If you spend your days building, shipping, defending, or fixing systems, you already know how this goes. A new technique shows up in a research thread, someone drops a “has anyone checked if we’re exposed?” comment, and suddenly you’re juggling risk, patches, logging gaps, and whatever tool is in the blast radius this week.
That day-to-day reality is why Rapid7 Labs is launching Hacktics and Telemetry, a bi-weekly video and audio podcast with episodes built to fit into a lunch break or a commute. It’s hosted by Rapid7’s Douglas McKee, bringing to the pod years of deep technical and leadership experience, then co-hosted by Jonah ‘CryptoCat’ Burgess – a strong researcher with a solid pulse on the cybersecurity community.
The format stays consistent on purpose. Each episode starts with a scan of what’s emerging, shifts into a guest conversation, then closes with a short segment that ties the story back to mitigation and tooling. The goal is simple: move past theory, show what’s happening with real examples, and leave you with something you can act on.
Episode 1: OpenClaw Risks, RCEs, and Metasploit Pro Updates
Doug and Jonah open by digging into two AI-centric stories from the past week. The first is PhoneLeak, described as data exfiltration in Gemini via phone call. It’s the kind of uncomfortable example that forces practical questions: how do you defend against mobile clickjacking when it’s disguised as a routine CAPTCHA? When an AI assistant has deep extensions into a user’s workspace, how do you prevent malicious prompts from quietly accessing sensitive data like 2FA codes? And perhaps most importantly, how do defenders anticipate and monitor for bizarre, out-of-the-box exfiltration methods—like an AI bypassing SMS confirmations to leak data via DTMF tones on a phone call?
The second story comes from the other side of the AI conversation: an AI agent reportedly identifying an RCE in BeyondTrust remote support, plus discussion of older privileged remote access versions. More automation can mean faster discovery, which shrinks the window between “interesting finding” and “you need to patch this.” That changes how defenders think about exposure, patch prioritization, and what “good enough” means (and looks like) when it comes to monitoring.
In the guest segment, Greg Richardson (Global Advisory CISO & AI Thought Leader, 6 Levers AI) walks through how he uses AI agents in his workflow while keeping control tight. He talks about setting tasks while he sleeps, but the constraints are the point: access is locked down, the agent only touches files he explicitly provides, communication is limited, and token limits help cap the size of any mistake. He also makes a strong case for starting small, with one task at a time, instead of trying to automate dozens of things on day one.
To close out this inaugural episode, the team hits on a SolarWinds Help Desk vulnerability, then shares a quick look at Metasploit Pro 5.0 updates – including more granular payload selection and a walkthrough of the new UI.
If your idea of useful content includes threat trade-offs, concrete mitigations, and a bit of candid “how this actually plays out,” you’re in the right place.
Following our recent published advisories, this publication is intended to outline a summary of the cyber activities associated with the tension. Based on the available information, we believe the conflict is beginning to show signs of expanding beyond a strictly regional crisis. Initial threat reporting pointed to a measurable increase in cyber activity linked to the crisis predominantly focused on hacktivist mobilization, with reports of phishing campaigns, and claims of data theft and disruptive operations. For a companion piece focused around our customers, dive into Rapid7 Detection Coverage for Iran-Linked Cyber Activity.
Cyber activity by groups associated with Iran and their affiliated ecosystems have begun to surface. Much of the visible activity currently appears to have limited immediate operational impact as it consists primarily of website defacements, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, coordinated messaging campaigns, phishing attempts, and reconnaissance against exposed digital infrastructure. While these incidents may appear opportunistic or symbolic, historical patterns of such behavior suggest that this activity can represent early-stage signaling, pressure, and preparatory shaping operations rather than isolated disruption.
Iran’s cyber ecosystem operates through a layered structure that includes state-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, proxy actors, hacktivist personas, and sympathetic foreign collectives. Even when not centrally coordinated, these actors often converge on the same narratives and target sets during geopolitical crises, enabling simultaneous visible disruption and covert intelligence-driven intrusion activity. As the conflict evolves, this ecosystem provides a scalable and deniable tool for retaliation that can gradually intensify.
It is very likely that the cyber risk will widen accordingly as the current conflict continues. Governments and organizations located in regions hosting U.S. military infrastructure or closely aligned with U.S. and Israeli positions may face increased exposure, particularly across sectors such as logistics, critical infrastructure, public administration, energy, and telecommunications.
Strategic context and operational trends
Iran does not operate according to a single publicly articulated cyberwarfare doctrine. Instead, its cyber strategy has evolved pragmatically as part of the country’s broader asymmetric security model. Since 2010, there has been an expansion of its cyber capabilities as instruments for intelligence gathering, internal control, retaliation, coercive messaging, and regional influence. Cyber operations are therefore best understood not as a separate military domain with a fully transparent doctrine, but as an adaptable component of the regime’s survival and strategic competition against outsiders.
