The Gentlemen Ransomware Claims 478 Victims, Can Spread Like a Worm

A new analysis of The Gentlemen operation has revealed that the financially motivated threat group initially operated as an affiliate responsible for conducting double extortion attacks, while leveraging resources from various ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) schemes like LockBit (aka Tenacious Mantis), Qilin (aka Pestilent Mantis), and Medusa (aka Venomous Mantis).

According to a detailed report published by PRODAFT, the group, which it tracks as Phantom Mantis, is led by a Russian-speaking cybercriminal tracked as LARVA-368, who goes by the monikers hastalamuerte, ArmCorp, zeta88, nobody0, and santamuerte. The Gentlemen is known to be active since March 2025, claiming a total of 478 victims to date, per data from Ransomware.Live.

"In July 2025, Phantom Mantis transitioned into The Gentlemen, an independent partnership program no longer dependent on other RaaS groups," the Swiss cybersecurity company said. "Additionally, LARVA-368 relies heavily on artificial intelligence for the development and maintenance of ransomware and tools, as well as for assistance with post-exploitation procedures."

As for LARVA-368, the threat actor is assessed to have been a member of the Embargo (aka Primeval Mantis) ransomware group before launching their own operation under the name ArmCorp. It was subsequently rebranded to The Gentlemen four months later.

The individual's identity has since been outed by cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs as a 36-year-old Alexander Andreevich Yapaev (Япаев Алексанр Андреевич) from the Russian city of Izhevsk. PRODAFT told The Hacker News that its findings match the same persona with "high confidence."

As detailed by Dark Atlas in August 2025, the shift coincided with a payment dispute between LARVA-368 and Qilin, with the threat actor accusing the RaaS operation of carrying out an exit scam and defrauding them of $48,000.

"Although Phantom Mantis was a very active affiliate group with over 20 targets registered on its affiliate panel in less than 30 days, the group's admin (LARVA-368) and LARVA-367 (aka DevMan), a former Phantom Mantis's member, claimed that Pestilent Mantis was scamming affiliates and that there was an alleged 'backdoor' within the Pestilent Mantis's affiliate panel victim chats," PRODAFT noted.

"Although we could not confirm these claims, there is a chance that LARVA-368 and LARVA-367 intentionally spread disinformation with the intent of recruiting Pestilent Mantis affiliates to Phantom Mantis by discrediting the group."

Phantom Mantis has also been observed paying for Premium accounts on underground forums to boost their visibility and fend off competition, with the group's communication and the technical support handled by a separate Russian-speaking persona named The Gentlemen Data.

Some of the other salient aspects of the extortion scheme compiled from various reports are as follows -

• In an analysis of the ransomware in late last year, LevelBlue's Cybereason team described The Gentlemen as a "highly adaptive, fast-moving ransomware operation" that combines mature ransomware techniques with RaaS features, double extortion, cross-platform lockers, and flexible propagation, and affiliate support.
• The group has emerged as one of the most active threat actors, accounting for 10% of ransomware activity in April 2026. "The Gentlemen follows an enterprise-focused chain beginning with initial access, via vulnerable internet-facing services or stolen credentials," NCC Group said. "Analysis suggests The Gentlemen can adapt and change tactics during an attack, such as manipulating GPOs, compromising privileged accounts, and using custom methods to bypass endpoint protections."
• Only about 13% of their victims are based in the U.S. The majority of the victims are concentrated in Thailand, the U.K., Brazil, Germany, and India.
• LARVA-368 uses The Gentlemen IM app accounts to support affiliates regarding encryption and any intrusion-related issue, such as providing EDR killers to bypass security solutions via the bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) technique.
• Support services for both The Gentlemen and The Gentlemen Data are available via Tox, SimpleX Chat, and Ricochet Refresh open-source messaging platforms.
• Potential affiliates are required to provide the administrator at least 1GB of data exfiltrated from a victim to gain access to the affiliate panel, a tactic designed to prevent researchers and law enforcement authorities from gaining access to the infrastructure under the guise of an affiliate. The affiliate panel supports user management, configuring new targets, and downloading ransomware to a specific target.
• Phantom Mantis provides five versions of ransomware that are designed for Windows, Linux, ESXi, Windows XP+, and Logical Volume Manager (LVM).
• The group courts affiliates with an aggressive profit-sharing model: 90% for affiliates and 10% for the operator.
• Initial access is obtained via edge devices such as VPN appliances, firewalls, and other internet-facing systems, with a specific focus on platforms like Cisco and Fortinet FortiGate.
• Infection chains involve the use of red team utilities like NetExec, RelayKing, TaskHound, PrivHound, and CertiHound to perform Active Directory discovery, certificate abuse, privilege escalation, and file share discovery. A separate set of tools, such as EDRStartupHinder, gfreeze, glinker, and DumpBrowserSecrets, are used for evading security programs, while Velociraptor is employed for command-and-control (C2).
• The attacks also attempt to clear System, Application, and Security Windows Event Logs, disable Microsoft Defender, and add antivirus exclusions.
• The ransomware makes use of a hybrid cryptographic scheme: X25519 key exchange combined with XChaCha20 symmetric encryption.
• Microsoft, which is tracking the cluster under the moniker Storm-2697, said the ransomware is written in Go and obfuscated with Garble to target the Windows environment. "When enabled with the --spread argument, it turns the malware from a single-host encryptor into a self-propagating worm that attempts to deploy its encryptor to every reachable system on the network," the tech giant said. "If the --wipe argument is provided, The Gentlemen ransomware performs an additional post-encryption routine to eliminate recoverable artifacts from disk."
• According to ZeroFox, the ransomware crew likely runs a multi-channel extortion operation, combining ransomware attacks with email outreach and phone-based pressure tactics targeting victims.
• The group implements a "highly responsive development cycle," an aspect exemplified by the release of a same-day patch after a decryptor was released in April 2026.
• The average dwell time of an intrusion ranges from two to six weeks from initial access to encryption, with the group particularly focusing on organizations running VMware infrastructure.

Last month, a leak of an internal Rocket.Chat database used by the group - comprising 3,366 messages between November 2025 to late April 2026 - has shed further light on the group's inner workings, including its use of known security flaws in VMware Aria Operations, Fortinet, Cisco, and Microsoft software, while painting a picture of a criminal enterprise whose members have a clear division of roles and responsibilities.

"The group actively tracks and evaluates modern vulnerabilities, including CVE-2024-55591, CVE-2025-32433, and CVE-2025-33073, and combines them with technique-driven paths like backup and management-controller abuse and NTLM relay workflows, giving them a flexible exploitation pipeline," Check Point said.

That's not all. In March 2026, Hunt.io said it discovered an open directory hosted at "176.120.22[.]127:80" on the Russian bulletproof hosting provider Proton66 that exposed 126 files containing a complete ransomware operator toolkit attributed to a The Gentlemen RaaS affiliate.

