Kaspersky Threat Research has uncovered attacks on educational organizations in Latin America and Africa in which attackers used artificial intelligence to help direct activity inside compromised networks. Researchers traced reconnaissance, credential theft, movement between computers and data collection, including activity that compromised highly privileged administrator accounts.
The attackers used CyberStrikeAI, an open-source penetration-testing framework that combines a command-and-control system with a large language model. In this architecture, a human operator sets objectives, while the model can select tools, generate commands and analyze execution results. An implant installed on the compromised machine executes those commands and returns the results to the attackers’ server. Kaspersky observed the attacks between September and October 2026.
Read more…
Source: Kaspersky
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- Cyberattackers are now quietly selling off their victim’s internet bandwidth
August 31, 2021
Cyberattackers are now targeting their victim’s internet connection to quietly generate illicit revenue following a malware infection. On Tuesday, researchers from Cisco Talos said “proxyware” is becoming noticed in the cybercrime ecosystem and, as a result, is being twisted for illegal purposes. Proxyware, also known as internet-sharing applications, are legitimate services that allow users to portion out ...
- LockFile Ransomware Uses Never-Before Seen Encryption to Avoid Detection
August 31, 2021
Researchers discovered a novel ransomware emerging on the heels of the ProxyShell vulnerabilities discovery in Microsoft Exchange servers. The threat, dubbed LockFile, uses a unique “intermittent encryption” method as a way to evade detection as well as adopting tactics from previous ransomware gangs. Discovered by researchers at Sophos, LockFile ransomware encrypts every 16 bytes of a ...
- Cybercriminal sells tool to hide malware in AMD, NVIDIA GPUs
August 31, 2021
Cybercriminals are making strides towards attacks with malware that can execute code from the graphics processing unit (GPU) of a compromised system. While the method is not new and demo code has been published before, projects so far came from the academic world or were incomplete and unrefined. Earlier this month, the proof-of-concept (PoC) was sold on ...
- DNS Rebinding Attack: How Malicious Websites Exploit Private Networks
August 31, 2021
Web-based consoles are widely adopted by management software and smart devices to provide interactive data visualization and user-friendly configuration. This is gaining momentum as enterprises’ computer systems become more complex and more modern internet of things (IoT) devices are used at home. These web applications are usually located in internal environments or private networks protected ...
- HPE Warns Sudo Bug Gives Attackers Root Privileges to Aruba Platform
August 30, 2021
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is warning a vulnerability in Sudo, an open-source program used within its Aruba AirWave management platform, could allow any unprivileged and unauthenticated local user to gain root privileges on a vulnerable host. Rated high in severity, HPE warns the Sudo flaw could be part of a “chained attack” where an “attacker has ...
- QNAP works on patches for OpenSSL bugs impacting its NAS devices
August 30, 2021
Network-attached storage (NAS) maker QNAP is investigating and working on security updates to address remote code execution (RCE) and denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerabilities patched by OpenSSL last week. The security flaws tracked as CVE-2021-3711 and CVE-2021-3712, impact QNAP NAS device running QTS, QuTS hero, QuTScloud, and HBS 3 Hybrid Backup Sync (a backup and disaster recovery app), ...