Broadly speaking, Iranian cyber activity tends to serve three overlapping strategic objectives. The first is regime security and domestic control, in which cyber tools support surveillance, information control, and disruption of dissident or opposition networks. The second is strategic intelligence collection, in which state-linked actors target governments, defense organizations, technology providers, telecommunications firms, and critical infrastructure to gather political, military, and economic intelligence. The third is coercive signaling and regional influence, in which cyber operations impose costs on adversaries, shape perceptions, and demonstrate retaliatory capability while remaining below the threshold of overt interstate war.
A key feature of this regime’s approach is the development of long-term access. Iranian APT groups often conduct sustained intrusion campaigns focused not only on immediate collection but also on access persistence, credential harvesting, and network familiarity. In a crisis environment, these pre-existing footholds can become strategically important, supporting either intelligence collection or later disruptive operations. This is one reason current low-visibility intrusions deserve as much analytical attention as public hacktivist claims. The visible DDoS or defacement campaign may dominate headlines, but the more significant strategic risk often lies in covert access established inside other targets.
Another defining feature of Iran’s cyber strategy is its layered operational model. State-linked APT groups frequently operate alongside contractors, proxies, persona-driven influence actors, and hacktivist collectives. This structure offers several advantages: it creates deniability, increases operational tempo; broadens the range of possible targets; and allows Iran-aligned ecosystems to combine disruptive spectacle with intelligence-driven depth. During periods of heightened tension, this blended model enables visible pressure operations to coexist with quieter espionage or pre-positioning campaigns. Current reporting on the conflict strongly supports this interpretation, with activist and proxy campaigns surging in parallel to concern over state-linked phishing, malware, wipers, and infrastructure-focused targeting.
Iran’s threat actor landscape
State sponsored
Iran’s cyber capabilities are distributed across a hybrid ecosystem of state institutions, intelligence services, military structures, and semi-official operators. Rather than relying on a single centralized cyber command, Tehran appears to allocate responsibilities across different organs, primarily the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, with support from contractors, front entities, and affiliated personas. Strategic coordination of the cyber domain is overseen by the Supreme Council of Cyberspace, while operational activities are carried out through a mix of official and semi-official channels.
IRGC-linked actors
The Islamic Revolution Guard Corp (IRGC) maintains one of Iran’s most visible offensive cyber capabilities and has been associated with cyber espionage, influence operations, credential theft, and politically aligned disruptive activity. Among the principal IRGC-linked actors are APT35 (also known as Charming Kitten or Mint Sandstorm), which has long conducted spear-phishing and credential-harvesting operations against diplomats, journalists, researchers, and policy communities; APT42 is an actor particularly associated with surveillance and social engineering targeting dissidents, activists, journalists, and policy experts. Cotton Sandstorm (also known as Holy Souls and Emennet Pasargad), meanwhile, has been linked to both espionage and influence-oriented operations targeting regional adversaries and Western institutions. Recent reporting also highlights continued concern around malware associated with this broader actor set, including infostealing and espionage tooling used in phishing-led operations.
MOIS-linked actors
The Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) operates parallel cyber capabilities that tend to emphasize intelligence collection, long-term access, and strategic espionage. The most prominent groups in this cluster include MuddyWater and OilRig (also known as APT34). CISA has previously described MuddyWater as an Iranian government-sponsored actor conducting cyber espionage and malicious cyber operations across multiple sectors, while current reporting continues to place the group among the most operationally relevant Iranian state-linked threats in the present crisis environment. OilRig remains a longstanding espionage actor focused on governments, financial institutions, energy entities, and other strategic organizations.
These actors illustrate Iran’s distributed cyber-operational model: Intelligence-driven access development, influence, psychological pressure, and opportunistic disruptive action are not separate lines of effort but parts of a broader strategic continuum.
Parallel hacktivist and proxies
Beginning in June 2025, a noticeable surge in hacktivist and proxy cyber activity accompanied the broader escalation of tensions in the Middle East. This reflects a recurring pattern observed during previous geopolitical crises, in which ideologically aligned non-state cyber actors mobilize alongside, or in parallel with, state-linked cyber operations. In the current confrontation, this dynamic has again expanded the cyber landscape beyond traditional state-directed espionage or sabotage.
By early March 2026, several dozen hacktivists or proxy collectives emerged related to the conflict. These groups vary significantly in capability and reliability. Some focus on distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, while others conduct website defacements or hack-and-leak campaigns. Some primarily amplify claims of compromise that are exaggerated or only partially verifiable. Their significance, therefore, lies less in technical sophistication than in the cumulative pressure they place on defenders and the broader information environment.
In crisis situations, this activity can produce strategic effects. Numerous low-impact incidents can consume defensive resources, complicate attribution, and obscure more sophisticated intrusions occurring simultaneously. Hacktivist campaigns may therefore function as distractions, signals, or psychological pressure while more capable actors pursue quieter access to high-value networks. For this reason, the analytical distinction between advanced persistent threat (APT) activity and hacktivism can become blurred during periods of geopolitical confrontation.