This included tools for reconnaissance, privilege escalation, defense evasion, credential theft, lateral movement, persistence, and pre-encryption preparation, essentially spanning all phases of the intrusion lifecycle.

"LARVA-368 is a threat actor specializing in extortion-related activities and has been active since at least 2020," PRODAFT said. "The expertise acquired through previous collaborations with various RaaS groups provided the technical foundation necessary to establish The Gentlemen RaaS."

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Enterprise Data Storage Solutions: Architectures, Features, and Trends

Enterprise storage requirements roughly double every few years. Organizations absorb new workloads faster than storage budgets grow. The storage layer is where availability and performance intersect – and where recovery either works or doesn’t. If your design doesn’t match the workload, the consequences show up fast: slow applications, missed backup windows, or ransomware recovery that drags on for weeks.

What is enterprise data storage?

Enterprise data storage is hardware and software built to store, manage, protect, and provide access to large volumes of business-critical data. Consumer storage optimizes for price and simplicity. Enterprise systems add redundant hardware paths, hot-swap components, consistent performance under concurrent load, and the management APIs that production environments depend on. A desktop NAS might hold the same terabytes as an enterprise filer, but a single controller failure on the desktop model takes everything down with it. We’ve seen it happen.

The main architectures fit different access patterns. I’ll explain why the choice matters in a moment.

Why enterprise storage matters

Ransomware has made storage architecture a security decision. Modern attacks target both primary storage and backup repositories. If you think air-gapped backups are overkill, wait until you need them. That assumption is expensive.

Regulatory compliance adds retention and access requirements that mid-market storage can’t meet reliably. Hospitals retain imaging data for years under HIPAA (which carries specific access and audit rules). Financial institutions produce trade records on demand under SOX. Manufacturers keep quality data for product liability periods. Each needs audit-capable storage that can demonstrate chain of custody.

Uptime requirements have tightened too. Applications that carried loose SLAs a decade ago now run payment systems and patient care workflows. Five nines availability is roughly 5.26 minutes of downtime per year. Achieving that typically requires redundant controllers, automatic failover, and often synchronous replication to a secondary site. It isn’t cheap, and it isn’t simple.

Block, file, and object: the access models

Most environments use all three, but that doesn’t mean you should treat them the same.

Block storage presents raw volumes to the operating system, which formats them as local disks. Databases write directly to blocks, and operating systems boot from block volumes. VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Oracle, and SQL Server rely on block storage because it gives the lowest latency and lets applications control the I/O path directly.

File storage organizes data into a directory hierarchy accessed over NFS or SMB. Multiple users and services can read and write the same files simultaneously. Shared workspaces and home directories are typical file storage use cases.

Object storage treats data as discrete objects with metadata and a unique identifier, accessed via HTTP-based APIs like S3. Because there is no directory structure to maintain, object storage scales far beyond the practical limits of conventional file systems. The tradeoff is latency. This kind of storage isn’t designed for random block I/O and is generally unsuitable as primary storage for databases. It fits data lakes, backup repositories, and compliance archives that otherwise would’ve gone to tape. For a detailed comparison, see block vs object storage on the StarWind blog.

Six architectures that show up in production

Here’s where theory meets the hardware you’ll actually buy. We’ve worked with environments that ran four of these six types simultaneously, usually because different teams bought different things and nobody wanted to rip anything out. That mess is more common than vendors admit, and it’s why the “one platform” pitch never quite lands.

 

Figure 1: Enterprise storage types and architectures

 

DAS (direct-attached storage)

DAS connects drives directly to a single server with no network layer in between. It gives the fastest access for single-node workloads. The limitation is that DAS can’t be accessed by other servers without copying data. It’s most useful when raw local performance matters more than centralized access.

SAN (storage area network)

SANs present block-level volumes to servers over a dedicated high-speed network. The OS treats these volumes as local disks. Virtualization clusters and high-performance databases run on SAN infrastructure because it provides consistent low-latency block I/O.

That I/O can be shared across multiple hosts without the overhead of a file system layer or the contention that starts when NFS locks fight your database checkpoint threads. Pure Storage FlashArray, Dell PowerStore, and HPE Alletra are the dedicated-appliance segment of the market – as opposed to the software-defined or white-box options.

NAS (network-attached storage)

NAS delivers file-level storage over Ethernet using NFS or SMB. It suits shared file environments, including home directories, collaborative workspaces, video production storage, and backup landing zones.

NetApp ONTAP and Dell PowerScale are widely used enterprise platforms. Mid-range NAS solutions typically include deduplication, compression, snapshots, and thin provisioning. Many enterprise NAS platforms also expose storage over iSCSI. That makes them dual-protocol devices that can handle both file and block workloads from the same hardware. If you’re supporting a small or midsize office, NAS is often all the shared storage infrastructure you need.

Object storage

Object storage manages unstructured data at scale through S3-compatible APIs. DataCore Swarm, for example, provides an on-premises S3-compatible platform with support for S3 Object Lock, which allows organizations to deploy immutable backup targets and compliance archives without sending data to public cloud.

At scale, object storage generally offers a lower cost per terabyte than block or file storage, while its flat namespace can grow well beyond the limits of traditional file systems. The tradeoff is latency.

SDS (software-defined storage)

SDS separates the storage control plane from physical hardware. (This is the same abstraction idea that made VMware popular in compute, but storage admins are often more skeptical of it.) The software layer manages storage services across commodity servers or existing arrays.

It presents a unified interface regardless of the hardware underneath. DataCore SANsymphony runs on standard servers and provides auto-tiering, caching, mirroring, and high availability across heterogeneous storage platforms, including Dell, HPE Alletra, Pure Storage, and NetApp ONTAP. This makes it possible to consolidate SAN services without replacing existing equipment. VMware vSAN and Red Hat Ceph cover similar ground for larger clusters with different trade-offs in management complexity and hardware requirements.

HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure)

HCI puts compute and storage on the same physical nodes, manages networking there too, and treats the whole stack as one system. It reduces hardware footprint and simplifies deployment for remote offices and edge locations where maintaining separate storage hardware isn’t practical. Nutanix AOS and StarWind HCI Appliance are both widely deployed in this segment.

StarWind HCI Appliance is designed for compact two-node or small-cluster configurations where storage and compute share the same hardware, high availability remains local, and there is no dependency on a dedicated storage network.

You can use the table below as a starting point to match your workload requirements with the storage architecture.

 

Storage type	Best for	Scalability	Performance
DAS	Single-server workloads	Low	High
SAN	Virtualization and databases	Medium	High
NAS	File sharing and collaboration	Medium	Medium
Object storage	Backups, archives, AI datasets	Very high	Low
SDS	Hybrid environments, virtualization	High	High
HCI	ROBO and edge deployments	Medium	High

 

How to choose without buying the wrong thing

No single architecture fits every workload. Start with what you actually need.

