OpenAI banned Russian ChatGPT accounts backing a fake think tank, IBI, that used AI posts and a fake “sovereignty” index to push pro‑Russia narratives. OpenAI says it has banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that likely originated in Russia and were used to support a covert influence operation. The campaign promoted an organisation called the International Burke Institute, or IBI, a supposed expert community that claimed to be based in Israel. The operation did not rely on dramatic deepfakes or a viral bot army. It used a more familiar method: build something that looks credible, fill it with enough content to seem legitimate, then use social media to push people toward it. Credibility is often cheaper to fake than to earn. OpenAI says the operators prompted ChatGPT in Russian to generate comments and posts, mostly in English, for X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Telegram and Substack. They specifically asked the model to avoid linguistic signals that might reveal a Russian origin, and used VPNs to bypass OpenAI’s restriction on access from Russia. “We banned a cluster of ChatGPT accounts that very likely originated in Russia. The operators prompted in Russian to generate social media comments that were posted on Substack, Telegram, X, Facebook and LinkedIn.” reads the report published by OpenAI, “Most of the comments they generated were in English, and the operators instructe. ChatGPT to hide any linguistic clues that they were Russian. As we do not allow access to our models from Russia, they used VPNs to access our platform.” The social media content promoted IBI articles or urged readers to follow IBI-linked channels. Some posts came from accounts bearing the institute’s name and logo, while others appeared to come from ordinary users whose main activity was sharing the same material. The website behind the brand was registered in February 2025 and presented itself as an Israel-based community of international experts. It claimed links to well-known names such as Francis Fukuyama and Noam Chomsky, but OpenAI’s review found that 34 of 36 sampled articles published under expert profiles had been copied from elsewhere online. “Some of these articles were years old; others were attributed to the wrong authors. For example, one article on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor appears to have been copied from a Cambridge University Press original, but incorrectly attributed to a professor at the University of Nottingham whose expertise is in South Asian politics.” continues the report. This was not a case of ChatGPT writing every false article on the site. OpenAI says the website content itself was not generated by its models, and some material appeared to have been written by a Slavic-language speaker and machine-translated. The AI’s role was narrower but still useful: it helped create the promotional layer that sent people toward the site and made the operation appear more active and organic. openai “What began as an investigation into AI-generated social media posts led us to a much broader influence operation, built around a website containing copied and misattributed academic work, a “sovereignty” index that cast Russia in a favourable light, and efforts to disguise the operators’ Russian origins.” states OpenAI. “Although the campaign appears to have reached relatively small audiences, its elaborate construction distinguishes it from other Russia-linked(opens in a new window) influence(opens in a new window) operations(opens in a new window) we have disrupted(opens in a new window) since the start of the war in Ukraine.” The centrepiece was the so-called Sovereignty Index, also called the Burke Index. It ranked countries across political, economic, technological, information, cultural, cognitive and military dimensions, and consistently gave Russia a favourable place while criticising Western states, especially France, Germany, the European Union and the United States. openai A made-up index can be effective because numbers carry authority even when the method is vague, selective or impossible to audit. Add charts, expert profiles, academic-looking articles and a professional website, and a claim can travel much further than a Telegram post from an anonymous account. OpenAI found one Telegram channel, “Lahme Ente,” that published German-language posts attacking Ukraine, the EU and the German government while calling for closer ties with Russia. Another operator used ChatGPT to create logos for channels focused on Germany, France, Poland, Türkiye and the United States, then repeatedly asked for Russian-language summaries of their activity. “As well as generating content about IBI, one of the operators generated German-language posts that were posted on a Telegram channel called “Lahme Ente” (“lame duck”). These posts routinely criticized Ukraine, the EU and the German government, and advocated for better relations with Russia.” continues the report. “A second operator, alongside their IBI-related content, generated logos for a dozen Telegram channels (including Lahme Ente) focused on Germany, the USA, France, Poland and Türkiye. “ One American-facing channel called “American Observer” included awkward English that suggested it was not run by a native speaker. The operators were trying to hide their origin, but language remains a stubborn problem: a VPN can change an IP address, not always a sentence. The campaign’s immediate reach appears limited. OpenAI says most social posts received few views and the official IBI accounts had low