From August–September 2026, Chinese-speaking attackers used an open-source AI penetration testing framework called Cairn to autonomously conduct 25 operations against at least 19 organizations. The attackers weaponized Cairn by pairing it with Chinese AI models Zhipu GLM and DeepSeek.
The attackers supplied a target and a goal, then Cairn planned, executed and recorded results on its own. These attacks achieved unauthorized access or data retrieval at 10 of the targeted organizations, including:
- Accessing dozens of valid credentials
- Mass exposing personal data (exceeding one million records at one organization)
- Retrieving military and government identities
- Creating persistent administrator accounts in a production system
- Modifying a live industry standards-ballot document
Read more…
Source: Palo Alto Unit 42
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- Network Anomaly Detection in KATA
July 31, 2026
Once the attacker has breached the corporate network, subsequent stages of the attack often involve leveraging standard domain infrastructure protocols: using Kerberos, running DNS queries, accessing internal services, opening network shares, and other common networking actions. Because this activity is virtually indistinguishable from legitimate network traffic, it is extremely difficult to detect it with traditional ...
- Toy Ghouls’ new toy: the GenieLocker ransomware
July 30, 2026
The new GenieLocker ransomware family has been active since March 2026. It has been used in attacks against organizations in the Russian Federation, primarily in the manufacturing sector, and attributed to the Toy Ghouls group by open-source intelligence (link in Russian). The Toy Ghouls, also known as Bearlyfy, Labubu and Laboo.boo, is a financially motivated extortion group, which ...
- Durov’s bank accounts frozen after terrorist tag applied
July 30, 2026
Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov will not be able to access his bank accounts in Russia after placement on the list of terrorists by financial watchdog Rosfinmonitoring earlier on Thursday, lawyer Dmitry Agranovsky told TASS. Since 2022, Russia has recorded 153,000 crimes committed using Telegram, including the organization of a terrorist attack at the Crocus City Hall, ...
- OpenAI explains how its AI agent breached Hugging Face
July 29, 2026
On July 28, OpenAI published an update on the agent that escaped its sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face during an internal cybersecurity evaluation. In the update, OpenAI reiterates that the “rogue” system was a more capable, pre‑release research model, not something intended for public deployment, and that it has now been deactivated and locked down for restricted research ...
- Check Point SmartConsole Authentication Bypass Technical Analysis (CVE-2026-16232)
July 29, 2026
On July 22, 2026, Check Point published a security advisory for CVE-2026-16232, an authentication bypass in the SmartConsole login process affecting Security Management Server and Multi-Domain Security Management Server (MDS). By leveraging CVE-2026-16232, an unauthenticated attacker can obtain an application login token, use this token to log in through SmartConsole with full administrator privileges, and modify the security policy ...
- Iran-linked CyberAv3ngers suspected in attacks on Minnesota water systems
July 29, 2026
Security researchers at Tenable suspect the Iran-linked faux hacktivist outfit CyberAv3ngers was behind the cyberattack that disrupted more than 30 Minnesota water facilities. Neither state-level nor federal officials have made any claims regarding attribution for the attacks, however, Tenable reckons the operational pattern is consistent with the crew’s previous raids, noting the timing relative to recent government warnings. The ...