This Week in Cybersecurity #29
Agentic AI goes operational, ERP ripples widen, edges burn, and policy turns up the heat
Good morning Security Gang,
I’m rolling into the weekend with a double espresso and the same message I gave all week: the threat surface didn’t get bigger—our dependencies did. We saw autonomous, agent-driven espionage move from theory to practice, ERP zero-days cascade across industries, and edge gear become the soft underbelly (again). If you were heads-down shipping projects, here’s your clean, category-by-category catch-up so you can start Monday calibrated—not panicked.
Nation-State & Geopolitics
China-linked agentic AI espionage. Anthropic detailed GTG-1002 running near-autonomous, multi-agent intrusions (recon → exploit → exfil) at machine speed. The headline isn’t “AI wrote malware”; it’s orchestration. Treat AI egress and tokens like crown-jewel assets and practice detecting automated, high-volume behaviors.
Iran: cyber that cues kinetic. Amazon’s report tied IRGC operators to hacked AIS/CCTV on ships later hit by Houthi missiles—one of the clearest cyber-to-physical links we’ve seen. If you touch maritime or energy OT, assume telemetry can target you.
China through the edge. Long-run campaigns are hijacking SOHO routers and stale edge devices as covert relays, DNS hijack points, and firmware-level persistence. Your weakest “remote office” router may be someone else’s stealth C2.
Denmark & hacktivism. Pro-Russian DDoS knocked ministry sites offline—no data loss, but it’s timed narrative warfare. Expect more nuisance-grade disruption around political flashpoints.
Arrests & pressure. A Russian suspect tied to GRU-style ops was picked up in Thailand; five Americans pled guilty to helping DPRK “ghost workers” infiltrate U.S. companies. Law-enforcement reach is widening—so are adversaries’ workarounds.
Enterprise Breaches & Supply Chain
Oracle E-Business Suite fallout. Clop’s EBS zero-day spree (CVE-2025-61882/61884) snared names from media to manufacturing (Logitech, Washington Post, GlobalLogic). ERP = finance/HR/procurement nerve center; patch, rotate keys, and hunt for rogue export jobs.
JLR’s $220M lesson. Ransomware that stalled lines and parts ordering shaved ~$220M and 5.1% EBITDA—proof that over-centralized outsourcing and slow incident decision loops turn security debt into P&L pain.
Legacy cloud sprawl. Checkout.com caught an old third-party bucket alive and leaking; instead of paying, they donated the “ransom” equivalent. Audit orphaned storage and automate decommissioning—yesterday.
Consumer data, enterprise risk. DoorDash customer PII and Princeton donor records aren’t “just consumer hits”—they’re fuel for refund fraud, VIP phishing, and account-recovery abuse across your business apps.
Tickets are treasure maps. Eurofiber France’s support system exposure likely included configs, certs, and VPN snippets. If it was ever in a ticket, rotate it.
Edge, OT & Critical Infra
FortiWeb under active fire. Auth bypass/command injection on internet-facing WAFs let attackers mint admins, alter rules, and pivot inward. Patch, kill sessions, and put management behind an IP allowlist.
Cisco ASA/FTD chained bugs → DoS. Acrane Door is weaponizing ASA/FTD zero-days to reboot devices and disrupt networks. Retire EoL ASAs and lock down the admin plane.
Routers as footholds. “Wrthug” hijacks outdated ASUS units via defaults/unpatched firmware for DDoS, proxies, and creds. Minimum hardware standards and patch verification belong in your TPRM.
7-Zip path traversal RCE (exploited). One booby-trapped archive on an admin/dev box is a lateral-movement starter kit. Update and block execution from temp extract paths.
NAS & ICS fix sprint. QNAP shipped seven zero-day fixes; Siemens/Rockwell/Schneider/AVEVA issued broad ICS advisories. Remove internet exposure and treat engineering workstations as Tier-0 assets.
Cloud, AI & Developer Ecosystem
NPM worm floods 150k+ packages. Registry pollution poisons dependency search. Pin versions, use private mirrors, and enforce SCA gates in CI.