subscriber counts, although its Telegram channels reportedly attracted around 10,000 to 20,000 followers each. Using the Brookings Breakout Scale, OpenAI rated the effort at the lower end of Category Three: activity across multiple platforms with some signs of reaching genuine audiences. That does not make it irrelevant. Influence operations are often built for scale, reuse and timing rather than instant virality. A network with a website, a recognisable brand, social accounts, apparent experts and ready-made narratives can remain quiet until a political event, election, protest or crisis gives it an opening. This case also shows what AI changes and what it does not. It does not eliminate the need for operators, infrastructure, stolen material, audience research or political intent. It makes routine tasks cheaper: drafting posts, translating them, changing tone, generating replies, creating branding and monitoring channels at a pace that a small team can sustain. “The significance of the operation lies less in the audience it reached, however, than in the infrastructure it had built. While the actors only used ChatGPT to produce isolated promotional posts, those posts pointed to an otherwise credible-appearing institution, complete with purported experts, republished academic work and a purported proprietary risk index.” concludes the report. “This illustrates how influence actors can use AI as a supporting tool within a broader effort to manufacture authority, obscure the source of favored narratives, and establish assets that could be scaled over time. It also illustrates how their supporting use of AI can lead to the broader operation being exposed.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, OpenAI)
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a vulnerability in Amazon Kiro, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, agentic integrated development environment (IDE), that could facilitate data exfiltration via prompt injection and Kiro Powers. The security flaw, which does not have a CVE identifier, works against Kiro IDE 0.7.45 on Windows, according to Mindguard. The latest version of
Security teams have spent years trying to detect threats faster. AI is changing the harder part: how much time defenders have left to act. Advanced AI models can now help attackers discover vulnerabilities, generate exploit code, and move through weaknesses faster than traditional security processes were built to handle. The challenge is no longer just finding another vulnerability or
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has charged two Western Australian men with a combined total of 14 offences over their alleged role in TeamPCP, the cybercrime group behind the March 2026 compromise of the open-source security scanners Trivy and Checkmarx KICS and the AI gateway LiteLLM. Louis Michael Gaebler, 23, and Ruben Ian Thomson, 21, appeared in Perth Magistrates Court on August 27,
AI is officially mainstream in security operations. According to Prophet Security's State of AI in Security Operations 2026 report (produced from ViB’s survey of 250+ cybersecurity pros), 40% of security teams now use AI daily. Another 56% are currently testing it out, and only 4% have no plans to adopt it. For the teams already using AI, what is actually changing? Here are the ten biggest
Individuals and organizations in Cambodia have emerged as the target of a new campaign that delivers an open-source remote access trojan (RAT) called Spark RAT. "The samples employ diverse lure themes, suggesting an effort to appeal to a broad range of potential victims. These include government notices, public health materials, real estate-related content, and other topics," Acronis Threat
Threat actors linked by Arctic Wolf to Dark Caracal with medium confidence deployed a previously undocumented Go-based malware framework, GoCaracal, during a June 2026 intrusion at an unnamed communications organization in Venezuela. GoCaracal provides operators with remote shell access and payload execution, while the extended profile adds browser data theft, keylogging, remote desktop control
Academic researchers have disclosed a Rowhammer attack impacting NVIDIA workstation GPUs with GDDR6 memory that defeats error correction codes (ECC), the mitigation NVIDIA recommends against GPU Rowhammer, and enables denial-of-service (DoS) and privilege escalation to a root shell. Dubbed GPUThor, the attack was developed by researchers at the University of Toronto, who hammered four DRAM
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added six flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, including a high-severity security vulnerability impacting Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2019-1068 - A remote code execution vulnerability in
