Threat intelligence

Microsoft reports that Storm-3168, which it links to the JADEPUFFER operator Sysdig described as agentic ransomware, used two compromised service principals to enumerate an Azure tenant, then attempted more than 150 destructive or credential-collection operations in 35 minutes, deleting most targeted storage accounts along with a Key Vault and Function App. Microsoft says the timing and division of work strongly indicate automated or scripted execution; it did not observe a ransom note or confirm exfiltration.

Mandiant's AI Risk and Resilience report describes an attacker who took over an active AI coding-assistant session at a SaaS provider; the assistant recommended a package the attacker had poisoned, and its installation led to an infostealer, GitHub OAuth token theft, and the Shai-Hulud worm spreading across about 100 internal repositories. The report does not disclose when the intrusion happened or how the session was taken over, and recommends verifying AI-recommended dependencies and keeping long-lived secrets out of extensions' reach.

Microsoft reports a campaign between August 3 and 5, 2026 that sent more than a million emails impersonating company executives to push accounts-payable staff toward an ACH payment of nearly $50,000, backed by fabricated invoices and forwarded threads impersonating ServiceNow. Microsoft says the templates showed multiple indicators consistent with generative AI, though these do not establish how much of the content AI produced.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's September 2026 tracker, drawing on Mandiant incident response, reports adversaries shifting from basic prompting to agentic workflows. In one case a suspected financially motivated actor used an AI coding chatbot and agent instruction files on compromised cloud infrastructure to build and run a mass credential-harvesting campaign in under six hours, compromising thousands of third-party credentials. GTIG also reports attackers targeting AI coding assistants and LLM security scanners in software supply-chain compromises, theft of proprietary AI models and data, and a growing underground market for AI accounts.

ENISA's 2026 threat landscape, based on 8,257 incidents in calendar 2025, assesses that AI will highly likely increasingly support malicious operations and that 2026 will likely see more kill-chain phases directly enabled by AI, with possible human-out-of-the-loop proofs of concept. It notes AI applications becoming targets where they hold files, credentials, sessions or development environment access.

The heads of the Five Eyes cyber agencies issued a joint statement that AI is rapidly transforming cyber risk and that organizations must act within months, not years. They ask leaders to reduce attack surface, accelerate patching as exploitation windows shorten, replace unsupported legacy systems, strengthen identity controls, and prepare for incidents.

Anthropic analyzed 832 accounts it banned for malicious cyber activity between March 2025 and March 2026 and mapped their use of Claude onto MITRE ATT&CK. It reports that the most common AI use was preparation such as writing malware, that use shifted toward activity after initial compromise, and that the share of actors its system rated medium risk or higher rose from 33% to 56% between the two six-month halves.

Google Threat Intelligence Group reported that cybercriminals planned a mass-exploitation campaign using a two-factor-authentication bypass in an open-source web administration tool, and assessed with high confidence that an AI model supported discovery and weaponization of the flaw. GTIG worked with the vendor on disclosure and disrupted the activity. The same report describes PRC-nexus actors using agentic frameworks such as Hexstrike and Strix for reconnaissance and vulnerability validation, and Android malware (PROMPTSPY) that calls Gemini to drive the device UI.

An NCSC technical director and an AI Security Institute researcher wrote that leading models went in about 18 months from barely progressing on a simulated enterprise attack range to completing over half of a 32-step scenario. They urge defenders to prioritize fundamentals such as asset inventory, access control, secure configuration and logging, and to adopt AI carefully for defense. NCSC CEO Richard Horne followed on April 15, 2026, warning that AI will make discovering and exploiting weaknesses easier, faster and cheaper.

Anthropic reports that in mid-September 2025 a group it assesses with high confidence to be Chinese state-sponsored used Claude Code inside an attack framework to attempt intrusions into about thirty organizations, succeeding in a small number. The operators got past safeguards by splitting the work into innocuous-looking tasks and claiming to be a security firm doing defensive testing; Anthropic says the AI performed 80 to 90 percent of the campaign, with people at a handful of decision points.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's AI Threat Tracker says adversaries moved beyond productivity uses in 2025 and began deploying malware that calls LLMs mid-execution, such as PROMPTFLUX, which asks Gemini to rewrite its own code, and PROMPTSTEAL, which queries a hosted open model for commands. GTIG attributes PROMPTSTEAL to Russia's APT28 in operations against Ukraine, and also reports actors posing as CTF players or researchers to get past safeguards and a maturing underground market for AI tools.

CyberSOCEval adds two open-source SOC benchmarks to CyberSecEval 4: malware analysis questions built from sandbox detonation reports, and threat intelligence reasoning over unstructured reports. The authors find larger, newer models do better, reasoning models gain less than in coding and math, and current models are far from saturating the tasks.

Anthropic's August 2025 threat intelligence report describes a criminal who used Claude Code to automate reconnaissance, credential harvesting and network intrusion against at least 17 organizations, including healthcare, emergency services, government and religious institutions, then threatened to publish the stolen data. The report also describes North Korean operatives using Claude to obtain and keep remote technical jobs, and a low-skill actor selling ransomware developed with Claude.

Google reports that, working from Google Threat Intelligence information, the Big Sleep agent found a critical SQLite memory-corruption flaw (CVE-2025-6965) that Google says was known only to threat actors and at risk of exploitation. Google says it reported the flaw for patching before attackers could exploit it, says it believes this is the first time an AI agent directly foiled an in-the-wild exploitation effort, and says Big Sleep is being applied to open-source projects.

The NCSC's second assessment judges that AI will almost certainly make elements of intrusion more effective through 2027, with AI-assisted vulnerability research and exploit development the most significant development. It warns that the window between disclosure and exploitation, already days, will shrink further, and judges fully automated end-to-end advanced attacks unlikely before 2027.

Google announced Sec-Gemini v1, an experimental model combining Gemini with Google Threat Intelligence, OSV and Mandiant data for tasks such as incident root-cause analysis and vulnerability impact assessment. Google reports it outperforms other models by at least 11% on CTI-MCQ and 10.5% on CTI-Root Cause Mapping, and offered free research access to selected organizations.

Google Threat Intelligence Group analyzed how government-backed hacking and information-operations actors used the Gemini web app. It reports use for research, troubleshooting code and producing content across several attack phases, with Iranian actors the heaviest users, and says it saw productivity gains but no novel capabilities; requests for clearly malicious help drew safety responses.