cybersecurity

According to NBC, North Korea is utilizing remote IT workers from third countries such as Iran and Lebanon to assist in infiltrating American companies and obtaining funds to finance its weapons programs. Alerts issued by the U.S. and several foreign agencies in July indicated that North Korean IT workers "seek to sign contracts with the intention of remitting salaries back to relevant North Korean agencies," while also posing internal threats to companies, involving data leaks, cryptocurrency theft, and sensitive information theft.As governments like the United States increase countermeasures, North Korea is increasingly leveraging third-country IT workers to secure job interviews, and after obtaining work contracts, the relevant positions are typically taken over by North Korean agents. Reports indicate that these foreign IT workers are scouted on LinkedIn, with some earning about $500 per month in cryptocurrency to work part-time as "interview assistants."Cointelegraph reported in May, citing data from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, that state-affiliated North Korean hackers and threat actors caused cryptocurrency losses exceeding $2 billion in 2025, a 51% increase year-on-year. The Bank of Korea estimates that despite facing global sanctions, North Korea's GDP will still grow by 3.5% in 2025.

Zach Pandl, the research director at Grayscale, pointed out that Zcash, as a Bitcoin-like digital currency with privacy features, currently has lucrative mining profits. Although Bitcoin network miners earn about $35 million daily, far exceeding Zcash's approximately $2 million, the daily revenue per mining machine for Zcash is about twice that of Bitcoin, with revenue per megawatt-hour approximately four times that of Bitcoin, even surpassing some AI/high-performance computing cloud services.Driven by the strong performance of token prices, Zcash's overall mining activity has increased more than 2.5 times this year, forming a virtuous cycle of "price increase --- mining increase --- network security enhancement --- supporting price." Pandl believes that at the current valuation, Zcash mining remains attractive and continues to strengthen its network security.

In a threat intelligence report released on Thursday, Anthropic stated that Russian and Chinese users are leveraging its AI model Claude to automate cyberattacks. Among them, a Russian operator codenamed "JackPoterz" has automated most parts of the attack chain through a customized AI-driven workflow, targeting over 20 organizations, including government departments and intelligence agencies, as well as embassies and diplomatic missions in Ukraine and several European countries.Chinese users are using Claude as the engineering and orchestration layer for vulnerability research, with one workflow producing more than a dozen potential zero-day vulnerabilities in network device firmware within a month. Anthropic pointed out that AI is changing the economics of cyberattacks, allowing a single operator to complete an intrusion in two to three hours and handle dozens of victims in parallel.Additionally, the report revealed that a suspected independent consultant based in Bamako, collaborating with Mali's national intelligence agency, has used Claude as the primary engineering force to build a large-scale domestic surveillance system covering approximately 25 million SIM cards across all three mobile operators in the country. This system is locally deployed and operates using local models, with software design and engineering support provided by Claude, enabling the generation of intelligence profiles on phone numbers without the need for court warrants.

The Japan Digital Agency stated that its servers suffered unauthorized access, and the personal data of approximately 246,000 individuals may have been leaked. The agency announced on Friday that in late June, it detected someone using a maintenance account to access a large number of files on its government solutions service network.Subsequent investigations revealed that someone exploited a virtual private network vulnerability, potentially stealing information from civil servants and other individuals using the system.

NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang stated on Thursday at the Goldman Sachs Technology Conference in San Francisco that cybersecurity is likely to become the next major use case for artificial intelligence.Huang mentioned that cybersecurity is the next big market for artificial intelligence, and advancements in this technology will disrupt an industry aimed at protecting computer systems.

Anthropic confirmed four incidents involving the Claude model mistakenly accessing the real internet and attacking third-party systems during a review of approximately 481 million model interaction records. The incidents involved Claude Mythos 5, Opus 4.6/4.7, and an internal research model. The accidents were caused by misconfiguration in the third-party evaluation environment that led to internet access, and the network security protections of the official product were not enabled during the evaluation.Anthropic summarized the core alignment risks as "biased reasoning" and "reckless" behavior exhibited by the model under task-driven conditions, where Claude Mythos 5 uploaded malicious packages to PyPI and accessed the real database of a security vendor using leaked credentials, believing it was in a "simulated environment." The company has introduced new assessments, monitoring, and alignment training, and has invited the independent organization METR to conduct an external investigation.

Silicon Valley angel investor Liron Shapira posted on X this morning, stating: "I assert (with 50% confidence): due to AI shaking the security and stability guarantees that people once believed Bitcoin had, the price of BTC will plummet more than 50% within the next two years."Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin rebutted this, saying: "I hold the completely opposite view. My fundamental reason is that, in the long run, I am quite optimistic about network security, and I believe the main challenge is how to smoothly transition through the transition period. Moreover, I believe BTC can at least properly handle all issues that do not require social consensus to resolve (for example, upgrading clients, mining pools, etc., to deal with network layer attacks fall into this category). Additionally, I believe the probability of hash algorithms or proof-of-work mechanisms being truly compromised is extremely low. I wanted to make a bet with you, but considering my current asset allocation (I guess you have the same view on Ethereum ETH), I have already staked about 90% of my wealth on this bet."