A virtualization cluster serving dozens of VMs has completely different requirements than a backup repository, a surveillance archive, or a data lake holding training data for a model that only runs on Tuesdays. Block workloads need consistent low-latency I/O. Sequential bulk workloads such as AI training and video ingest require throughput. Archival workloads need low cost per terabyte at scale. Since no single platform optimizes all three equally well, tiered architectures remain common.

Storage deployed at 70% capacity at launch often reaches 90% within 18 months as backup sets grow and new workloads arrive. Prioritize platforms that can scale by adding nodes or shelves without requiring disruptive data migration. In many cases, the labor cost of a forced migration exceeds the initial price difference between platforms that don’t offer graceful scale-out.

Performance planning is commonly underestimated. Teams benchmark storage under synthetic load and miss what happens when production workloads run in parallel. Checkpoint writes and backup operations running alongside peak database traffic can expose limitations that benchmarks never reveal. I’ve sat through vendor presentations where the benchmark numbers looked incredible, but the array fell over when we added backup traffic during a synthetic OLTP test. Ask for a mixed-workload demo. If they won’t do it, that tells you something.

Data protection requirements should define which features are non-negotiable before evaluation begins. The backup and DR architecture should be designed alongside the primary storage selection. Vendor support and ecosystem fit, including clean integration with your existing VMware, Hyper-V, or backup software, reduce implementation friction and day-to-day operational overhead. I’ve bought the wrong array before because the benchmark looked pretty and I didn’t ask about mixed workloads. Never again.

Backup storage and cyber resilience

Backup storage is a discipline of its own. You can’t afford to treat it as an afterthought.

The 3-2-1-1 strategy is the working baseline: three copies of data, on two different media types, one offsite, and one immutable or air-gapped. Immutability is the addition that ransomware recovery patterns made necessary. When attackers compromise primary storage and then locate and encrypt backup repositories, immutable backups with write-once semantics are often the only reliable recovery path left.

S3 Object Lock prevents overwriting or deleting objects for a defined retention period, regardless of credential compromise. DataCore Swarm supports Object Lock, so it works well as an immutable backup target if you’re running Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik, or comparable enterprise backup platforms. If you’re designing a cyber-resilient backup architecture, combining Object Lock, separate credentials, isolated backup access paths, and network segmentation can significantly reduce the impact of a storage-layer attack.

Restore testing is where backup strategies most often fail. Organizations that have never completed a full-scale restore at production data volumes usually discover weaknesses during an incident rather than during a planned exercise.

Healthcare organizations operating under HIPAA, financial institutions subject to SOX and PCI-DSS, and public sector entities all face specific retention and recovery requirements. The backup platform must support demonstrable compliance.

What is actually changing

NVMe and NVMe-oF are moving into mainstream enterprise deployments, not just hyperscale. It gives significantly lower latency than SATA or SAS SSDs do, and NVMe over Fabrics extends that performance over the network. Shared all-flash storage can now approach the latency of directly attached drives, which isn’t something you could’ve said five years ago.

If you’re running a mid-size enterprise, NVMe-oF is no longer exotic. As AI inference and real-time analytics demand lower and more consistent I/O, it is increasingly common as a shared hot-tier architecture. Both StarWind Virtual SAN and DataCore SANsymphony support NVMe-oF as a transport layer. That makes software-defined deployments viable for environments that previously required dedicated NVMe SAN hardware.

AI and GPU workloads are creating storage demand patterns that traditional NAS and SAN platforms weren’t originally designed to handle. Training large models requires high-throughput parallel reads, burst checkpoint writes, fast KV-cache access, and low-latency metadata operations during inference. Storage teams now design tiered AI storage separately from general-purpose shared storage, with NVMe close to compute, a parallel file system for the active training tier, and S3-compatible object storage for the data lake.

Hybrid and multi-cloud storage is the operational reality for most organizations. Primary data lives on-premises, cold data migrates to cloud tiers, and cloud compute handles overflow training runs. Storage platforms with native cloud tiering reduce the complexity of managing data movement between locations, which is why they’ve become popular.

Immutable storage and cyber resilience have moved from best-practice guidance to standard requirements. Some compliance frameworks now explicitly require demonstrable immutability for backup copies and tested air-gapped recovery environments. At the same time, HCI adoption continues to grow in remote and edge environments as edge computing expands in manufacturing and retail, though it’s still rare in heavy industry.

Mistakes that keep happening

Storage errors repeat across organizations of every size.

The most common error is underestimating scalability requirements. Data growth consistently outpaces what teams projected at procurement time, as new workloads and expanding backup sets pile up faster than budget cycles allow. Log retention periods stretch too, often without anyone updating the capacity model. Capacity shortages rarely emerge during planned upgrade cycles; they usually appear as operational emergencies. You can’t schedule your way out of exponential growth.

Teams often try to add backup immutability after deployment, which usually means they haven’t thought through recovery timelines. Immutable copies and backup network isolation are architectural decisions that need to be made before storage is purchased, not retrofitted after a recovery incident makes the gap obvious.

When you use the same platform for both primary and backup, you remove the separation that makes recovery possible when primary storage is compromised. Backup storage should be architecturally distinct, with separate credentials and a network path that production systems cannot reach. One backup copy is equally problematic. True resilience comes from maintaining multiple copies and regularly validating restore procedures.

Insufficient performance testing before purchase remains a common oversight.

Synthetic benchmarks may look impressive, but checkpoint writes and backup operations running alongside peak database traffic can expose limitations that benchmarks never reveal. If you’re evaluating a storage platform, mixed-workload testing should be part of the decision process. I once watched a team skip mixed-workload testing because the vendor’s datasheet looked convincing. The array lasted a few months before the database team started complaining about latency spikes during backup windows. Don’t make that mistake.

Another frequent mistake is failing to integrate storage monitoring into the broader observability strategy. Latency spikes and capacity growth often go unnoticed until they trigger user-facing issues. Queue depths often climb quietly in the background until someone notices the application timeouts. Storage metrics should feed into the same monitoring platform used for compute and networking infrastructure, or you’ll miss the warning signs.

Conclusion

If you have fewer than a hundred VMs and no dedicated storage admin, start with HCI or a dual-protocol NAS. You’ll get shared storage and replication without building a SAN fabric. Budget for NVMe block storage if you’re running Oracle, SQL Server, or anything that counts latency in milliseconds. And whatever you buy, test your restores before you sign the acceptance paperwork.

FAQ

What is enterprise data storage?

Enterprise data storage consists of hardware and software platforms designed to store, manage, protect, and provide access to large volumes of business-critical data. Unlike consumer-grade storage, enterprise solutions include redundancy, high availability, data protection capabilities, and centralized management tools designed for production environments.

What storage is best for AI workloads?

Active training datasets benefit from high-throughput parallel access, either a parallel file system or local NVMe staging. Data lakes and cold datasets suit S3-compatible object storage, while checkpoint writes need a tier built for burst write performance. Most AI deployments use a tiered architecture matched to each stage of the pipeline.