CISA red teams fully compromised two critical infrastructure orgs. One SOC isolated hosts in minutes; the other never detected the breach. CISA published an advisory (AA26-237A) documenting two simultaneous red team assessments at critical infrastructure organizations. Both organizations lost full domain control and had their cloud environments compromised. One of them didn’t know until CISA told them afterward. “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) conducted simultaneous red team assessments at two organizations and observed different defensive outcomes. In both environments, the red team achieved full domain compromise and accessed sensitive business systems (SBSs) and cloud resources.” states CISA. “Organization A failed to detect or contain the activity, but Organization B rapidly identified initial compromise attempts, isolated affected systems, and forced the red team into an assume breach model.” Organization A is a Government Services and Facilities Sector entity. Organization B operates in the Water and Wastewater Systems Sector. The red team used comparable techniques against both. The difference in outcome was entirely about detection and response, not the sophistication of the attack. At Organization A, the red team found a web application that still used default credentials. They used it to send phishing emails from a trusted internal address and gained access to four workstations. From there, they exploited a misconfigured Active Directory Certificate Services template with the ESC1 flaw. This allowed a low-privileged user to request certificates for other users, including administrators. They then reached all the targeted sensitive business systems without anyone noticing. After moving into the cloud, they even read SOC staff emails to see if the attack had been detected. It hadn’t. “Without well-defined baselines and alert filtering, false positives and routine alerts overwhelm defenders, obscuring real threats.” CISA continues. “Organizations that tune alerts to highlight anomalies and filter out normal business activity enable defenders to focus on genuine incidents and respond rapidly.” Organization A’s SOC was receiving thousands of false positive alerts, many at higher severity than the actual intrusion alerts the red team was generating. Staff eventually reviewed SCCM-related alerts from real red team activity, couldn’t identify the system’s owner or function, and marked it a false positive. The red team confirmed the miss by reading SOC email. Then they used keyloggers and screenshot capture on SOC workstations to make sure nothing was coming. Nothing was. The organization had multiple separate SOCs with different EDR solutions and no cross-team visibility, which meant that even if one team noticed something, there was no mechanism to act on it across the relevant systems. “Detection tools are only as effective as the people, processes, and procedures supporting them. SOC staff should not operate in silos and should have clear authority unhindered by bureaucracy to effectively contain and resolve incidents.” add CISA. At Organization A, SOC analysts were managing systems they didn’t fully understand and had no written escalation procedures, so their default response to ambiguity was to wait. At Organization B, staff triaged, investigated, coordinated with engineering, and reimaged machines before handing them back to users. At Organization B, the red team still found important security gaps. They discovered a password stored in plain text inside an XML file on an SCCM distribution point. They used the related service account to gain powerful rights over a domain controller and then performed a DCSync attack, obtaining the krbtgt hash. This allowed them to create Golden Tickets and impersonate users across the domain. They also found a path into the OT network through RDP files pointing to a bastion host. Using FTP credentials found on a jump server, they connected to the bastion through SSH. The bastion had no outbound internet access, so their payload could not run, and the SOC quarantined the host. Still, the access path was there. Both organizations also had the same cloud security problem: neither had enabled Conditional Access for workload identities. This Microsoft feature applies access controls to applications and service accounts, not just human users. Without it, applications with broad Microsoft Graph permissions can bypass normal Conditional Access rules. CISA’s red team used this gap in both organizations to access emails across the companies. In Organization A, the team also found AWS IAM credentials stored in users’ home directories with no expiration date. Those credentials could remain valid indefinitely, creating another long-term risk. In Organization B’s cloud environment, the red team abused Seamless SSO by using Kerberos tickets obtained via DCSync to authenticate to Azure without needing any user’s cleartext password. They found a disabled AD-synced account that owned an application with permission to read, write, and send emails for every user in the tenant. They re-enabled the account, DCSynced its credentials, added a client secret to the application, and could then access the full mailbox of every employee from the public internet. Organization B’s detections flagged the AzureHound tool by user agent and caught anomalous Microsoft Graph API request volumes, but those controls arrived after the initial cloud access was already established. CISA recommends several practical steps to improve security. These include hardening ADCS by disabling CT_FLAG_ENROLLEE_SUPPLIES_SUBJECT on templates and limiting who can enroll, setting the Machine Account Quota to zero when there is no operational need, and removing cleartext credentials from workstations and network shares. Organizations should also enable Conditional Access for workload identities, create procedures to revoke tokens, and treat SCCM and similar endpoint management platforms as Tier 0 assets, giving them the same level of protection as domain controllers. The full advisory also maps each red team technique to its MITRE ATT&CK identifier and compares how well the two organizations detected the different stages of the attacks. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
Confirm this action.
Leaving now will discard your changes.