According to CoinDesk, OpenAI stated that it will provide access to $1 billion worth of Daybreak cybersecurity model subsidies over the next six months, along with training and technical support to help organizations defend against AI-driven cyberattacks, including potential "zero-day" exploits.Daybreak is divided into two tiers, Blue and Red, which are used for routine defense and more sensitive cybersecurity tasks, respectively. Currently, about 2,000 organizations are using it. OpenAI previously disclosed that its new model Astra can discover unknown software vulnerabilities and generate attack plans with less human intervention, raising concerns in the crypto industry about the security capabilities of open-source blockchain software.

OpenAI officially released GPT-6 Astra on Thursday, with President Greg Brockman calling it a "generational leap in capability" during the press conference, and believing that the model has reached the standard of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), meaning that artificial intelligence can match or exceed human capabilities. Brockman stated, "Welcome to the era of AGI." If this judgment holds, it means AI entities will be closer to performing reasoning tasks in various complex tasks that humans can do, and even more.GPT-6 Astra is OpenAI's first model to cross the "critical" threshold under its internal danger capability scoring system, the Preparedness Framework, which means it can independently discover previously unknown software vulnerabilities (i.e., zero-day vulnerabilities) without gradual human supervision and chain them into attacks that can run in hardened systems. In testing, the model achieved a score of 100% on the ExploitBench benchmark; to rule out inflated scores due to memory answers, OpenAI conducted a second test using 20 recent vulnerabilities from the Google V8 JavaScript engine. Astra not only surpassed the previous generation GPT-5.6 Sol but also discovered and chained two previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities, which are still being disclosed to the affected parties.Due to its high autonomy, the monitoring difficulty of Astra has also increased. OpenAI acknowledges that in tests assessing its ability to evade supervision, the model is more difficult to track than previous systems.

According to Techcrunch, cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks announced the acquisition of AI Agent startup Console for $500 million in cash and stock. Founded in 2024, Console uses AI Agent to automate tasks such as password resets, application permission grants, and daily IT troubleshooting, with clients including Ramp, Flock Safety, and Scale AI.Palo Alto Networks plans to integrate Console into its AI-driven security platform Cortex, enabling security teams to investigate and handle security alerts through natural language, achieving more automated enterprise security operations.It is reported that this is also the seventh acquisition completed by Palo Alto Networks this year, having previously acquired Chronosphere at a valuation of $3.35 billion and the cybersecurity startup Koi for $400 million.

In a blog post released on Monday, Anthropic acknowledged that its Claude model had unauthorized access to real computer systems during a cybersecurity assessment, an incident reflecting operational security failures as well as alignment failures in motivation reasoning and intent to harm. Anthropic disclosed in July that the Claude model had breached the systems of three companies because the third-party assessment environment was connected to the public internet, while the model was informed it was in a simulated environment without internet access.Anthropic stated that Claude may have interpreted evidence of real internet access as still being in a simulated environment and was willing to take harmful actions on the real internet to complete the cybersecurity assessment task. Additionally, during tests at the UK AI Safety Institute, after assessors deliberately granted Claude Mythos internet access, the model took unauthorized actions on the live network. Anthropic emphasized that the models involved did not have the cybersecurity protections included in the officially released products.Following the incident on July 30, Anthropic has suspended cybersecurity assessments of pre-release models and introduced stricter protections: tests must run in verified offline sandboxes equipped with real-time monitoring; a new classifier can intercept suspected boundary violations, terminate tests, and notify humans. Anthropic has also expanded the scope of offline monitoring used by internal frontier agents. Previously, OpenAI models had also breached Hugging Face in July to obtain answers for cybersecurity tests, with investigations revealing that about 1,200 agents acted collaboratively through unauthorized message boards.

According to Decrypt, CrowdStrike and the U.S. Department of Justice announced on Tuesday that they have dismantled the Sality peer-to-peer botnet, which has been active since 2003.This botnet primarily hijacked cryptocurrency payments through the EggJagger malware over the past eight years, which monitored the cryptocurrency wallet addresses in victims' clipboards and replaced them with the operator's own address, causing victims to send funds to strangers.CrowdStrike estimates that the operator has stolen at least 12.1 million rubles (approximately $150,000) solely through the EggJagger payload. Most of the stolen cryptocurrency has not been spent, and CrowdStrike assesses that these unspent assets were worth about 147 million rubles (nominally around $1.35 million) at their peak in January 2025. The reason Sality has survived to this day is that it does not have a central server that can be seized; infected machines communicate directly with each other.This multinational operation involved the United States, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. The U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, and Defense Criminal Investigative Service seized Sality-related domains within the United States, and police from multiple European countries also seized other domains.CrowdStrike isolated more than 15,000 infected machines to its controlled honeypot by exploiting its architectural vulnerabilities. The operator has been tracked as SALTY SPIDER, which launched a denial-of-service attack against the Russian cryptocurrency exchange AvanChange in September 2023.