Several collectives active in the current environment publicly position themselves as ideologically aligned with Iran or with members of the so-called “Axis of Resistance.” Among the more visible groups are Handala Hack Team, Dienet, FAD Team, APT IRAN, Cyber Islamic Resistance, and Fatimion cyber team.These actors frequently frame their operations as retaliatory cyber campaigns targeting Israeli, Western, or allied regional entities, claiming responsibility for activities such as website defacements, DDoS attacks, and hack-and-leak operations targeting mainly government, telecommunications, energy, and financial entities. Although many claims remain difficult to verify independently, their messaging strategy often emphasizes their psychological and reputational impact.
In parallel, several pro-Russia hacktivist groups have also engaged in operations linked to the confrontation, including NoName057(16), Sever Killer, and Russian Legion. These groups typically conduct large-scale DDoS campaigns targeting government portals, financial services, and transportation or telecommunications infrastructure in states perceived as supporting Israel or broader Western policy positions. Their participation illustrates how regional conflicts can attract cyber actors from outside the immediate theater when ideological alignment or strategic narratives converge.
Cyber activities linked to the ongoing conflict
Iranian APT group operations
Beyond the highly visible hacktivist activity circulating on social media, defacement platforms, and Telegram channels, a quieter but more strategically significant layer of cyber operations is unfolding through Iranian state-linked APT groups. These operations appear ongoing and aligned with broader geopolitical objectives tied to the current conflict environment.
Recent threat reporting indicates continued operations by the Iranian APT group, MuddyWater, which is widely assessed to be linked to MOIS. Since at least early February 2026, reporting has suggested potential compromises or attempted intrusions targeting organizations associated with the United States and allied interests.
According to public reporting, activity linked to the group was reportedly observed within the networks of a United States–based bank, a United States airport, a nonprofit organization operating across the United States and Canada, and a software company with operations in Israel. In several of these incidents, threat actors reportedly deployed a previously undocumented backdoorknown as Dindoor, suggesting a coordinated, ongoing campaign rather than isolated compromise events.
Hacktivist and proxy disruption activities
The most visible form of cyber activity so far remains hacktivist and proxy-led disruption.
DDoS attacks are among the most common tactics employed by hacktivist groups. Pro-Russia groups such as NoName057(16) and Server Killer, along with other pro-Iran collectives affiliated with them, have been linked to waves of coordinated DDoS attacks against Israel, Qatar, Bahrain, and other politically symbolic targets. These attacks are generally inexpensive and cause only short-term technical damage, but they remain strategically useful because they disrupt public services, tie up defense resources, generate media coverage, and fuel the narrative of a sustained cyber response.
Figure 1: Telegram post from pro-Russia hacktivist groups claiming responsibility for targeting an Israeli website in support of Iran
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Website defacement also remains a common tactic. Groups such as FAD Team, 313, and Cyber Islamic Resistance have been associated with claims of attacks on several websites. Although defacements are technically simple to execute, they remain analytically significant: They are highly visible, rapidly disseminated, and psychologically impactful, often creating an exaggerated perception of widespread systemic compromise.
Data breaches represent a far more significant dimension of cyber operations. The Iranian-aligned group Handala, in particular, continues to blend political messaging with claims of data theft and the selective release of allegedly compromised information. The group recently asserted that it had infiltrated a Saudi energy company and exfiltrated internal documents, framing the operation as a combination of data exfiltration, coercive pressure, and psychological warfare targeting the energy sector. Even when the full authenticity of released datasets cannot be independently verified, the publication of partially credible material can still generate substantial reputational damage and potential operational disruption for affected organizations.
Targeting critical infrastructure has emerged as one of the most concerning aspects of the current cyber activity by pro-Iran hacktivists and proxy collectives. Groups operating in this ecosystem, including Iranian APTs, Handala, and networks associated with the Cyber Islamic Resistance umbrella, have publicly claimed operations targeting infrastructure across the region. Recent Telegram posts indicate that an Iranian APT group claimed responsibility for attempts to sabotage Jordanian critical infrastructure, while other Iran-aligned hacktivist personas have asserted access to sectors including fuel systems, water utilities, and other operational technology environments.
In a separate case, the Handala Hack Team has alleged that it compromised both Oil and gas companies in the United Arab Emirates and Israel, claiming to have exfiltrated more than 1.3 TB of sensitive data from oil and gas sector networks. These claims, which would represent a significant intrusion into Middle Eastern energy infrastructure if confirmed, have circulated primarily through hacktivist communication channels and social media reporting and have not been independently verified.
Figure 2: IRAN APT group claimed attempts to target Jordanian critical infrastructure
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Although many of these claims remain difficult to independently verify, the recurring focus on industrial control systems and essential services is analytically significant. Hacktivist collectives aligned with Iranian geopolitical narratives frequently leverage infrastructure-related claims as part of information operations designed to amplify perceived impact, generate psychological pressure, and signal the potential for escalation into operational technology environments. Even when technical disruption is limited or exaggerated, the persistent narrative around infrastructure compromise can shape defensive priorities and highlight potential escalation pathways within the broader cyber conflict.
Sectoral exposure and risk landscape
In the current geopolitical context, cyberattacks extend far beyond military networks and defense institutions. Modern cyber operations increasingly aim to affect the broader ecosystem that supports government activity, economic stability, and public trust. Consequently, adversaries seek not only technically vulnerable targets but also organizations whose compromise or disruption can increase visibility, influence public perception, or create cascading effects across interconnected systems.