What is the difference between enterprise and consumer storage?

Enterprise storage includes dual controllers, hot-swap components, end-to-end error correction, consistent performance under concurrent multi-user load, snapshot and replication capabilities, and REST management APIs. Consumer storage lacks most of these features and is not designed for continuous operation under shared production workloads.

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ThreatsDay Bulletin: Worm Code Leaked, AI Agent Phished, Claude Action Patch + 28 New Stories

It's been one of those weeks. You expect the usual noise: recycled malware, sloppy attacks, another easy target getting hit. Instead, there's a supply chain attack kit in a public repo, a $5,000-a-month RAT that clones browsers, and research showing AI agents can be tricked into leaking real credentials.

The bigger problem is how polished this all looks now. Mule networks run like SaaS. Deepfake KYC bypass is sold as a feature. Endpoint tools can be quietly weakened using built-in OS settings, with no exploit needed.

Here's the full list of threats, tools, flaws, and updates worth knowing.

1. 3.3B identity records exposed

   A new analysis from Flashpoint has revealed that "more than 11.1 million devices were infected with infostealers last year, fueling a supply of over 3.3 billion stolen credentials, session cookies, cloud tokens, and other forms of identity data now circulating across illicit markets." There are over 30 unique infostealer strains actively listed for sale across illicit marketplaces, forums, and underground communities, indicating the "scale and accessibility of the modern malware-as-a-service ecosystem." Lumma, Acreed, Rhadamanthys, Vidar, and StealC were the most prolific stealers in 2025. India, Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and the U.S. were the top six countries affected by stealer malware during the same period.

2. MaaS RAT targets credentials

   A threat actor named "o1oo1" has advertised an advanced remote access trojan (RAT) named SilabRAT that's sold under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model for $5,000 a month on darknet forums since September 2025. "SilabRAT is heavily focused on financial gain through credential theft," Group-IB said. "It offers stability and is capable of bypassing existing security measures." Delivered via ClickFix campaigns using Hijack Loader, the malware uses Hidden Virtual Network Computing (HVNC) to facilitate remote control capabilities, employs techniques like Browser Profile Cloning to replicate a user's browser profile (user agent, extensions, storage, and other fingerprinting attributes) to the attacker's system, and can identify wallet addresses or extract cryptocurrency-related artifacts. The Russian-speaking malware developer and vendor, "o1oo1," has been active since late 2020, previously launching a service called AsmCrypt.

3. 47% of tech intrusions

   CrowdStrike has revealed that a North Korean threat actor known as Famous Chollima, which is behind the long-running IT worker and Contagious Interview campaign, accounted for 47% of all state-sponsored hands-on-keyboard operations against the tech sector between April 2025 and March 2026. Hands-on intrusions refer to cyber attacks in which a human operator controls and interacts with a system rather than relying solely on malware. "In their IT worker infiltration campaigns, they sought fraudulent employment at tech companies across North America, Europe, and Asia," the cybersecurity company said.

4. 13 domains seized

   The U.S. Department of Justice has announced the seizure of 13 internet domains masquerading as consulting companies used to target U.S. persons, including current and former security clearance holders with access to classified and sensitive U.S. government information. "These domain seizures offer a glimpse at how foreign actors can use promises of easy money to lure Americans into revealing sensitive or classified information that they are duty-bound to protect," said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. "Anyone approached online with offers of easy income for vague 'consulting' work should treat those overtures with extreme caution and remain vigilant for warning signs of malicious targeting." These sham companies advertised generic consulting or analyst jobs on platforms like Upwork, Expertia AI, Hubstaff Talent, Wellfound, and Post Job Free that sought to recruit current or former U.S. government and U.S. military employees to lend their expertise to unspecified clients. The recruiters then pressured candidates to part with confidential information and reports from "insider" sources in exchange for cryptocurrency payments. The announcement comes after the Five Eyes intelligence alliance countries warned of China aggressively using job platforms to target people for information. In a statement shared with Reuters, the Chinese Embassy in Washington condemned the allegations and called them fabricated.

5. Supply-chain toolkit exposed

   The Miasma credential-stealing attack framework was briefly made available for free on GitHub, after multiple repositories with the name "Miasma-Open-Source-Release" began appearing since June 8, 2026. According to SafeDep, the source code has been published through compromised developer accounts. "The Miasma codebase appears to be larger than a supply chain worm," SafeDep said. "It is a full supply chain attack toolkit that allows the operator to execute various attacks via stolen credentials against arbitrary or targeted packages on public registries (PyPI, npm, RubyGems), JFrog Artifactory, GitHub repositories and GitHub Actions, AI coding tools config poisoning, SSH-based lateral movement, and other attack vectors." As opposed to relying on conventional command-and-control (C2) infrastructure, the malware employs three independent C2 channels using GitHub commit search, each with a different search string and crypto key: "DontRevokeOrItGoesBoom" to discover attacker-controlled personal access tokens (PATs) for data exfiltration, "TheBeautifulSandsOfTime" to deliver JavaScript, and "firedalazer" to deliver Python script URLs that act as a remote code execution backdoor. Miasma is assessed to be a variant of the Shai-Hulud worm. The campaign has since morphed into a Python variant called Hades, which represents the latest evolution of the sustained software supply chain campaign. As of last week, a total of 304 components have been impacted by Miasma.

6. Search uploads retained

   Google has revealed that it intends to save the images, files, audio, and video users upload to Search under a new "Search Services History" setting. This can include images, files, and audio/video recordings, such as Google Lens images, content you upload, and recordings from Search Live, Translate speaking practice, and voice searches, per Google. The tech giant said the Search Services History setting will be used to "provide, develop, and improve its services," including its AI models, as well as offer personalized suggestions and ads if the new "Personalized Recommendations" option is switched on. These two settings are separate from Google's Web & App Activity.

7. Cross-platform RAT emerges

   Iru has analyzed a new cross-platform RAT called SStar Agent that's designed for both Windows and macOS systems. "The macOS builds are heavily instrumented surveillance tools focused on recon and exfiltration, while the Windows build layers on a keyboard hook, clipboard monitor, and remote mouse/keyboard control," the company said. "Notably, the malware includes a large POST request via endpoint /api/telemetry/report that constantly monitors and exfiltrates the entire directory tree to monitor files of interest. The gap between the Windows and macOS versions indicates this is still a work in progress." The malware is delivered by means of a poisoned npm package named "tw-style-utils." The lure is a bogus Web3 engineering take-home assessment, a GitHub repository ("star45674/smart-contract-engineer-role") that's likely distributed to targets. While the repository itself is clean, the payload resides in the npm dependency. Although it's not clear who is behind the malware, the activity overlaps with previously observed social engineering attacks mounted by North Korean hacking groups.

