Hacking groups—at least one of which works on behalf of the North Korean government—have found a new and inexpensive way to distribute malware from “bulletproof” hosts: stashing them on public cryptocurrency blockchains.
In a Thursday post, members of the Google Threat Intelligence Group said the technique provides the hackers with their own “bulletproof” host, a term that describes cloud platforms that are largely immune from takedowns by law enforcement and pressure from security researchers. More traditionally, these hosts are located in countries without treaties agreeing to enforce criminal laws from the US and other nations. These services often charge hefty sums and cater to criminals spreading malware or peddling child sexual abuse material and wares sold in crime-based flea markets. — Read More
Tag Archives: Cyber
Introducing CodeMender: an AI agent for code security
… Software vulnerabilities are notoriously difficult and time-consuming for developers to find and fix, even with traditional, automated methods like fuzzing. Our AI-based efforts like Big Sleep and OSS-Fuzz have demonstrated AI’s ability to find new zero-day vulnerabilities in well-tested software. As we achieve more breakthroughs in AI-powered vulnerability discovery, it will become increasingly difficult for humans alone to keep up.
CodeMender helps solve this problem by taking a comprehensive approach to code security that’s both reactive, instantly patching new vulnerabilities, and proactive, rewriting and securing existing code and eliminating entire classes of vulnerabilities in the process. Over the past six months that we’ve been building CodeMender, we have already upstreamed 72 security fixes to open source projects, including some as large as 4.5 million lines of code.
By automatically creating and applying high-quality security patches, CodeMender’s AI-powered agent helps developers and maintainers focus on what they do best — building good software. — Read More
Building AI for cyber defenders
AI models are now useful for cybersecurity tasks in practice, not just theory. As research and experience demonstrated the utility of frontier AI as a tool for cyber attackers, we invested in improving Claude’s ability to help defenders detect, analyze, and remediate vulnerabilities in code and deployed systems. This work allowed Claude Sonnet 4.5 to match or eclipse Opus 4.1, our frontier model released only two months prior, in discovering code vulnerabilities and other cyber skills. Adopting and experimenting with AI will be key for defenders to keep pace.
We believe we are now at an inflection point for AI’s impact on cybersecurity. — Read More
Building AI for cyber defenders
AI models are now useful for cybersecurity tasks in practice, not just theory. As research and experience demonstrated the utility of frontier AI as a tool for cyber attackers, we invested in improving Claude’s ability to help defenders detect, analyze, and remediate vulnerabilities in code and deployed systems. This work allowed Claude Sonnet 4.5 to match or eclipse Opus 4.1, our frontier model released only two months prior, in discovering code vulnerabilities and other cyber skills. Adopting and experimenting with AI will be key for defenders to keep pace.
We believe we are now at an inflection point for AI’s impact on cybersecurity.
For several years, our team has carefully tracked the cybersecurity-relevant capabilities of AI models. Initially, we found models to be not particularly powerful for advanced and meaningful capabilities. However, over the past year or so, we’ve noticed a shift. — Read More
How Hackers Hack Websites
Detecting and countering misuse of AI: August 2025
We’ve developed sophisticated safety and security measures to prevent the misuse of our AI models. But cybercriminals and other malicious actors are actively attempting to find ways around them. Today, we’re releasing a report that details how.
Our Threat Intelligence report discusses several recent examples of Claude being misused, including a large-scale extortion operation using Claude Code, a fraudulent employment scheme from North Korea, and the sale of AI-generated ransomware by a cybercriminal with only basic coding skills. We also cover the steps we’ve taken to detect and counter these abuses. — Read More
Mind the Gap: Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use Vulnerabilities in LLM-Enabled Agents
Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled agents are rapidly emerging across a wide range of applications, but their deployment introduces vulnerabilities with security implications. While prior work has examined prompt-based attacks (e.g., prompt injection) and data-oriented threats (e.g., data exfiltration), time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) remain largely unexplored in this context. TOCTOU arises when an agent validates external state (e.g., a file or API response) that is later modified before use, enabling practical attacks such as malicious configuration swaps or payload injection. In this work, we present the first study of TOCTOU vulnerabilities in LLM-enabled agents. We introduce TOCTOU-Bench, a benchmark with 66 realistic user tasks designed to evaluate this class of vulnerabilities. As countermeasures, we adapt detection and mitigation techniques from systems security to this setting and propose prompt rewriting, state integrity monitoring, and tool-fusing. Our study highlights challenges unique to agentic workflows, where we achieve up to 25% detection accuracy using automated detection methods, a 3% decrease in vulnerable plan generation, and a 95% reduction in the attack window. When combining all three approaches, we reduce the TOCTOU vulnerabilities from an executed trajectory from 12% to 8%. Our findings open a new research direction at the intersection of AI safety and systems security. — Read More
Detecting and countering misuse of AI: August 2025
We’ve developed sophisticated safety and security measures to prevent the misuse of our AI models. But cybercriminals and other malicious actors are actively attempting to find ways around them. Today, we’re releasing a report that details how.
Our Threat Intelligence report discusses several recent examples of Claude being misused, including a large-scale extortion operation using Claude Code, a fraudulent employment scheme from North Korea, and the sale of AI-generated ransomware by a cybercriminal with only basic coding skills. We also cover the steps we’ve taken to detect and counter these abuses. — Read More
When AIOps Become “AI Oops”: Subverting LLM-driven IT Operations via Telemetry Manipulation
AI for IT Operations (AIOps) is transforming how organizations manage complex software systems by automating anomaly detection, incident diagnosis, and remediation. Modern AIOps solutions increasingly rely on autonomous LLM-based agents to interpret telemetry data and take corrective actions with minimal human intervention, promising faster response times and operational cost savings.
In this work, we perform the first security analysis of AIOps solutions, showing that, once again, AI-driven automation comes with a profound security cost. We demonstrate that adversaries can manipulate system telemetry to mislead AIOps agents into taking actions that compromise the integrity of the infrastructure they manage. We introduce techniques to reliably inject telemetry data using error-inducing requests that influence agent behavior through a form of adversarial reward-hacking; plausible but incorrect system error interpretations that steer the agent’s decision-making. Our attack methodology, AIOpsDoom, is fully automated–combining reconnaissance, fuzzing, and LLM-driven adversarial input generation–and operates without any prior knowledge of the target system.
To counter this threat, we propose AIOpsShield, a defense mechanism that sanitizes telemetry data by exploiting its structured nature and the minimal role of user-generated content. Our experiments show that AIOpsShield reliably blocks telemetry-based attacks without affecting normal agent performance.
Ultimately, this work exposes AIOps as an emerging attack vector for system compromise and underscores the urgent need for security-aware AIOps design. — Read More
Are Cyber Defenders Winning?
On June 6, President Trump signed an executive order to “reprioritize cybersecurity efforts to protect America,” outlining a rough agenda “to improve the security and resilience of the nation’s information systems and networks.” As the administration develops a new cybersecurity strategy, it is essential that it understand and respond to a shifting trend in cyberspace: After a decades-long slump, defenders may finally be gaining the advantage.
In the 1970s, computers could be kept secure simply by being in locked rooms. But when these computers were connected to networks, attackers gained the advantage. Despite decades of defensive innovations since then, defenders’ efforts are routinely overwhelmed by the gains made by attackers. Successful defense is possible—but only with substantial resources and discipline.
Shifting “the advantage to its defenders and perpetually frustrating the forces that would threaten” cyberspace was a central goal of the Biden administration’s U.S. National Cybersecurity Strategy. But how will defenders—flooded with ambiguous statistics—know if they’re succeeding? — Read More