A successful intrusion into a widely used service provider, a major infrastructure operator, or a publicly accessible institution can quickly produce consequences that extend far beyond the initial target, affecting supply chains, service availability, and public confidence. In this context, cyber operations often serve multiple purposes simultaneously: intelligence gathering, strategic positioning within critical networks, and generating disruption or exerting influence during periods of heightened geopolitical tension.
At present, several sectors appear particularly exposed:
Government institutions and public administration
Defense and aerospace industry
Energy sector, including oil, gas, and electricity
Telecommunications providers
Financial services
Transportation systems
However, the risk landscape extends beyond these sectors themselves. Organizations that form part of the broader digital supply chain supporting these industries may also represent attractive entry points. This includes cloud service providers, managed service providers, technology vendors, and other third-party platforms that maintain privileged access to client environments. Compromising such intermediaries can allow adversaries to reach high-value targets indirectly. By gaining access to a supplier or service provider, attackers may obtain pathways into multiple networks simultaneously, access sensitive information, or move laterally across interconnected operational systems. Supply chain compromise, therefore, offers both scale and stealth, making it an increasingly common tactic in sophisticated cyber campaigns.
Geopolitical alignment can also influence targeting decisions. Organizations based in countries that host United States military assets or are publicly aligned with United States or Israeli policy positions may attract additional attention from adversaries. In these cases, targeting can carry symbolic, political, or strategic value beyond the immediate technical impact of the intrusion. Within this environment, cyber exposure can generally be understood through three overlapping targeting dynamics.
Symbolic targets include municipalities, universities, media outlets, and public institutions. These organizations may be targeted primarily for visibility, messaging, or propaganda purposes. Even limited disruption or data exposure can generate headlines and amplify the perceived reach of the attackers.
Operational targets include sectors that support everyday economic and social activity, such as telecommunications providers, transportation systems, payment networks, and fuel distribution infrastructure. Disruptions in these areas can quickly affect daily life, creating public anxiety and increasing pressure on authorities to respond.
Strategic targets consist of entities whose compromise offers long-term intelligence or operational value. This category includes defense contractors, major financial institutions, government networks, and operators of critical infrastructure. In these cases, adversaries may prioritize persistence and stealth to collect intelligence, monitor decision-making processes, or maintain access that could be leveraged during future crises.
Taken together, these targeting patterns illustrate a broader shift in cyber operations: Attackers are increasingly selecting targets not only for their intrinsic value, but for the broader political, economic, and societal effects that disruption or compromise can produce.
What should organizations monitor?
In the current phase of the conflict, organizations should continue to monitor for indicators that activity is shifting from opportunistic disruption toward deliberate intrusion or access preparation.
Internet-facing infrastructure is often the initial entry point. Elevated scanning or probing of public websites, VPN gateways, remote access portals, cloud services, and email authentication infrastructure may indicate early reconnaissance. While some scanning is routine, sudden increases in probing activity or authentication attempts should be treated as potential precursors to intrusion.
Phishing and social engineering campaigns are also likely to intensify. Threat actors may exploit developments in the conflict by using lures that reference civil defense alerts, battlefield updates, humanitarian messaging, or urgent requests that appear to originate from leadership or trusted partners. In some cases, malicious applications or replicas of legitimate services may be used to harvest credentials or deploy malware.
Credential misuse remains a primary access vector. Security teams should monitor for abnormal authentication patterns, including logins from unusual geographic locations, access at unexpected hours, repeated failed logins followed by success, changes to multi-factor authentication settings, or the creation of new privileged accounts.
Organizations operatingcritical infrastructure should closely monitor activities within their operational environments. Suspicious access to remote management platforms, unusual connectivity between IT and OT networks, or unexpected activity involving engineering workstations or vendor access channels may signal reconnaissance within sensitive systems.
Finally, monitoring the broader information environment can provide early warning and signal the need to increase monitoring. Hacktivist groups frequently use platforms such as Telegram and X to circulate target lists, claim attacks, or release fragments of allegedly stolen data tied to geopolitical events. Tracking these channels can help organizations identify potential targets and strengthen their defensive posture before malicious activity reaches their networks.
An unknown hacker used Anthropic’s LLM to hack the Mexican government:
The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security said in research published Wednesday.
[…]
Claude initially warned the unknown user of malicious intent during their conversation about the Mexican government, but eventually complied with the attacker’s requests and executed thousands of commands on government computer networks, the researchers said.
Anthropic investigated Gambit’s claims, disrupted the activity and banned the accounts involved, a representative said. The company feeds examples of malicious activity back into Claude to learn from it, and one of its latest AI models, Claude Opus 4.6, includes probes that can disrupt misuse, the representative said.
Shortly after the first set of explosions, Iranians received bursts of notifications on their phones. They came not from the government advising caution, but from an apparently hacked prayer-timing app called BadeSaba Calendar that has been downloaded more than 5 million times from the Google Play Store.