8. Fake npm popularity

   Tenable has detailed a technique dubbed download pumping, where attackers artificially inflate npm package download counts in order to make malicious packages appear legitimate and trustworthy to developers. This approach has been observed in a package named "ambar-src," which reached more than 50,000 downloads in three days after attackers published hundreds of benign versions of the package before introducing the actual malicious payload. "Every time a new version was published, automated systems like repository mirrors and analysis bots automatically downloaded it," Tenable said. "Because the attackers systematically uploaded hundreds of versions, they artificially generated a massive wave of automated traffic, inflating the package's download count to more than 50,000 downloads in just three days."

9. Exchange spoofing risk

   A weakness in certain configurations of Microsoft Exchange could be abused by attackers to send emails masquerading as any user to a vulnerable organization. The technique has been codenamed Ghost-Sender. "Using Exchange Online (or on-premises Exchange in hybrid mode) in combination with an external MX record, such as a third-party email server or spam protection solution, can allow the spoofing of emails from any sender to any recipient in the target tenant," InfoGuard Labs said. "This is regardless of the configured SPF, DKIM, and DMARC policies of the spoofed sender's domain, and the emails are delivered without any further warning. It is possible to send emails from anyone, including external and internal email addresses. For internal senders, Outlook even resolves the sender's profile picture."

10. Russia-focused phishing waves

    A previously unknown group known as SiribClone has targeted Russian military personnel using bait applications for "safe photo exchange" to distribute malicious files for desktop and mobile devices. In some cases, members of the group have posed as women seeking romantic relationships to infect smartphones, computers, and Telegram accounts. The group has been active since early 2025. Attacks targeting Android devices lead to the deployment of a spyware called SafeLoveStealer that can steal photographs, videos, documents, and location data. Windows systems, on the other hand, are infected by a stealer known as SiribGrabber. The malware is distributed via phishing emails containing ZIP archives disguised as military-themed documents. In addition, the group operates phishing sites mimicking Telegram login pages to trick targets into entering their phone numbers, verification codes, and two-factor authentication passwords, allowing them to seize control of the accounts. Also linked to the threat actor is a tool called Kontur that stores stolen Telegram sessions and allows operators to review captured messages. Russian maritime universities, energy facilities, diplomatic missions, and government agencies have also been targeted through phishing campaigns by an unidentified group since at least July 2024. Recent attack waves have employed a C2 framework called Ravage, although two distinct phishing campaigns observed in 2024 have used Cobalt Strike. The third hacking group to single out Russia (along with Belarus) is Cloud Atlas, which has resorted to sending phishing emails with ZIP archives containing malicious shortcuts that launch PowerShell scripts, paving the way for malware like VBShower and PowerShower, the latter of which is used to drop a credential grabber. Lateral movement via RDP, SSH, and RevSocks is achieved via PAExec or PsExec as part of a framework known as PowerAdmin. Furthermore, the attacks involve two new tools: PowerCloud, which collects user data with administrator privileges and writes it to Google Sheets, and Browser checker, a PowerShell script that checks whether browser processes (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and others) are running.

11. ClickFix backdoor expands

    A ransomware-related threat actor has put to use a new malware family called MLTBackdoor that's delivered via ClickFix. "MTLBackdoor supports a set of commands like downloading and uploading files from the victim's system," Zscaler ThreatLabz said. "However, one of the most powerful features is the ability to load Beacon Object Files (BOFs) to expand its capabilities." The malware was discovered in May 2026. In recent months, ransomware and data extortion attacks involving DragonForce and World Leaks have employed backdoors like VIPERTUNNEL, a Python malware previously linked to RansomHub, and RustyRocket, a custom-built Rust tool to facilitate covert data exfiltration and persistent access. "Once an attacker runs it, RustyRocket can securely connect back to an attacker-controlled server using heavily encrypted and layered traffic that blends in with normal internet activity, making it very hard for defenders to detect," Accenture's T. Ryan Whelan said. "This malware is an integrated communications architecture built for persistence and obfuscation."

12. WooCommerce card theft

    A new skimmer campaign is targeting WooCommerce sites to steal card details from checkout pages. "The skimmer impersonates the real Stripe payment element, validates cards in real time so the victim never suspects anything," CloudSEK said. "The most 'professional' aspect of this sample is how hard it works to feel legitimate. It re-implements the same client-side checks a real checkout performs."

13. 33,000 users targeted

    A new Go-based loader named GoFlateLoader is being used to deliver multiple infostealers, including Amatera, Remus, Lumma, Vidar, StealC, and SvitStealer. "GoFlateLoader appears both in x86 (32-bit) and x86-64 (64-bit) variants, matching the bitness of the payload it is supposed to execute," Gen Digital's Avast said. "The loader is designed for in-memory payload execution and is deliberately inflated with a massive PE overlay to hinder detection." The malware is delivered via cracked software and a malicious Traffic Distribution System (TDS) that has been used to deliver Remus Stealer, AnimateClipper, and the SessionGate framework. Since the beginning of April 2026, more than 33,000 unique users have been targeted, with the most affected countries including Brazil, India, Argentina, Mexico, Turkey, and Spain.

14. $862K damage case

    Maxwell Schultz, 36, of Columbus, Ohio, has been sentenced to 24 months in federal prison for hacking into his employer's network after his contract was terminated in May 2021. Impersonating another contractor, Schultz obtained login credentials, accessed the former employer's systems, and executed a malicious PowerShell script that reset roughly 2,500 passwords, locking out employees and contractors and causing more than $862,000 in losses. Schultz pleaded guilty to the crime in November 2025.

15. Fake banking updates

    A new phishing campaign impersonating Italian and European banking brands is being used to distribute an Android malware called NFCShare. The attacks use phishing sites that aim to trick users into entering their credentials, after which they are prompted to update the banking application by downloading an APK file hosted on GitHub ("antoniocastaldo1998/app-scuola"). The end goal is to guide the user through a fake card verification flow: bring the card near the phone, keep it close while "authenticating," and enter the card PIN. Under the hood, the app reads NFC card data (ISO-DEP) and exfiltrates it to a remote WebSocket endpoint. The activity shares tactical overlaps with other NFC relay malware, such as SuperCardX and RelayNFC. The presence of Chinese text suggests a China-linked operator or tooling lineage.

16. AI agent phishing risk

    Four phishing simulations on an OpenClaw email agent codenamed Pinchy have revealed it to be susceptible to tactics commonly used to deceive human users. "In some cases, Pinchy not only failed at spotting the phishing attacks, it also performed risky actions that could potentially compromise a real-world organization," Varonis said. "In one notable case, a casual email from 'Dan' asking the agent to share staging credentials was enough to forward AWS IAM keys, database passwords, and SSH access to an external Gmail." This agent phishing is different from indirect prompt injection. While the latter embeds malicious instructions inside data the model consumes to trigger unintended actions or responses, agent phishing operates above the application surface. "A believable request arrives through a normal communication channel, reads like a legitimate business message, and succeeds when the agent acts on it before verifying who asked," Varonis added.

