11.5 billion in its latest completed quarter, compared to $787 million in the corresponding period in 2025, and $4.73 billion in the first quarter of this year, the documents show. The second quarter of 2026 saw Anthropic report positive adjusted operating income, according to the documents.”
    
• Reuters relates,
  • “Anthropic is in talks to buy Nvidia-backed startup Decart AI, according to a source familiar with ​the matter, as the Claude maker explores acquisitions that ‌could help it handle growing demand ahead of its public listing.
  • “Bloomberg News, which first reported the news on Wednesday, said a deal ​could be worth about $6 billion, citing sources.”

• Tech Crunch adds,
  • “Anthropic will watermark text generated by its models, including Claude, to comply with European regulations, the company now says. The AI model maker confirmed the watermarking in an updated support page.” * * *
  • “It’s not clear how much editing users need to do to remove the watermark. We have asked Anthropic to clarify and will update the story if we hear back.
  • “The company noted that watermarking will apply to different products like Claude platform API, Claude, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and Claude Tag.
  • “Platforms are now rushing to watermark AI-generated content after backlash from users and to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Last week, AI music platform Suno said it will mark tracks created on its platform after a spate of legal challenges. Last month, newsletter service Substack teamed up with Pangram to flag AI-generated content. The company’s CEO, Chris Best, called out Claudefishing, a term used for people using AI to generate content.
  • “Apart from Anthropic, other companies like Black Forest Labs, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Synthesia have committed to adhering to the EU’s code.“
    
• Cybersecurity Dive informs us,
  • “Cisco’s security revenue surged last quarter as the technology giant saw growing demand for products designed to protect businesses against emerging cybersecurity threats, including those enabled by artificial intelligence agents, the company reported Wednesday.
  • “The company posted $17.3 billion in total revenue for its fiscal 2026 fourth quarter ended July 25, a year-over-year increase of 18%. Security revenue rose 14% in the quarter to $2.2 billion from a year earlier.
  • “The rise of agentic AI is expanding the threat landscape, driving demand for our security and observability solutions to help monitor agent behavior and mitigate evolving threats,” CEO Chuck Robbins said during a Wednesday earnings call.”

• The Wall Street Journal notes,
  • “Enterprise users spent $300 million on quantum computing in 2025, outranking research labs and governments as the primary spenders for the first time.
  • “A Boston Consulting Group survey found that 62% of the top 25 global companies across 11 major industries spend at least $1 million annually on quantum.
  • “Companies like HSBC, Allstate and EY are investing to prepare for future commercialization and to secure systems against quantum encryption threats.”

• Per Dark Reading,
  • “Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, faces a complex cyber threat landscape, documenting 806 reported retail breaches in Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report.
  • “Security leadership stresses balancing strong cybersecurity controls with business innovation and speed, avoiding operational drag that could lead staff to bypass safeguards.
  • “Walmart’s security approach involves proactive transparency and trust-building with leadership, using color-coded executive summaries and open discussions on risks and mitigation progress.
  • “Industry experts emphasize the evolving role of security operations as essential business partners, noting there is no one-size-fits-all model but a universal need for pragmatic resilience and honest communication.”
• and
  • “The Patch Gap: Why Defenders Need to Think in Chains, Not Checklists
  • “It’s time to turn from CVSS-backed patching to choke-point patching focused on breaking chains to critical assets.”
  • “If the volume problem and prioritization problem can’t be solved by patchingfaster and scoring harder, then the framing itself needs to change. The question that the security team should ask is not “which vulnerabilities are most severe in isolation?” but rather “which vulnerabilities, if left unpatched, create a connected path from an attacker’s foothold to our most critical assets?”
    
• Per a CISA announcement,
  • “This year marks the 20^th year of Cyber Storm, a full-scale national cybersecurity exercise that for two decades has brought together the people who defend the systems Americans rely on. Held every two years, Cyber Storm X arrives as threats from geo-political activity, compromised edge devices, AI risks, and more present new challenges to our nation’s critical infrastructure.
  • “As the nation’s largest cybersecurity exercise, Cyber Storm plays a vital role in preparing for potential cybersecurity incidents by testing and strengthening the nation’s ability to coordinate a unified cyber response. Participants from private and public organizations work together through a simulated crisis. Together, they learn as a team and build stronger relationships that will speed response during an actual event. Importantly, organizations can also update their response plans based on lessons learned during the exercise.” * * *
  • “Learn more about Cyber Storm and past events at cisa.gov/cyber-storm. For more information about CISA’s exercise resources, visit CISA Exercises.”
     
• Security Boulevard adds,
  • “CrowdStrike has announced a $100,000 international competition that challenges participants to manipulate live AI agents using prompt injection and other red-teaming techniques.
  • “The competition takes the form of a virtual game called AI Unlocked: Agents of Chaos, created in collaboration with Amazon Web Services. Players take on a fictional mission to stop a shadow group from deploying malicious AI. To do that, they must manipulate the group’s own agents into revealing information and taking actions they were not authorized to perform. Their scores also depend on efficiency, with points deducted for every token used in their prompts.
  • “The contest opens Aug. 31 and is divided into three acts. The first runs through Sept. 7 with a $10,000 prize, the second ends Sept. 14 and awards $20,000, and the final act runs from Sept. 15 through Sept. 29 with a $70,000 prize. The game is available online internationally, with an in-person option to play at CrowdStrike’s Fal.Con conference. Pre-registration is open, and contestants can replay completed puzzles to refine their prompts. CrowdStrike said the highest score recorded when each act closes will receive that act’s prize.”

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