Malicious VS Code extensions (GlassWorm). Unicode-obfuscated implants and Solana-based C2 hit dev workstations and build systems. Allowlist publishers, rotate dev tokens, scan secrets.
“ShadowRay” on AI clusters. Exposed Ray dashboards are being hijacked for crypto mining and data tapping. Require auth, close ports, and alarm on GPU/CPU spikes and rogue jobs.
Leaky AI repos. Wiz found keys/datasets/model endpoints in public GitHub from marquee AI firms. Turn on secret scanning and rotate anything exposed—assume model IP is a theft target.
Browser 0-days keep coming. Chrome’s V8 type-confusion fix was live-exploited; push updates via MDM and keep Site Isolation on.
DDoS, Outages & Resilience
Azure’s 15.7 Tbps moment. The Aisuru/Turbo-Mirai wave showed that your provider’s scrubbing isn’t your failover plan. Lower DNS TTLs, warm a secondary region, and pre-approve traffic profiles.
Cloudflare’s “not cyber” face-plant. Purely operational outages still nuke your auth and SLAs. Build graceful-degradation modes and route status-page signals into incident comms.
Crime, Takedowns & Money
Operation Endgame. Seizures of RAT/stealer infra and arrests across Europe disrupted access to 100k+ compromised wallets. Ecosystems reconstitute, but costs are rising.
Sanctioning the plumbing. U.S./UK/Australia hit Russian bulletproof hosts that launder ransomware traffic and cash. It won’t stop them inside Russia—but it breaks international partnerships.
$230M laundering plea. A U.S. twenty-something pled guilty to washing nine-figure crypto stolen via social engineering; recruitment pipelines run through gaming and socials. Watch insider and social risk, not just tech.
Policy, Regulation & Market Moves
CMMC enforcement is real. No 800-171/-172 alignment, no defense work. Keep SSP/POA&M current and flow requirements to subs.
UK drags MSPs into “critical.” NIS2-style oversight for MSP/MSSP means mandatory standards/reporting—and pass-through costs. Security posture should improve; budgets will feel it.
Info-sharing extended; SEC hardening. The U.S. kept liability shields for public-private intel flowing and floated a bill to harden the SEC’s own cyber program. Regulators are expected to meet the bar they set.
OpenAI preservation order. A court told OpenAI to retain logs tied to the NYT suit—privacy and data-classification ripple effects for AI platforms and enterprises that consume them.
Quick Actions (do first)
Patch & lock edge: FortiWeb/Cisco ASA-FTD/QNAP; put admin planes behind allowlists, kill sessions, and monitor for rogue admins/config drift.
ERP triage: Patch Oracle EBS CVEs 61882/61884; rotate keys; hunt for unusual exports and third-party API pulls.
Dev/AI hygiene: Pin deps, use private mirrors, secret-scan repos, auth Ray dashboards, and alarm on GPU/CPU anomalies.
Identity hardening: Move VIPs to FIDO2; tighten account recovery; monitor OAuth grants/exports on policy and finance teams.
Resilience: Lower DNS TTLs, pre-plan multi-region failover, and build graceful-degradation for auth/CDN outages.
James Azar’s CISO Take
This week made one thing painfully clear: speed has changed sides. Agentic orchestration turned multi-stage intrusions into a concurrent workflow, and edge compromises moved faster than most change boards. If you’re still betting on quarterly patch cycles and manual hunts, you’re playing last year’s game. “Orchestration—not bespoke malware—is the superpower now.” Instrument for automation patterns, not just signatures, and treat AI egress, ERP exports, and admin planes like the blast-radius levers they are.
Second, the economics are shifting. ERP zero-days and OT hits aren’t “security incidents”; they’re EBITDA events. Sanctions and takedowns are adding friction, but your risk moves with your vendors, your dev pipelines, and your edge. Tighten the contracts, shorten the tokens, and shorten the recovery. As I keep saying, “Resilience isn’t built in the cloud or on-prem; it’s built in preparation.” Patch fast, rehearse faster, and design for failure on purpose.
Coffee cup cheers—and as always, stay cyber safe. ☕👊
Don’t miss Saturday morning
I’m publishing a fresh Saturday Reader article part of our 3 part series on how Subscription model broke the CISO’s budget.