17. AI fixes weak passwords

    Apple has revealed that its upcoming version of Apple Intelligence, the company's generative artificial intelligence (AI) system, will support capabilities to update its weak and compromised passwords with a single tap via the Passwords app. "Building on its ability to alert users about weak and compromised passwords, Passwords can now automatically fix these for users with just a tap," Apple said. "Using Apple Intelligence and Safari to agentically take action on a user's behalf, Passwords securely navigates through websites to sign in and upgrade their accounts to strong passwords."

18. EDR telemetry throttled

    A new technique called EDRChoker that interferes with the client-server connection of Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) software to sidestep defenses. "EDRChoker uses policy-based Quality of Service (QoS) to throttle EDR agents to the lowest bandwidth; when agents attempt to connect, they will consistently time out due to the extremely low bandwidth," a security researcher who goes by the name Zero Salarium said. "It takes a list of common EDR process names and creates QoS policies that limit those processes to 8 bits per second. At that bandwidth, an EDR agent becomes effectively isolated from its server." Earlier this January, the researcher also demonstrated EDRStartupHinder, which prevents an EDR program from starting. "EDRStartupHinder aims to exploit Windows Bindlink to redirect a DLL from System32 to another location, alongside taking advantage of the function that only loads DLLs signed by a program protected with Protected Process Light (PPL) to prevent AV/EDR services from starting," the researcher said. Another technique devised by Binary Defense involves disabling critical security services, such as Windows Defender and Sysmon, without triggering traditional malware alerts. It modifies Windows Access Control Lists (ACLs) to add "Deny" Access Control Entries (ACEs) against core system libraries like "kernel32.dll." Because these services rely on the DLL to function, the dependency chain is broken. Upon a system reboot, the protected services fail to start, leaving the endpoint without any defenses.

19. STX RAT supply chain grows

    The supply chain attack targeting CPUID to deliver STX RAT is broader in scope than previously thought, with a new analysis from Cyderes uncovering seven additional trojanized packages tied to the same campaign. "All packages follow the same delivery mechanism," the cybersecurity company said. "The actor, operating under the alias Leda Elacoate (pufferfish11@firemail[.]cc), built and maintained a Bitbucket repository of trojanized installers over approximately one month, targeting a wide range of user demographics." Among the impacted packages is X-VPN, a consumer VPN with over 100 million reported users. Users who installed X-VPN from official channels are not affected. "The actor began with cryptocurrency exchange and trading software as lures, targeting users with likely access to financial accounts, and progressively expanded that lure portfolio across a social engineering decoy and VPN software," Cyderes added.

20. Agent Tesla via ZIP lures

    Phishing emails masquerading as legitimate payment advice messages are being used to deliver ZIP archives, opening which triggers a multi-stage infection chain that leads to the deployment of Agent Tesla. "In simple terms, the victim opens what looks like a harmless file, but behind the scenes, a heavily obfuscated Batch script silently launches PowerShell, which then pulls and executes additional malicious code directly in memory," Point Wild said. "From there, the attack escalates into a staged execution chain involving shellcode decoding, persistence setup, and process injection into legitimate Windows applications like charmap.exe." Agent, Tesla is designed to steal browser credentials, log keystrokes, capture screenshots, and extract sensitive data from the system. The collected information is then exfiltrated using SMTP-based communication, allowing malicious traffic to blend with normal-looking email activity.

21. AI video lures spread malware

    Two social engineering campaigns are using AI-generated TikTok videos and Instagram Reels to direct users to sketchy sites that deploy Vidar Stealer and other dubious programs. "One methodology involves fake tutorials for software installs, with professional-sounding voice-overs and clean graphics," ReversingLabs said. "The second approach relies on posts demonstrating how to use premium software for free, spanning multiple videos, with a centralized tutorial being introduced after the account gains traction."

22. Routers turned into C2 nodes

    A suspected China-nexus intrusion set has been identified conducting a large-scale campaign targeting edge network devices across Southeast Asia. "The adversary deploys a custom Linux ELF implant (router.elf) directly onto compromised border routers, establishing persistent command-and-control (C2) via DNS over HTTPS (DoH) while simultaneously weaponizing the router's iptables subsystem to hijack downstream DNS traffic at scale," a security researcher named Y4er said. "Correlated Windows-side tradecraft leverages a cracked Cobalt Strike 4.4 Beacon delivered via DLL sideloading (version.dll), sharing identical C2 infrastructure and malleable C2 profiles with the router implant - confirming unified operational control.

23. RMM abused in Brazil

    An active phishing campaign has been observed targeting Brazilian organizations with fake business-document lures, resulting in the download of a NinjaOne Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) agent. "The campaign begins with phishing emails that redirect victims to Portuguese-language landing pages impersonating familiar Brazilian workflows, including SEFAZ-related fiscal documents, Reclame Aqui-style complaint processes, and secure document-delivery portals," Cato Networks said. "After completing a fake verification process, victims are prompted to download what appears to be a protected business document. Instead, the download delivers a legitimate NinjaOne RMM agent configured to provide remote access to attacker-controlled infrastructure, highlighting a previously undocumented abuse of NinjaOne in the Brazilian threat Landscape." The development once again highlights how threat actors no longer need to rely on bespoke malware to infiltrate organizations.

24. Money laundering goes MaaS

    Cybersecurity company KELA has shed light on money mule networks, which play a crucial role in modern cybercrime and financial fraud ecosystems, enabling threat actors to launder and monetize proceeds through ransomware, scams, and Business Email Compromise (BEC), and other illicit schemes. "In recent years, traditional mule recruitment has increasingly evolved into professionalized Mule-as-a-Service (MaaS) ecosystems that provide scalable laundering infrastructure to cybercriminals," KELA said, adding "mule operations increasingly rely on stolen identities, synthetic identities, compromised accounts, and AI-assisted onboarding techniques rather than solely recruiting human participants." Threat actors have also been found to rely on forged documentation, deepfake-enabled KYC bypass methods, account takeover techniques, and automated account "warming" activity to set up resilient laundering infrastructures across multiple financial platforms.

25. AI chats exposed

    G DATA said it has witnessed a growing number of Google Chrome extensions that impersonate legitimate productivity tools while stealthily hijacking users' conversations with AI chatbots. Some of these include Urban VPN, Smart Sidebar: ChatGPT, Claude & DeepSeek, and Chat AI, the last of which exhibits traits consistent with a campaign dubbed AiFrame. "User data generated through AI conversations may still be vulnerable to theft by threat actors utilizing plug-ins that pose as legitimate tools," G DATA said.

