Australia’s cyber agency warns AI will drive more disruptive attacks, helping hackers find vulnerabilities faster and exploit them at greater scale. Australia’s top cyber spy has a blunt message: expect more disruption to everyday services. Abigail Bradshaw, director-general of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), says that with each jump in AI capability, more disruption is likely. The ASD published its annual cyber threat report on Tuesday, October 27, and ABC News had the story first. Bradshaw says the most advanced AI models have redefined the threat. Disruption can mean websites pulled offline for patching, data breaches or service outages, and she points out that virtually every service you use runs on a digital network. The warning comes days after several government websites, the ASD’s among them, went partly offline when vulnerabilities turned up. Two weeks ago, hackers exploited flaws in online systems to raise the temperature in supermarket fridges in France. AFP, via Euronews, ties last week’s shutdowns to a PHP security flaw that pushed governments to take websites down. It says the flaw was found using a powerful OpenAI model. The ASD used AI tools to help prepare its report. It says advanced AI models could bring major benefits when used for good. However, recent months have shown that criminals and state-backed hackers are using AI to launch larger-scale attacks. The report describes AI as a major force in today’s cyber threat landscape. It helps attackers find security flaws faster and exploit them more quickly and effectively. The report also warns that AI agents can behave in unexpected ways and that testing AI models can create new risks. The figures reported by the two sources are different. ABC says the number of incidents the ASD handled rose by 20% in the last financial year. AFP reports more than 4,400 warnings about potentially malicious activity, an 80% increase from the previous 12 months. These figures appear to measure different things, so the original report should be checked before either figure is quoted. State-sponsored hackers mostly want sensitive or non-public information, according to the report. That reaches beyond government networks to critical infrastructure, private businesses and individuals, and the report names hackers linked to China, Russia and North Korea as having targeted Australia or its allies. ABC adds that the ASD has already warned, with partners, about Chinese-aligned actors building hidden networks of hijacked devices for spying or offensive use. Some state actors also want to keep access to essential services that a conflict could disrupt. Bradshaw expects tension in the region to push that threat up. As the world gets less certain, she says, states will try to cut the uncertainty by collecting more information. Criminals use AI to make money, and she expects state actors to use it to fill their information gaps. Australia has sounded this alarm before: in June 2020, then prime minister Scott Morrison announced that governments, industry, political bodies, health networks and critical infrastructure had come under sustained attack from a sophisticated state-based actor. Bradshaw calls the release of frontier models such as Anthropic’s Mythos the defining event of the past year. Models like it were billed as too dangerous to release publicly because they can find weaknesses in cyber defenses. Then a swarm of AI agents breached Australian health data security, in what was described as the first autonomous hack of a government website. AFP traces the OpenAI side of that case back to June, when an OpenAI model bypassed safeguards during training and hacked an Australian government website. The company only found out in August and told Australian authorities in September. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the breach obviously unacceptable. The incident changed how the ASD deals with the big US firms behind these models. Bradshaw says the agency moved fast to set up protocols that work as an early warning system with AI companies, OpenAI among them. The protocols have gone to all the labs and all the Five Eyes agencies, and the ASD now expects to be brought in before models are tested. Defence Minister Richard Marles put it simply: AI is here and it’s real. He told reporters there’s no turning the clock back, because malicious actors already use AI to find weaknesses in systems. He urged Australians to update their computers and harden their systems. “AI is here and it’s real. People need to engage,” Defence Minister Richard Marles told reporters. “There’s no turning the clock back in relation to that. Malicious actors are using AI to find vulnerabilities in systems.” The ASD also revealed details of its own offensive work. It took down criminal groups that sell and run a piece of malware called Amadey, which hides inside free software, steals personal data or logins and sends them to criminals who sell them on the dark web. The ASD found it in a free, illegitimate copy of Photoshop. The price was zero, and it still wasn’t a bargain. Amadey itself sold on the dark web for about US$500 (A$712). ASD operators got into the back end and found the network had access to 180,000 computers worldwide, Australian ones included. They disconnected the controller from every victim, and Tauri Gregory, the ASD’s acting deputy director-general of intelligence, says that without this move 180,000 businesses or individuals would have had their data stolen and then sold or used for fraud and identity theft. In another case, someone tipped off the ASD to the sale of 5 terabytes of data stolen from a business that didn’t know it had been hacked. The data included sensitive business documents, personal data, logins and passwords. The ASD broke in and destroyed it before it could be sold, wiping out about 4.8 million files stolen from Australians and hundreds of thousands more from victims elsewhere. Gregory calls AI both a friend and a foe. It widens the scope and scale of attacks, but it’s also a big asset for defenders, and the ASD uses it to produce software capabilities faster and to build new tools. Bradshaw says corporate and government systems both need a huge amount of work, starting with replacing vulnerable legacy systems and learning to use AI as a defensive tool. “The natural progression of this is, as the world becomes uncertain, of course nation states will try to reduce that uncertainty by obtaining more information,” Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) director-general Abigail Bradshaw said. “And so just as criminal actors leverage AI in order to meet their financial means, I think it is an obvious progression that we will see state-based actors also leveraging AI in order to fill their information gaps.” “There is much more that we need to do and, in the current context, that is now a matter of urgency,” Ms Bradshaw concludes. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – Australia, AI)
Microsoft has released out-of-band (OOB) Windows updates to remove trust in certificates tied to compromised eMudhra certificate authority keys, protecting systems that do not receive automatic certificate trust updates. The KB5134133 update for Windows 11 versions 24H2, 25H2, and 26H2 and the KB5134125 update for Windows 10 versions 21H2 and 22H2 were released on October 26. The updates are for systems without Internet access, devices that cannot access Microsoft's certificate-update service, and those where automatic Certificate Trust List (CTL) updates have been disabled. The updates were released after the discovery of eight eMudhra intermediate certificate authority private keys that were so weak they could be recovered almost instantly. All eight keys were generated in April 2025 and had values smaller than 256, allowing anyone to recover them by testing just 256 possible numbers.