The messages arrived in quick succession over a period of 30 minutes, starting with the phrase ‘Help has arrived’ at 9:52 am Tehran time, shortly after the first set of explosions. No party has claimed responsibility for the hacks.
It happened so fast that this is most likely a government operation. I can easily envision both the US and Israel having hacked the app previously, and then deciding that this is a good use of that access.
This is new. North Korean hackers are posing as company recruiters, enticing job candidates to participate in coding challenges. When they run the code they are supposed to work on, it installs malware on their system.
I spent 20 minutes writing an article on my personal website titled “The best tech journalists at eating hot dogs.” Every word is a lie. I claimed (without evidence) that competitive hot-dog-eating is a popular hobby among tech reporters and based my ranking on the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Championship (which doesn’t exist). I ranked myself number one, obviously. Then I listed a few fake reporters and real journalists who gave me permission….
Less than 24 hours later, the world’s leading chatbots were blabbering about my world-class hot dog skills. When I asked about the best hot-dog-eating tech journalists, Google parroted the gibberish from my website, both in the Gemini app and AI Overviews, the AI responses at the top of Google Search. ChatGPT did the same thing, though Claude, a chatbot made by the company Anthropic, wasn’t fooled.
Sometimes, the chatbots noted this might be a joke. I updated my article to say “this is not satire.” For a while after, the AIs seemed to take it more seriously.
These things are not trustworthy, and yet they are going to be widely trusted.
The 2026 Winter Olympics have been live for several weeks, and the cyber activity many predicted is already unfolding.
Threat intelligence reporting from Intel471 highlights a surge in hacktivist chatter and mobilization tied to protests and geopolitical tensions surrounding the Games. At the same time, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group has warned that hacktivists, state actors, and cybercriminal groups are actively targeting the global defense industry, including organizations that overlap with Olympic infrastructure and supply chains. This is not a coincidence. Major global events concentrate visibility, political symbolism, and digital dependency. That combination attracts actors who want attention as much as disruption.
What is hacktivism in 2026?
Hacktivism today is ideologically motivated cyber activity designed to influence perception, apply pressure, or advance political narratives, often through disruption, data leaks, or public messaging. Recent reporting shows that hacktivist groups are not operating in isolation. In some cases, their campaigns run alongside state-aligned or criminal activity. The targeting of defense contractors, aerospace suppliers, and industrial entities reflects this convergence.
During the Olympics, those same sectors intersect with event logistics, telecommunications, aviation, energy, and security technology.
What has happened since the Winter Games began?
According to Intel471, online communities aligned with hacktivist causes have escalated messaging and operational coordination in the lead-up to and during the Winter Games. Threat actors have referenced Olympic-related targets in forums and social channels, including infrastructure tied to transportation and sponsors.
SecurityWeek and OODA Loop, citing Google’s intelligence, note continued targeting of defense industry entities through phishing and exploitation of exposed services. While not every campaign is explicitly labeled “Olympics-related,” the overlap in sectors matters.
Defense contractors often provide technology, logistics, surveillance, or communications capabilities that support major international events. Attacks against them, even if framed around geopolitical grievances, can have ripple effects.
The pattern is consistent: high-visibility events amplify the impact of even limited cyber incidents.
Why global events amplify hacktivist activity
The Olympics function as a global amplifier. Billions are watching, media cycles move faster, and political narratives are intensified. In that environment, even relatively low-complexity attacks can produce outsized consequences. A distributed denial-of-service campaign against a broadcaster can interrupt coverage at a critical moment. A data leak involving a sponsor can dominate headlines for days. A website defacement tied to a political cause can circulate globally within minutes. In many cases, the objective is not technical devastation but psychological and reputational impact. Undermining confidence in organizers or projecting instability can advance the strategic goals of ideologically aligned groups without requiring sophisticated or destructive techniques.
What security teams should focus on, now and in the future
With the Games underway, the priority is not speculation. It is monitoring and preparedness. Security leaders supporting global events should:
Review third-party dependencies that connect to core event operations
Increase monitoring of public-facing systems during peak broadcast windows
Track hacktivist messaging that references sponsors, infrastructure, or host nations
Ensure executive and communications teams are aligned on rapid response planning
The risk is not confined to stadium control systems. It spans broadcasters, payment providers, logistics partners, and digital platforms. High-visibility events attract ideologically motivated actors, but they also create opportunities for financially driven cybercrime. As we’ve previously examined in our research on carding-as-a-service and stolen credit card fraud, periods of high transaction volume often coincide with increased fraud activity and exploitation of payment infrastructure.
Security leaders should prepare for both disruption and monetization. While hacktivist activity may generate headlines, financial exploitation often causes quieter but longer-lasting operational damage.
Hacktivism in 2026: A warning for high-visibility events
The Winter Olympics provide a live case study in how hacktivism operates within today’s geopolitical environment. Threat actors understand timing. They understand symbolism. They understand that a small disruption during a global event carries disproportionate weight.
The activity seen so far reinforces a broader shift. Hacktivism has matured into a persistent and visible component of the threat landscape. It intersects with state and criminal ecosystems and targets sectors that carry political and economic symbolism.
