The Russia-linked state-sponsored threat actor tracked as APT28 (aka BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, and Forest Blizzard) has been attributed to attacks targeting two member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Symantec Threat Hunter Team, which is tracking the activity cluster under the moniker Swallowtail, involved the use of a backdoor called HOOKEDGE and a previously
ConnectWise on Monday said it has taken remediation measures, including strengthening administrative-access protections and resetting accounts and replacing application credentials, as it continues to respond to a security incident that led to unauthorized access to application identities associated with Cloud Backup. The company said it has completed the following actions since it began
An attacker used a contributor's GitHub account to replace the download archives on five existing releases of OVHcloud's command-line tool on Monday, October 19. The account had been hijacked, and the new files were a build designed to steal secrets stored on the disk of any machine that runs it, the cloud provider says. They were live on GitHub for up to 94 minutes, from 12:47 to 14:21 UTC,
Microsoft urges organizations to secure AI Agents as insider threats, using dynamic permissions, continuous risk monitoring and automated containment. Microsoft published a detailed blog post explaining how organizations should secure AI agents. Microsoft sees them as a growing insider threat, not just a possible risk in the future. AI agents are not dangerous by nature, but they can access critical systems and may fail, be manipulated, or be compromised. “The most trustworthy agentic system will not be the one with the model we trust most. It will be the one designed that enables us to trust the model least.” said Satya Nadella This is not just a theory. It is a principle that should guide how organizations design and secure AI systems. The post makes a distinction worth holding onto. An agent that starts a task with the right permissions and behaves correctly can still become dangerous if its context changes mid-run. A prompt injection in an external document, a piece of untrusted data that shifts the agent’s reasoning, a task that evolves in a direction nobody anticipated, none of these require the agent to be compromised in the traditional sense. The model produces variable outputs, the context changes, and the agent’s behavior drifts. At machine speed, the window between that drift starting and it causing damage is very short. Microsoft’s proposed answer is continuous containment rather than upfront trust. You define what the agent is allowed to do before it acts, you monitor what it actually does while it runs, and you adjust its permissions in real time as its behavior or the risk calculation changes. An expense approval agent should start with access scoped exactly to reviewing and approving expenses, nothing broader, and those permissions should shrink or disappear the moment the agent tries something outside that task. The post introduces Dynamic Permissions to apply the principle of least privilege to AI agents. An agent should not automatically get the same access rights as the employee who deployed it. It starts with no permissions and receives only the access needed for its approved task. These permissions remain active only while the task is running. “The employee retains the employee’s access.” Microsoft states. “The agent receives its own identity, permissions and its own authority scoped to its current task and for the duration of the task only.” Alongside that, Dynamic Agent Risk is a continuously updated score that combines signals from identity, endpoints, network, cloud, runtime, and the agent’s own behavior to assess whether what the agent is currently doing still matches what it was authorized to do. The response when risk rises is graduated rather than binary: preserve reads while blocking writes, narrow accessible resources, require human approval for high-impact steps, or stop execution entirely if the risk warrants it. “Dynamic Agent Risk combines signals from identity, data, endpoints, cloud, network, runtime, and the agent’s own activity. It considers how securely the agent is configured, what resources it can reach, the potential impact if something goes wrong, and whether its actions are drifting from the user’s or organization’s intent.” Microsoft states. “The result is not a one-time score assigned at onboarding. It is a continuously updated understanding of the agent’s current risk and whether its current authority still matches that risk. “ Organizations frequently have AI agents running locally or introduced through third-party tools that were never formally registered in any central system. Microsoft says it’s expanding discovery to 60 types of local agents, including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and GitHub Copilot. Getting those into a unified registry with accountable identities is the prerequisite for applying any of the governance controls described in the rest of the post. You can’t set least-privilege permissions for an agent you don’t know exists. You can’t detect behavioral drift from an agent that doesn’t have a tracked identity. The agent registration problem is logistically harder than it sounds, especially for organizations where individual employees can spin up agents without IT involvement, which is most organizations right now. Microsoft recognizes that organizations cannot manually review every risk alert when they run hundreds of thousands of AI agents. Its solution is Guardian Agents, AI agents focused on security. They follow playbooks created by human operators, investigate changes in risk, apply or recommend security measures, and use what they learn to improve security policies. Humans set the goals and approve important decisions, while the agents handle continuous monitoring and response. However, this approach raises another concern. Guardian Agents are also AI agents, so they can fail or be manipulated, just like the agents they are supposed to control. Microsoft says security controls must operate outside the AI model and must not be changed by it. But this raises an important question: how can organizations ensure these controls remain reliable when the system enforcing them is also an AI agent? This is a challenge that real-world deployments will need to address in the coming years. “Organizations are adopting agents to serve customers better, solve problems faster, and give people more time for the work that matters most. The goal is not to make every model perfectly predictable before it can be useful.” Microsoft concludes. “The goal is to build systems that remain secure even when the model is not.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, AI Agents)
Siemens has addressed a DLL sideloading vulnerability impacting Siemens Software Center that it said has been exploited in ClickFix attacks. The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-110936 (CVSS v4 score: 8.4), could allow an attacker to place a specially-crafted DLL in a directory the application searches, resulting in execution of malicious code with the same privileges as the
A U.S. court on Monday granted the U.S. government's request to detain a former OpenAI engineer accused of planting a recording device in an executive conference room at the company's San Francisco office to allegedly steal sensitive secrets. In a new court filing Sunday, prosecutors revealed that Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national, was "in frequent communications via WhatsApp
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a ClickFix delivery platform called ROMULUS that's being used to distribute malware such as Legion Loader. According to Forescout Research - Vedere Labs, ROMULUS is akin to a malware delivery service that employs ClickFix-style lures on bogus landing pages to trick unsuspecting users into running malicious commands and infecting their own
Ransomware operators including Spikey Scorpius (aka Qilin) and Tarnished Scorpius (aka Inc) are exploiting PAN-OS vulnerability CVE-2026-0257. The post Threat Brief: Active Exploitation of PAN-OS CVE-2026-0257 (Updated October 19) appeared first on Unit 42.
Hackers reportedly compromised AOMEI's servers to distribute malware through a built-in promotional feature in its backup software, briefly tampering with configuration files before restoring them to their original state to hide the attacks. The supply chain attacks took place between April and July 2026 and targeted the update and notification systems used by AOMEI Backupper, a Windows application for backing up data, cloning disks, and restoring systems. Researchers at ManageEngine's Threat Analysis Lab (METAL), working with Google's Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant, uncovered the campaign and investigated the attacks. In reports published by Google and ManageEngine, the activity is attributed to a threat actor tracked as UNC7017, who used the compromised infrastructure to distribute a previously unknown malware downloader called CROSSROAD and a backdoor named SHINYROAD.
Staffing software company Bullhorn has disabled access to its platform to contain a cyberattack that caused a system-wide outage. The company says it has isolated the issue and eradicated the immediate threat. Currently, its team is working to restore services following thorough security reviews conducted with help from CrowdStrike specialists. Bullhorn is an American software company specializing in cloud-based staffing and recruitment solutions. Its platform helps staffing firms manage the recruitment lifecycle, including candidate tracking, onboarding, and payroll. The company says it serves more than 10,000 customers worldwide. According to a status page on the incident, customers started to experience issues with job posting in the Bullhorn application on Friday. The next day, the company said it was "experiencing a system-wide outage affecting the Bullhorn platform," and later confirmed that the issues were caused by a cyberattack.
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