u/Syncplify

Feels like every week there's a new AI tool employees are quietly using, and most security stacks weren't built for this. People pasting sensitive data into random chatbots. AI agents touching files and APIs with way less oversight than a human would get. DLP tools that can't tell "legit AI use" from "IP walking out the door."

Curious how people here are actually dealing with this? What's working for you vs. what's just theater at this point?

Around 900 people took that deal through a service called Poison Claude, advertised on cybercriminal forums. Pay with cryptocurrency, get a cheap API key, point your tools at their servers instead of Anthropic's. Every prompt you type, every document you share, every password or piece of code you paste in goes through their hands first.

The business model is fraud- hundreds of fake AWS accounts, each collecting Amazon's $200 new user credit, cycling through them as the credits run out. They don't even hide it. Their website openly explains the whole setup.

Poison Claude isn't alone either, Ecomagent pulls the same trick on Google Cloud, exploiting a program that hands AI startups up to $35.000 in credits.

Okta researchers who looked into Poison Claude found an exposed API endpoint leaking customer information. So not only are they handling everything you type, they can't even keep their own systems locked down.

Who knows what they do with the rest of it.

Most ransomware gangs encrypt your data and threaten to leak it if you don't pay. Anubis has an optional "wipe mode" that permanently erases file contents entirely, leaving them at zero bytes with no recovery possible. It's essentially a way to tell victims that the clock isn't just ticking on a leak - it's ticking on whether their data exists at all.

The group has been around since late 2024, rebranded from an earlier operation called Sphinx, and has already claimed around 90 victims across the US, UK, Australia, France, and Canada. Healthcare has been hit particularly hard, one Mississippi hospital system had 293GB stolen including surgical images and over 1,2 million files covering more than 100k patients. It was their second ransomware attack in two years.

And right now they're actively exploiting CitrixBleed 2, a vulnerability that exposes session tokens and lets attackers bypass MFA entirely, meaning multi-factor authentication, the thing everyone tells you to enable, isn't enough on its own if your Citrix appliances aren't patched.

Most ransomware is recoverable if you prepared properly. Wipe mode changes that calculation completely. Ransomware where you can restore from backups is a bad day. Ransomware that can make backups irrelevant if you don't have offline copies is a different problem entirely.

There's a bug in Android 16 that lets anyone with physical access to your locked phone use Gemini to send SMS and WhatsApp messages without ever entering a PIN, and Google has apparently patched similar issues before, researchers just keep finding new ways through.

The exploit involves a specific multi-touch gesture, and someone who knows what they're doing can not only send messages from your locked phone but also quietly connect additional apps to Gemini in the process. If you check your settings afterward, WhatsApp will just be connected with no trace of how it got there.

Google says a fix is coming this week, but this same conversation has been going on since September 2025. Every new thing Gemini can do from the lock screen is also a new thing someone else can do from your lock screen.

In the meantime, go into Gemini app settings and turn off "Use Gemini without unlocking" - probably the right call until this gets properly sorted.

The more useful an AI assistant becomes without requiring authentication, the harder it becomes to guarantee that only you are using it. At some point that tradeoff needs to be part of the conversation when these features get designed, not just when researchers find the holes.

Does this change how you think about AI assistants having lock screen access at all?

Source.

Silent Ransom Group doesn't deploy ransomware, doesn't use zero-days, and doesn't need to phish your credentials. Their whole operation runs on confidence tricks and a plausible story.

It opens with the most boring email imaginable, just an invoice with no links and no attachments, doing nothing except leaving someone wondering if something is wrong. Then a phone call follows from someone claiming to be your IT helpdesk, using real names pulled from your company website or LinkedIn, who talks the victim into a screen-sharing session and installs a legitimate remote-access tool. From there they quietly drain whatever they can find across SharePoint, OneDrive, and corporate email. One investigated case ended with 16GB stolen.

They target law firms especially, given that client files, merger plans, and regulatory filings are basically a goldmine for extortionists.

And then it gets weird. When the phone approach fails, the FBI has warned they've started sending someone to physically show up at the office posing as an IT technician, plug in a USB stick, and walk out.