For organizations tied to high-visibility events, the lesson is clear. Cyber risk during global moments is not only technical – it is reputational, geopolitical, and amplified by attention and preparation must account for all three.
Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to handle edge cases in robotic vehicle systems where data is scarce by using common-sense reasoning grounded in perception and action to generalize beyond training distributions and adapt to novel real-world situations. These capabilities, however, also create new security risks. In this paper, we introduce CHAI (Command Hijacking against embodied AI), a new class of prompt-based attacks that exploit the multimodal language interpretation abilities of Large Visual-Language Models (LVLMs). CHAI embeds deceptive natural language instructions, such as misleading signs, in visual input, systematically searches the token space, builds a dictionary of prompts, and guides an attacker model to generate Visual Attack Prompts. We evaluate CHAI on four LVLM agents; drone emergency landing, autonomous driving, and aerial object tracking, and on a real robotic vehicle. Our experiments show that CHAI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art attacks. By exploiting the semantic and multimodal reasoning strengths of next-generation embodied AI systems, CHAI underscores the urgent need for defenses that extend beyond traditional adversarial robustness.
Hackers associated with the Chinese government used a Trojaned version of Notepad++ to deliver malware to selected users.
Notepad++ said that officials with the unnamed provider hosting the update infrastructure consulted with incident responders and found that it remained compromised until September 2. Even then, the attackers maintained credentials to the internal services until December 2, a capability that allowed them to continue redirecting selected update traffic to malicious servers. The threat actor “specifically targeted Notepad++ domain with the goal of exploiting insufficient update verification controls that existed in older versions of Notepad++.” Event logs indicate that the hackers tried to re-exploit one of the weaknesses after it was fixed but that the attempt failed.
Researchers have demonstrated remotely controlling a wheelchair over Bluetooth. CISA has issued an advisory.
CISA said the WHILL wheelchairs did not enforce authentication for Bluetooth connections, allowing an attacker who is in Bluetooth range of the targeted device to pair with it. The attacker could then control the wheelchair’s movements, override speed restrictions, and manipulate configuration profiles, all without requiring credentials or user interaction.
You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
The Danish Defence Intelligence Service (DDIS) announced on Thursday that Moscow was behind a cyber-attack on a Danish water utility in 2024 and a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Danish websites in the lead-up to the municipal and regional council elections in November.
The first, it said, was carried out by the pro-Russian group known as Z-Pentest and the second by NoName057(16), which has links to the Russian state.
Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control of more than 1,000 smartphones that power the company.
The hacker, who asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation from the company, said he reported the vulnerability to Doublespeed on October 31. At the time of writing, the hacker said he still has access to the company’s backend, including the phone farm itself.
The Department of Justice has indicted thirty-one people over the high-tech rigging of high-stakes poker games.
In a typical legitimate poker game, a dealer uses a shuffling machine to shuffle the cards randomly before dealing them to all the players in a particular order. As set forth in the indictment, the rigged games used altered shuffling machines that contained hidden technology allowing the machines to read all the cards in the deck. Because the cards were always dealt in a particular order to the players at the table, the machines could determine which player would have the winning hand. This information was transmitted to an off-site member of the conspiracy, who then transmitted that information via cellphone back to a member of the conspiracy who was playing at the table, referred to as the “Quarterback” or “Driver.” The Quarterback then secretly signaled this information (usually by prearranged signals like touching certain chips or other items on the table) to other co-conspirators playing at the table, who were also participants in the scheme. Collectively, the Quarterback and other players in on the scheme (i.e., the cheating team) used this information to win poker games against unwitting victims, who sometimes lost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. The defendants used other cheating technology as well, such as a chip tray analyzer (essentially, a poker chip tray that also secretly read all cards using hidden cameras), an x-ray table that could read cards face down on the table, and special contact lenses or eyeglasses that could read pre-marked cards.
These days, the most important meeting attendee isn’t a person: It’s the AI notetaker.
This system assigns action items and determines the importance of what is said. If it becomes necessary to revisit the facts of the meeting, its summary is treated as impartial evidence.
But clever meeting attendees can manipulate this system’s record by speaking more to what the underlying AI weights for summarization and importance than to their colleagues. As a result, you can expect some meeting attendees to use language more likely to be captured in summaries, timing their interventions strategically, repeating key points, and employing formulaic phrasing that AI models are more likely to pick up on. Welcome to the world of AI summarization optimization (AISO).
Optimizing for algorithmic manipulation
AI summarization optimization has a well-known precursor: SEO.
Search-engine optimization is as old as the World Wide Web. The idea is straightforward: Search engines scour the internet digesting every possible page, with the goal of serving the best results to every possible query. The objective for a content creator, company, or cause is to optimize for the algorithm search engines have developed to determine their webpage rankings for those queries. That requires writing for two audiences at once: human readers and the search-engine crawlers indexing content. Techniques to do this effectively are passed around like trade secrets, and a $75 billion industry offers SEO services to organizations of all sizes.