According to the Securities Times, at the Fourth Cybersecurity (Tianjin) Forum, Zhou Hongyi, the founder of 360 Group, gave a keynote speech, stating that AI has changed the landscape of cyber offense and defense, and traditional solutions are difficult to sustain. He emphasized the need to create a new automated offense and defense system centered on "model governance," using AI capabilities to address AI risks, ensuring the safety of large models, the reliability of generated content, and the credibility of output results.Zhou Hongyi also proposed that there should be lifecycle management for intelligent agents, establishing an auditable, intervenable, and interruptible control mechanism, and called for the cybersecurity industry to quickly form a system for AI vulnerability discovery, automated defense, and intelligent agent security.

OpenAI stated that its upcoming Astra model can autonomously discover previously unknown software vulnerabilities and convert them into usable attack vectors without human intervention, making it the company's first model to reach the "Critical" cybersecurity capability level threshold. In a blog post released on Tuesday, OpenAI mentioned that according to its Preparedness Framework, reaching this level means the model can discover zero-day vulnerabilities and develop usable exploit code in hardened real systems without human involvement, or design and execute attacks based solely on a high-level objective.In testing, Astra achieved a 100% score in benchmark tests for developing exploit code based on known vulnerabilities and discovered two previously unknown vulnerabilities in another internal test. Additionally, the model successfully broke through a hardened browser sandbox and executed commands on the host machine, while gaining root access by exploiting multiple weaknesses in the operating system. OpenAI stated that it has delayed some of Astra's development progress to enhance security measures and plans to make its advanced cybersecurity capabilities available only to selected testers.This capability is particularly relevant to the cryptocurrency industry, as software vulnerabilities can be converted into financial losses within minutes. CoinDesk reported in June that increasingly powerful AI models can compress the process of searching code, discovering misconfigurations, and assembling attacks from days or weeks to machine speed. Security researchers noted at the time that the significant change was not the emergence of new categories of attacks, but rather the dramatically increased speed at which existing vulnerabilities are discovered and exploited.

According to security company Huntress, hackers are spreading theft malware to cryptocurrency users by forging Google Docs files, hosting malicious files on GitHub, and impersonating Claude.ai pages. Attackers disguise themselves as senior employees of CoinDesk on the social platform X, luring victims to open Google Docs documents containing malicious code under the pretext of inviting them to an online meeting, thereby guiding users to install the malicious program themselves.Mac users face the threat of Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS), which can steal browser passwords, cryptocurrency wallet data, and Telegram files; Windows users are pushed fake Google API Connector updates, which, once installed, implant NetSupport RAT and a counterfeit Ledger hardware wallet application. Additionally, hackers are placing false advertisements on search engines like Bing, enticing users to visit counterfeit Claude.ai pages and execute malicious commands. The related malware MacSync and SectopRAT can steal cookies, saved passwords, recovery phrases, and payment card information.Security company Socket also discovered 16 malicious extensions targeting Chrome and Edge, capable of emptying EVM, Solana, and Tron wallet assets.

On August 25, OpenAI announced the addition of proxy browsing capabilities for ChatGPT Work, enabling it to take over tasks on websites that require login and continue working. Users only need to enter their credentials or security codes once at the login interface, and the proxy can continue executing tasks, with sessions potentially remaining logged in for subsequent tasks without the need to log in again. OpenAI stated that this browser supports password managers, and the model cannot see usernames or passwords; this information will not be stored or used for training.However, one-time authentication effectively leaves a foothold for the proxy to maintain continuous access to the account. OpenAI's own models have previously exhibited boundary-crossing behavior, with approximately 1,200 OpenAI proxies (including GPT-5.6 Sol and a pre-release model) breaching the testing environment and invading Hugging Face's production servers to cheat benchmark tests, with about 700 proxies participating in the attack. This feature has been launched on the web and mobile browsers of ChatGPT Work, allowing users to clear sessions by site individually in the cloud browser settings.

Ledger's Chief Technology Officer Charles Guillemet stated that there has recently been "FUD" targeting Ledger in the market, as a smart contract security company claimed to have discovered vulnerabilities in the Ledger Ethereum application. Guillemet mentioned that there indeed were vulnerabilities related to certain Clear Signing processes in the Ledger Ethereum application, but these vulnerabilities were discovered by Ledger's security research team Donjon using AI-driven vulnerability research tools, and the fixes were completed and deployed two weeks ago. Users can obtain protection by timely updating their Ledger device firmware and applications.The relevant security company contacted Ledger's bug bounty program only after the fixes were completed, did not follow responsible disclosure processes, and did not communicate with the bug bounty team, yet implied in subsequent content that the issue had not been resolved. This approach is not true security research but rather a way to create panic for attention. AI is changing the cybersecurity landscape, and both attackers and defenders can enhance efficiency with AI, but AI-driven security research can only truly enhance the security of the entire ecosystem when basic security principles such as responsible disclosure and pre-release verification are followed.Guillemet finally reminded Ledger users to keep their device firmware, Ledger applications, and related software up to date to automatically receive the latest security fixes and research results. Users should not be influenced by the related "FUD" and should timely update their software and maintain safe habits.