26. 507 Meta repos exposed

    A public Meta IP address running an open Grafana instance acted as a pathway for read-write access to 507 private Meta repositories, netting the Sectricity Security Team a bug bounty of $157,000. "The pivot was a wildcard SAN on the TLS certificate: *.llm-playground.aws.metafb.cloud, which exposed a quiet shadow estate behind metafb.cloud," the cybersecurity company said. "By parsing JavaScript bundles across that estate, we uncovered references to a previously unseen domain: api.haloworld.xyz, which became the next pivot point. Slight (AI built wordlist given JS bundles, context, etc) fuzzing against api.haloworld.xyz then exposed /_api/gcp-token, an unauthenticated endpoint that handed out a valid GCP OAuth2 token." The GCP token, in turn, granted read access to the project's Secret Manager that contained a Vercel token. The Vercel token exposed 85 environment variables across Meta's projects, including multiple GitHub personal access tokens (PATs) and other secrets. One of those GitHub tokens had read/write access to 507 private repositories.

27. 7M seniors’ data sold

    Troy Murray, 57, of Hickory, North Carolina, has been sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for selling the personal information of over 7 million elderly Americans to Jamaican lottery fraud scammers. He has also been ordered to pay a forfeiture in the amount of $5,214,688.48. Murray "devised a scheme where he organized, maintained, and sold lists containing the names, phone numbers, physical addresses, and, in some cases, ages and email addresses, of elderly Americans to individuals in Jamaica involved in lottery fraud schemes," the U.S. Justice Department said. "From 2016 to 2023, Murray sold these lists to Jamaican scammers, who perpetrated lottery fraud on elderly American consumers, earning Murray hundreds of thousands of dollars each year." Each of these lists was sold for $500.

28. One-packet crash bug

    Security researcher Marcus Hutchins has released details and a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for ComoDoS, an integer underflow vulnerability residing in Comodo Internet Security's firewall driver, Inspect.sys (CVE-2026-49494, CVSS score: 7.5). "Although the vulnerability can be used to remotely trigger both an out-of-bounds (OOB) read and out-of-bounds write in the Windows kernel, the limitations on both primitives lead me to believe it's unlikely this bug could be weaponized into RCE," Hutchins said. "The bug does, however, enable you to remotely crash the target system with a single TCP/IP packet, even if the firewall is configured to block all ports." The vulnerability remains unpatched as of writing.

29. CI/CD secrets exposed

    Microsoft said it discovered an issue in the Claude Code GitHub Action that could be exploited to expose CI/CD workflow secrets when AI agents process untrusted GitHub content, including issue bodies, pull request descriptions, and comments. "While Claude Code Action supported environment scrubbing for subprocess execution paths such as Bash, the Read tool was not subject to the same sandboxing model," the Windows maker said. "It was eventually authorized to access /proc/self/environ, reading the workflow's ANTHROPIC_API_KEY and potentially other credentials available to the runner." Following responsible disclosure on April 29, 2026, the issue was fixed on May 5 with the release of Claude Code version 2.1.128. The patch strengthens the Read tool by unconditionally rejecting a number of files in /proc/ in order to protect those files from exfiltration.

30. Fake $200K job lure

    The Iranian hacking group known as Nimbus Manticore approached an employee via LinkedIn by impersonating a headhunter, luring them with a salary offer of $200,000 per year. Per Nextron Systems, the interaction is said to have redirected the victim to a fake hiring portal branded as Ebix Recruitment that prompted them to enter temporary credentials received from the recruiter to log in to the website. "After authentication, the portal prompted the victim to download a two-factor authentication application for 'additional security,'" the company said. "The advertised 2FA application was delivered as a ZIP archive and contained the malware payload." The attack culminates with the deployment of a custom implant with data exfiltration and remote control capabilities.

31. Backdoor with wiper modules

    Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new Golang backdoor called BLUERABBIT that routes C2 through RabbitMQ for tasking, Redis for state management, and MinIO for S3-compatible data exfiltration. "It is a full-spectrum intrusion tool: remote access, system profiling, file encryption with a .candy extension, and two distinct disk-wiping modules capable of rendering systems permanently unrecoverable," Binary Defense said. The backdoor is assessed to be the work of an Iran-nexus threat actor. It was first observed in mid-to-late March 2026, and is likely used for targeting entities in Israel. BLUERABBIT is "related to the same likely Iran-nexus activity cluster that previously leveraged BLUEWIPE and SEWERGOO in June 2025," it added.

The throughline is simple: attackers do not always need exploits. They need patience, stolen credentials, trusted tools, and one policy setting nobody has checked since the last reorg. The perimeter is not the real problem anymore. The problem is everything inside it that still trusts by default.

Same old lesson: audit what your agents can access, treat every identity in the pipeline as a risk, and check what your browser extensions are sending home. See you Thursday.

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Docker Hardened Images enhanced vulnerability scanning with Docker and Aikido

Aikido now scans Docker Hardened Images (DHI) with built-in VEX support. Vulnerabilities that Docker has verified as non-exploitable drop out of the queue automatically, so developers spend their time on findings that actually matter. This post walks through what changed, why it matters, and how users can benefit from the new integration.

Why teams are drowning in CVEs

Modern application teams drown in CVEs. And the volume is climbing fast. AI coding agents now generate and assemble software far faster than any team can review it, pulling in dependencies by the hundreds and spinning up new services on demand. Every base image they reach for is another stack of CVEs landing in someone’s queue. The faster code ships, the more it matters that it starts from a foundation that’s already minimal, already patched, and already vetted — which is exactly why hardened images matter more now than they ever have.

Docker Hardened Images addresses this problem at the source. DHI images are purpose-built, often distroless, and ship with only the software the workload needs. The attack surface is smaller by construction. Patches land faster than upstream in many cases.

A smaller attack surface only helps if your scanner can see it. Distroless images break tools that expect a package manager or a shell. Naive scanning produces false positives against components that are not actually present, or flags CVEs in code paths that cannot be reached. Teams end up triaging noise that the image author already knew was not a problem.

The new integration closes this gap. DHI publishes signed VEX attestations alongside each image. Aikido reads those attestations and applies them during triage. The CVEs Docker has already cleared get filtered out, with a clear reason attached.

Before you begin

You need three things to scan DHI with Aikido:

• An active Aikido account.
• Access to Docker Hardened Images.
• A Docker Hub Personal Access Token with read-only scope.
• If your Docker Hub registry is already connected to Aikido, skip the next section.

Connect Docker Hub to Aikido

In Aikido, go to Settings > Containers and click Connect Registry.
Select Docker Hub.
Enter your organization namespace, username, and Personal Access Token.
Aikido discovers your repositories and lists them for scanning.

Scan a Docker Hardened Image

Once the registry is connected, open the registry action menu and click Scan repos in registry. There is no extra configuration for DHI. Aikido detects hardened images automatically and applies the right data sources in the background.