More recently, researchers have documented techniques for influencing AI responses, including large-language model optimization (LLMO) and generative engine optimization (GEO). Tricks include content optimization—adding citations and statistics—and adversarial approaches: using specially crafted text sequences. These techniques often target sources that LLMs heavily reference, such as Reddit, which is claimed to be cited in 40% of AI-generated responses. The effectiveness and real-world applicability of these methods remains limited and largely experimental, although there is substantial evidence that countries such as Russia are activelypursuingthis.
AI summarization optimization follows the same logic on a smaller scale. Human participants in a meeting may want a certain fact highlighted in the record, or their perspective to be reflected as the authoritative one. Rather than persuading colleagues directly, they adapt their speech for the notetaker that will later define the “official” summary. For example:
“The main factor in last quarter’s delay was supply chain disruption.”
“The key outcome was overwhelmingly positive client feedback.”
“Our takeaway here is in alignment moving forward.”
“What matters here is the efficiency gains, not the temporary cost overrun.”
The techniques are subtle. They employ high-signal phrases such as “key takeaway” and “action item,” keep statements short and clear, and repeat them when possible. They also use contrastive framing (“this, not that”), and speak early in the meeting or at transition points.
Once spoken words are transcribed, they enter the model’s input. Cue phrases—and even transcription errors—can steer what makes it into the summary. In many tools, the output format itself is also a signal: Summarizers often offer sections such as “Key Takeaways” or “Action Items,” so language that mirrors those headings is more likely to be included. In effect, well-chosen phrases function as implicit markers that guide the AI toward inclusion.
Research confirms this. Early AI summarization research showedthat models trained to reconstruct summary-style sentences systematically overweigh such content. Models over-rely on early-positioncontent in news. And models often overweigh statements at the start or end of a transcript, underweighting the middle. Recent work further confirms vulnerability to phrasing-based manipulation: models cannot reliably distinguish embedded instructions from ordinary content, especially when phrasing mimics salient cues.
How to combat AISO
If AISO becomes common, three forms of defense will emerge. First, meeting participants will exert social pressure on one another. When researchers secretly deployed AI bots in Reddit’s r/changemyview community, users and moderators responded with strong backlash calling it “psychological manipulation.” Anyone using obvious AI-gaming phrases may face similar disapproval.
Second, organizations will start governing meeting behavior using AI: risk assessments and access restrictions before the meetings even start, detection of AISO techniques in meetings, and validation and auditing after the meetings.
Third, AI summarizers will have their own technical countermeasures. For example, the AI security company CloudSEK recommends content sanitization to strip suspicious inputs, prompt filtering to detect meta-instructions and excessive repetition, context window balancing to weight repeated content less heavily, and user warnings showing content provenance.
AI summarization optimization is a small, subtle shift, but it illustrates how the adoption of AI is reshaping human behavior in unexpected ways. The potential implications are quietly profound.
Meetings—humanity’s most fundamental collaborative ritual—are being silently reengineered by those who understand the algorithm’s preferences. The articulate are gaining an invisible advantage over the wise. Adversarial thinking is becoming routine, embedded in the most ordinary workplace rituals, and, as AI becomes embedded in organizational life, strategic interactions with AI notetakers and summarizers may soon be a necessary executive skill for navigating corporate culture.
AI summarization optimization illustrates how quickly humans adapt communication strategies to new technologies. As AI becomes more embedded in workplace communication, recognizing these emerging patterns may prove increasingly important.
This essay was written with Gadi Evron, and originally appeared in CSO.
AI agents are now hacking computers. They’re getting better at all phases of cyberattacks, faster than most of us expected. They can chain together different aspects of a cyber operation, and hack autonomously, at computer speeds and scale. This is going to change everything.
Over the summer, hackers proved the concept, industry institutionalized it, and criminals operationalized it. In June, AI company XBOW took the top spot on HackerOne’s US leaderboard after submitting over 1,000 new vulnerabilities in just a few months. In August, the seven teams competing in DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge collectively found 54 new vulnerabilities in a target system, in four hours (of compute). Also in August, Google announced that its Big Sleep AI found dozens of new vulnerabilities in open-source projects.
It gets worse. In July Ukraine’s CERT discovered a piece of Russian malware that used an LLM to automate the cyberattack process, generating both system reconnaissance and data theft commands in real-time. In August, Anthropic reported that they disrupted a threat actor that used Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, to automate the entire cyberattack process. It was an impressive use of the AI, which performed network reconnaissance, penetrated networks, and harvested victims’ credentials. The AI was able to figure out which data to steal, how much money to extort out of the victims, and how to best write extortion emails.
Another hacker used Claude to create and market his own ransomware, complete with “advanced evasion capabilities, encryption, and anti-recovery mechanisms.” And in September, Checkpoint reported on hackers using HexStrike-AI to create autonomous agents that can scan, exploit, and persist inside target networks. Also in September, a research team showed how they can quickly and easily reproduce hundreds of vulnerabilities from public information. These tools are increasingly free for anyone to use. Villager, a recently released AI pentesting tool from Chinese company Cyberspike, uses the Deepseek model to completely automate attack chains.
This is all well beyond AIs capabilities in 2016, at DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge. The annual Chinese AI hacking challenge, Robot Hacking Games, might be on this level, but little is known outside of China.