The whole attack runs on nothing but a convincing story and a USB stick, and before the fake technician has even made it back to their car, the extortion email is already in your inbox. At what point does security training cover "what to do when someone walks into your office with a USB stick"?

Source.

The FBI is warning about Kali365, a phishing-as-a-service operation that's been quietly bypassing MFA since April 2026 and what makes it particularly nasty is that there's no fake website to spot, no misspelt domain, nothing that looks remotely suspicious.

Available on Telegram for as little as $250 a month, it gives complete non-technical fraudsters everything they need to run sophisticated campaigns by abusing a legitimate Microsoft feature called device code flow , the same thing you use when you type a short code into your phone to log into Netflix on your TV.

The attack itself is almost elegant in how simple it is: you get an email that looks like it's from a trusted cloud service, you visit a real Microsoft page, enter a code, and without realising it you've just handed an attacker an OAuth token giving them full access to your Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive - no password needed, no MFA prompt, because as far as Microsoft is concerned you already authenticated.

Hundreds of attacks were documented in April alone across North America and Europe, and every single victim had MFA enabled.

The FBI's main fix is to block device code flow through a conditional access policy in Microsoft Entra ID, and roll out hardware security keys where possible - because regular MFA does absolutely nothing here.

Has your company even heard of device code flow attacks, let alone started blocking them?

Americans lost $5.8 billion to crypto investment scams last year alone, and a raid in Sri Lanka this month shows exactly how these operations keep finding new places to hide.

37 Chinese nationals were arrested in Colombo carrying 147 phones and 100 SIM cards between them, all technically in the country as tourists, which is a lot of holiday reading material. It's the third bust in Sri Lanka in as many months, because as Thailand and Cambodia crack down harder, the gangs just pack up and relocate somewhere with looser visa rules and halfway decent internet.

The FBI's Internet Crime Report puts the damage at $5,8 billion across 41,000 complaints in 2024, and that's just the people who actually came forward - the real number is almost certainly much higher.

What makes the whole thing genuinely dark though is that many of the people doing the actual scamming are themselves victims, lured abroad with fake job offers, passports taken away, forced to hit daily targets under threat of violence, with the UN estimating around 220,000 people currently trapped in compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar alone.

Do you think there's any realistic way to actually stop this?

Source.

A new report from Cifas found that 13% of surveyed workers have either sold their company login details in the past year or personally know someone who has, which is already a pretty uncomfortable number, but it's not disgruntled junior employees feeling underpaid and overlooked doing it, it's the people at the top.

32% of senior managers, 36% of directors, 43% of C-suite executives, and a genuinely baffling 81% of business owners consider selling company credentials to be "justifiable," usually under the assumption that it's harmless one-time access - as if handing someone a working set of login details doesn't give them the exact same trusted access as any legitimate employee on the network.

And the timing couldn't be worse, because with economic pressure mounting, AI threatening jobs, and redundancies becoming more common, the temptation to make a quick payout by selling access to your employer's systems is only going to grow and most companies aren't built to catch it, especially when the person doing it is the one who's supposed to be setting the security culture in the first place.

Multi-factor authentication helps, but it's a bit of a band-aid when the person handing over the credentials is the CEO. At what point does this become something companies actually train for, or is "don't sell your login details" still somehow assumed to be common sense?

40% of ransomware attacks now come with physical threats to employees, and in the US that number jumps to 46%.

We're way past "pay up or we leak your data" at this point. A hospital got phone calls where strangers read nurses their home addresses down the line, and a security researcher had a threatening note left on his doorstep while he was actively helping a US government agency deal with an attack.

The playbook is simple and honestly kind of genius in a terrifying way, hackers stay hidden overseas and just hire local, post on a forum, offer some cash, and let someone else do the knocking. The FBI flagged a whole network for this last summer that's been tied to arson, kidnappings, even shootings.

What nobody seems to be talking about though is what this actually means for companies, because your HR database full of employee home addresses is no longer just a privacy liability - it's a physical safety problem, and I'd bet almost no incident response plan in existence covers the moment a staff member picks up the phone and a stranger calmly reads their address back to them.

If you work in security or IT, has this actually come up in any planning conversations at your company, or is everyone still treating this like a purely digital problem?