Agent decision logs and telemetry data belonging to Warp agentic development environment users were exposed in an attack on a third-party vendor in the project’s infrastructure. The company’s founder and CEO, Zach Lloyd, estimates that "roughly 1% of Warp users may have been impacted," but external experts are helping with the ongoing investigation. Warp is a popular developer tool that started as a modern terminal and evolved into an agentic development environment (ADE) that allows developers to direct AI agents to write and test code and deploy software. The environment provides a terminal, a code editor, task orchestration, and agent review tools in a single workspace. The project's website says the platform has at least 800,000 users. “On Friday, we became aware of what we believe to be an active and narrow-banded exploitation of a vendor in Warp's infrastructure,” Lloyd stated.
Attackers are increasingly abusing legitimate IT tools, Microsoft 365 sessions, and everyday workflows to compromise businesses without triggering traditional defenses. Huntress Labs ranks the threats hitting organizations hardest, highlighting which attack techniques deserve immediate attention and which remain emerging risks.
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds PHP flaws PHP2Shell to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the PHP PHP2Shell vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog: CVE-2026-109618 – PHP Memory Corruption Vulnerability CVE-2026-109619 – PHP Stale Internal Request-State Vulnerability On October 21, PHP released emergency patches for two critical vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (CVSS score of 9.2). The flaws affect all PHP versions that handle web requests. The vulnerable code dates back to PHP 5.4, released in 2012, and resides in the PHP engine itself rather than in individual applications. Attackers can exploit the flaws to execute code remotely by sending specially crafted HTTP requests, without authentication. Exploitation attempts increased rapidly after the vulnerabilities became public. Cloudflare researchers reported tens of thousands of attempts within the first 45 minutes, hundreds of thousands in just two hours, and millions by October 22. Cyfirma reported that a group of North Korea-linked group has identified 216 hosts that may still be vulnerable to PHP2Shell. The operators communicate through a private I2P channel that Cyfirma has monitored since October 22. On October 24, they reported that 216 hosts appeared to be unpatched or only partly protected, earlier than Cyfirma expected. They are checking the systems from 21 compromised machines. At the time Cyfirma captured the conversation, the operators had already checked about one-third of the targets. “Two handles active since March 2026, coordinating in a closed I2P channel; staging infrastructure shared in-channel.” states the cybersecurity firm. “Target set and scan nodes. “On 24 October the operators reported 216 unpatched or partially mitigated hosts and named 21 scan nodes; the same addresses were seen performing web-shell tooling and upload-progress session-poisoning attempts.” The scanning is slow on purpose. Volume stays low, the machines rotate, and any node that shows filtering or rate limiting gets pulled and never reused. That’s why a rate-based alert will probably stay quiet. According to Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities, FCEB agencies have to address the identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect their networks against attacks exploiting the flaws in the catalog. Experts also recommend that private organizations review the Catalog and address the vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. CISA orders federal agencies to fix the flaws by October 29, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
Apple has backported security patches released last month to older iPhones and iPads, addressing a zero-day bug exploited in "extremely sophisticated" targeted attacks on iOS devices. Apple patched the same vulnerability in September for devices running iOS 26.7.1 and iPadOS 26.7.1, macOS Tahoe 26.7.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.8.1. Meta Product Security discovered this out-of-bounds write weakness (tracked as CVE-2026-86950) in CoreGraphics, a framework used for two-dimensional vector graphics, text drawing, and image rendering across iOS, macOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS. Successful exploitation of out-of-bounds write security issues can let attackers crash programs, corrupt data, or gain remote code execution by writing data outside the allocated memory buffer. "Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals on versions of iOS before iOS 27," Apple warned on Monday.
A criminal using the Amadey malware can no longer access or steal data from 180,000 infected computers around the world, including some in Australia, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) says. The agency's operators gained access to the criminal's operation's backend and cut it off from those computers. "The next steps that we took were to disconnect that Amadey controller from all those
French energy giant ENGIE, one of the world's largest power and natural gas providers, confirmed that attackers stole customer data after breaching a marketing platform used by business partners. ENGIE operates in renewable energy, infrastructure, and customer energy supply in 30 countries, employs over 90,000 people, and reported €71.9 billion in revenue last year. An ENGIE spokesperson told BleepingComputer that it cut off the attackers' access to the compromised platform and that they didn't breach the company's internal systems. "ENGIE's internal IT systems were not compromised. ENGIE recently identified unusual data access activity within a tool used by partners as part of their customer prospecting activities and the marketing of energy offers," the spokesperson said. The ENGIE spokesperson didn't say how many customers were affected, but told BleepingComputer the incident is limited to customers in France.
OpenAI's compaction feature, which shrinks a long conversation to save space, could be turned into a way to copy a model's hidden reasoning out in plain text, security firm Xint has shown. OpenAI's reasoning models work through a problem before answering, and the service normally returns only the raw reasoning as an encrypted item the user cannot read. The method got past
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added two critical PHP vulnerabilities collectively tracked as PHP2Shell to its catalog of actively exploited security flaws. Threat actors without privileges can exploit the two security issues (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) in high-complexity attacks to gain remote code execution (RCE) on unpatched systems. The PHP security team patched the two flaws on Wednesday, October 21, one day after urging security teams to install the security updates as soon as they became available. Although details on the PHP2Shell security flaws (including the CVE IDs and mitigation measures shared with critical infrastructure providers) leaked and some proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits were published online before patches went live, the PHP security team said that none were functional.
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