Tipping point on the horizon
AI agents now rival and sometimes surpass even elite human hackers in sophistication. They automate operations at machine speed and global scale. The scope of their capabilities allows these AI agents to completely automate a criminal’s command to maximize profit, or structure advanced attacks to a government’s precise specifications, such as to avoid detection.
In this future, attack capabilities could accelerate beyond our individual and collective capability to handle. We have long taken it for granted that we have time to patch systems after vulnerabilities become known, or that withholding vulnerability details prevents attackers from exploiting them. This is no longer the case.
The cyberattack/cyberdefense balance has long skewed towards the attackers; these developments threaten to tip the scales completely. We’re potentiallylooking at a singularity event for cyber attackers. Key parts of the attack chain are becoming automated and integrated: persistence, obfuscation, command-and-control, and endpoint evasion. Vulnerability research could potentially be carried out during operations instead of months in advance.
The most skilled will likely retain an edge for now. But AI agents don’t have to be better at a human task in order to be useful. They just have to excel in one of four dimensions: speed, scale, scope, or sophistication. But there is every indication that they will eventually excel at all four. By reducing the skill, cost, and time required to find and exploit flaws, AI can turn rare expertise into commodity capabilities and gives average criminals an outsized advantage.
The AI-assisted evolution of cyberdefense
AI technologies can benefit defenders as well. We don’t know how the different technologies of cyber-offense and cyber-defense will be amenable to AI enhancement, but we can extrapolate a possible series of overlapping developments.
Phase One: The Transformation of the Vulnerability Researcher. AI-based hacking benefits defenders as well as attackers. In this scenario, AI empowers defenders to do more. It simplifies capabilities, providing far more people the ability to perform previously complex tasks, and empowers researchers previously busy with these tasks to accelerate or move beyond them, freeing time to work on problems that require human creativity. History suggests a pattern. Reverse engineering was a laborious manual process until tools such as IDA Pro made the capability available to many. AI vulnerability discovery could follow a similar trajectory, evolving through scriptable interfaces, automated workflows, and automated research before reaching broad accessibility.
Phase Two: The Emergence of VulnOps. Between research breakthroughs and enterprise adoption, a new discipline might emerge: VulnOps. Large research teams are already building operational pipelines around their tooling. Their evolution could mirror how DevOps professionalized software delivery. In this scenario, specialized research tools become developer products. These products may emerge as a SaaS platform, or some internal operational framework, or something entirely different. Think of it as AI-assisted vulnerability research available to everyone, at scale, repeatable, and integrated into enterprise operations.
Phase Three: The Disruption of the Enterprise Software Model. If enterprises adopt AI-powered security the way they adopted continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), several paths open up. AI vulnerability discovery could become a built-in stage in delivery pipelines. We can envision a world where AI vulnerability discovery becomes an integral part of the software development process, where vulnerabilities are automatically patched even before reaching production—a shift we might call continuous discovery/continuous repair (CD/CR). Third-party risk management (TPRM) offers a natural adoption route, lower-risk vendor testing, integration into procurement and certification gates, and a proving ground before wider rollout.
Phase Four: The Self-Healing Network. If organizations can independently discover and patch vulnerabilities in running software, they will not have to wait for vendors to issue fixes. Building in-house research teams is costly, but AI agents could perform such discovery and generate patches for many kinds of code, including third-party and vendor products. Organizations may develop independent capabilities that create and deploy third-party patches on vendor timelines, extending the current trend of independent open-source patching. This would increase security, but having customers patch software without vendor approval raises questions about patch correctness, compatibility, liability, right-to-repair, and long-term vendor relationships.
These are all speculations. Maybe AI-enhanced cyberattacks won’t evolve the ways we fear. Maybe AI-enhanced cyberdefense will give us capabilities we can’t yet anticipate. What will surprise us most might not be the paths we can see, but the ones we can’t imagine yet.
This essay was written with Heather Adkins and Gadi Evron, and originally appeared in CSO.
Airportr is a service that allows passengers to have their luggage picked up, checked, and delivered to their destinations. As you might expect, it’s used by wealthy or important people. So if the company’s website is insecure, you’d be able to spy on lots of wealthy or important people. And maybe even steal their luggage.
Researchers at the firm CyberX9 found that simple bugs in Airportr’s website allowed them to access virtually all of those users’ personal information, including travel plans, or even gain administrator privileges that would have allowed a hacker to redirect or steal luggage in transit. Among even the small sample of user data that the researchers reviewed and shared with WIRED they found what appear to be the personal information and travel records of multiple government officials and diplomats from the UK, Switzerland, and the US.
“Anyone would have been able to gain or might have gained absolute super-admin access to all the operations and data of this company,” says Himanshu Pathak, CyberX9’s founder and CEO. “The vulnerabilities resulted in complete confidential private information exposure of all airline customers in all countries who used the service of this company, including full control over all the bookings and baggage. Because once you are the super-admin of their most sensitive systems, you have have [sic] the ability to do anything.”
The collective thoughts of the interwebz
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