Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to an active "widespread email-driven phishing campaign" that employs adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) techniques to take control of Microsoft 365 accounts with an aim to identify key personnel involved in financial workflows and gather related email. "The campaign uses residential proxies to disguise malicious sign-ins as ordinary consumer traffic," Arctic Wolf Labs said. "Automated activity maintains compromised sessions at approximately eight-hour intervals." The activity is assessed to impact organizations across healthcare, education, manufacturing, government, and professional services sectors located in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. It shares tactical overlaps with Payroll Pirate attacks tracked by Microsoft under the moniker Storm-2755. Payroll Pirates is the designation assigned to a broader financially motivated threat cluster that involves hijacking the accounts of employees to reroute salary payments to attacker-controlled accounts. Some aspects of these campaigns have been documented since early 2025, with Microsoft tracking a related threat as Storm-2657.
A GitHub issue opened by an account with no repository privileges was enough to execute code on the CI runners behind Anthropic's and Google's own coding-agent repositories. On OpenAI's, it was enough to hijack the next agent run. Novee Security ran the attack against each vendor's agent in the configuration that the vendor ships by default, and presented the work at Black Hat USA on August 5. Two CVEs came out of it. Both are patched. Gemini CLI carries the worst of the two. CVE-2026-12537 (CVSS 4 score: 10.0) is an OS command injection in the container launcher, reached through a crafted .gemini/.env file, which lets an unprivileged attacker run code on the host of a headless CI platform before the sandbox starts. It is fixed in Gemini CLI 0.39.1 and run-gemini-cli 0.1.22. In Claude Code, CVE-2026-54316 turned Hugging Face's public download counter into an exfiltration channel that leaked an API key one character at a time, and is fixed in 2.1.163. Every Claude Code release from 0.2.54 up to 2.1.163 is affected. Anthropic says exploitation required getting untrusted content into a Claude Code context.
Security flaws in agent infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Vercel let untrusted or forged instructions reach an agent's tools with no check that a model turn had authorized them. In several of the attack paths, the model never ran at all, so system prompts, content filters, and model-level guardrails never got a chance to intervene. The affected products include Amazon Bedrock AgentCore's InvokeHarness API, Google's Agent Development Kit (ADK) for Python, and the Vercel AI SDK harness packages for the Codex and OpenCode coding agents. AWS has fixed the managed service, Google addressed the issues in ADK 2.5.0, and Vercel patched @ai-sdk/harness-codex in version 1.0.29 and @ai-sdk/harness-opencode in version 1.0.28. These are not identical vulnerabilities and do not share the same attack conditions. AWS involved an authenticated remote request, Google's paths required attacker-controlled session events or user-authored function calls, and Vercel's flaws required untrusted code already running inside a Linux sandbox.
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an active, multi-wave campaign that employs social engineering lures themed around Adobe and Zoom software updates, business document reviews, and system maintenance utilities to stealthily deploy Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) programs like ConnectWise ScreenConnect. The campaign has been codenamed SMOKE#SCREEN by Securonix Threat Research. "The campaign relies on a toolkit of VBScript droppers, batch file loaders, compiled .NET executables and an HTML phishing page, all ultimately pointing to a live WsgiDAV-based staging server at 207.174.0[.]143:8080," researchers Shikha Sangwan, Akshay Gaikwad, and Aaron Beardslee said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Successful attacks culminate with a ScreenConnect agent installed and beaconing to one of three attacker-controlled relay servers, providing the attackers with persistent remote access to compromised systems. The activity has not been attributed to any known threat actor or group.
Google deleted three AI agent workflows from its Agent Development Kit (ADK) Python repository. Pillar Security showed that a public GitHub issue could manipulate a triage agent into triggering a privileged code-fixing agent. The researchers said the public agent could be prompt-injected into posting /adk-issue-fix as adk-bot. They identified the bot as a collaborator, so that comment satisfied the privileged workflow's owner, member, or collaborator gate. The trusted bot identity became the authorization bridge. The team demonstrated arbitrary code execution on the continuous integration (CI) runner and exfiltration of the bot personal access token (PAT). The privileged job also held a Google API key and a Google Cloud service-account credential. Its researcher-controlled proof-of-concept attacks do not identify in-the-wild exploitation or a compromised ADK release.
The Police National Legal Database (PNLD) has confirmed that police, government and customer contact information was compromised and published on the dark web. The data included names, organisations and work email addresses belonging to police officers, police staff, criminal justice professionals, government partners and customers. The incident, identified on July 26, also exposed some names and email addresses belonging to people who had submitted questions through Ask the Police. That exposure could make phishing messages targeting named officers appear more convincing, according to UK government guidance. PNLD said, "There is no evidence to suggest that passwords or other security credentials have been compromised." The service provides legal information, products and services to UK police forces and criminal justice organisations. It is not the Police National Computer or the Police National Database, is not a crime-recording system, and does not hold confidential information about victims, witnesses or offenders.
An attacker drained 1,196 Bitcoin addresses in 41 minutes on July 30, taking 1,082.65 BTC worth about $70.2 million at the time. Galaxy Research mapped the sweep and tied it to a firmware flaw in Coldcard, the Bitcoin-only hardware wallet made by Canadian firm Coinkite. A March 2021 firmware integration error routed seed generation to a deterministic software pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) instead of the STM32 hardware random number generator (RNG). Block says an attacker who can determine or sufficiently constrain the device UID, timer state, and prior RNG-call history can reproduce candidate output streams offline without accessing the device. Candidate seeds can then be checked by deriving their addresses and comparing them with public blockchain data. Coinkite shipped emergency firmware for every affected model and release track on July 31, but installing it does not repair an existing seed. Coinkite tells owners with exposed seeds to generate a new one on patched firmware and move their coins.
ChatGPT AgentForger Flaw Could Deploy Rogue Workspace Agents via a Phishing Link The Hacker News
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