Under the hood, the workflow follows the DHI technical spec:

1. Detection. Aikido identifies the DHI base image from the image reference and registry metadata.
2. Cataloging. The scanner pulls the signed SPDX 2.3 SBOM published with the image. SBOMs are retrieved through OCI 1.1 referrer lookup against the registry, or from /opt/docker/sbom/ when present. Reading the vetted SBOM produces complete, accurate component data, where indexing a distroless filesystem would not.
3. Matching. Components are matched by PURL against the Docker OSV feed and upstream advisory feeds.
4. Applying VEX. Aikido overlays the OpenVEX statements Docker publishes for the image, and suppresses any finding marked as resolved by the attestation.

How VEX status shows up

VEX status	What it means
Fixed	The vulnerability is patched in this image.
Not Affected	Docker has verified the CVE is a false positive or non-exploitable in context. Aikido suppresses these by default.
Under Investigation	Impact is still being assessed by Docker.
Affected	The vulnerability applies, and a fix is not yet available.

What you see in Aikido

Aikido keeps the UI focused on a single question: is this image vulnerable or not. When Docker’s VEX attestation indicates a CVE doesn’t require triage (for example, it’s been fixed or marked not affected), Aikido filters it out of the active queue automatically. You don’t have to triage it, tag it, or click through anything. Findings that remain in the queue are the ones that genuinely apply to the image, so your team spends time only on what matters.

Behind the scenes, Aikido still consumes the full OpenVEX statement (status, justification, image digest) for audit and compliance purposes. It just isn’t surfaced as a status drill-down in the UI, because in practice nobody triaging vulnerabilities wants to dig through VEX metadata.

What the result looks like

On a typical DHI workload, the active queue shrinks dramatically once VEX is applied. A scan that returns several hundred CVEs against a generic base image collapses to the handful of findings the image actually carries.

A concrete example: a CVE in a parser library shows up across most base images. Docker marks it not_affected in the DHI build because the vulnerable code path cannot be reached by an adversary. Aikido reads that statement, files the CVE under “VEX indicates not affected,” and your team never sees it in triage. The justification stays attached if an auditor asks.

For teams pursuing FedRAMP, SOC 2, or other compliance regimes, this matters twice. The findings list is honest. The exceptions are signed, attributable to the image publisher, and traceable back to a public attestation. You are not handing auditors a wall of red.

Recap

The integration is based on the following information provided by Docker Hardened Images:

• Signed SBOMs give Aikido complete component data without trying to index a distroless filesystem.
• OpenVEX attestations carry Docker’s exploitability verdict, with justification, directly into the scanner.

The outcome is a triage queue that reflects real exploitability in your image, not a flat dump of every CVE that ever touched an upstream package.If you have not started with hardened images yet, the Docker Hardened Images documentation is the place to begin.

Learn more about the integration:

On June 26th, Aikido is hosting a webinar for those interested in learning more about the integration. 

Register for Aikido x Docker: Less Noise, More Signal in Container Security

Resources

• Review our Docker Hardened Images documentation.
• Set up Docker Hub registry on Aikido

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AI Broke Vulnerability Management. That's Why CISOs Are Moving Budget to BAS.

For thirty years, vulnerability management ran on a buffer: the months between when a vulnerability was found and when someone could figure out how to weaponize it. The solution was straightforward enough; triage by severity, schedule the fix, validate, and move on. The buffer was what made that work.

Today, that buffer is gone.

AI didn't make your team slower. It changed the other side of the equation, compressing discovery-to-exploit from months to hours. And the sad truth for defenders is that a process built for breathing room can't survive without it.

AI Turned Vulnerability Discovery Into a Volume Game

In its May 2026 update, Anthropic reported that it and approximately 50 partners used Claude Mythos Preview to find more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities in systemically important software in a single month.

Earlier figures were just as stark.

Pointed at Firefox, the gated Mythos model wrote 181 working exploits, against just 2 from the previous frontier model. It surfaced vulnerabilities across every major OS and browser, including an OpenBSD bug that had sat undetected for 27 years.

At the time of writing, more than 99% of what it found was still unpatched.

Figure 1. February 2026, FortiGate Campaign

An AWS threat-intelligence report from February 2026 shows the flip side: no zero-days needed, just weak credentials, industrialized through a custom MCP server running offensive tools autonomously. AWS confirmed 600+ devices across 55+ countries; the actor's logs, according to independent researchers, queued 2,516 devices across 106 countries.

Either way, the rules have clearly changed. What once took rare expertise now runs at machine speed and scale.

The Vulnerability Weaponization Window Has Collapsed, Too

Defenders used to have months between a CVE going public and its first confirmed exploitation in the wild, the window known as time-to-exploit (TTE).

That window has slammed shut.

Zero Day Clock puts the 2026 average at roughly 24 hours, down from ~53 days in 2024.

Figure 2. Mean time-to-exploit (TTE) by Zero Day Clock

The breach data agrees, too.

Verizon's 2026 DBIR ties 32% of initial-access techniques to exploitation of vulnerabilities and expects that number to climb, because AI coding assistants now put exploit-building, porting a tool to a new language, and discovering fresh flaws all within reach for attackers who've never had them before.

Figure 3. Generative AI-assisted techniques categorized as initial access methods by Verizon’s 2026 DBIR

Telling Teams to Patch Faster Is Like Telling a Freighter to Brake on a Dime

The industry's reflex answer is to patch faster. Regulators are codifying it: Many regulations now point toward same-day fixes for some critical vulnerabilities. Boards expect it. Executives demand it.

But remediation isn't a switch. Patches clear regression testing, wait for change windows, need to wait for approvals, and respect existing uptime and compliance commitments. Taking production down to outrun an exploit ends up being just a different outage.

And the data shows everything's moving the wrong way.

The Verizon 2026 DBIR tracked 13,000+ organizations:

• Median fix time for known-exploited vulnerabilities: 43 days, up from 32 the year before
• Amount that were fully patched: down from 38% to 26%

When offense runs in hours and remediation runs in weeks, the breach almost always happens in between.

Again, per Verizon's DBIR, even the best-performing organizations close only 30-40% of known-exploited vulnerabilities in the first week after detection: a rate that's barely moved despite years of steady investment.

So, ordering teams to patch faster doesn't change the physics, and it feels like ordering a freighter to brake on a dime.

The Bottleneck Moved. So Must the Strategy.

For two decades, vulnerability management ran on a tidy set of assumptions:

• Find the flaws,
• Score them by severity,
• Patch the worst first.

When a few dozen criticals landed per quarter, CVSS triage worked. Unfortunately, it doesn't stand a chance against hundreds or thousands of disclosures a day.

Dipping back to Verizon's DBIR one more time, the median organization had to patch 16 known-exploited vulnerabilities in 2025, up from 11 the year before, a jump of nearly 50%.

That was before AI-discovered flaws began flooding the catalog.

Severity scores, meanwhile, don't tell you whether a flaw is reachable in your environment, whether your controls will already block it, or whether it chains to anything that matters. A severity list where everything is a "9" or "10" essentially prioritizes nothing.

So the useful question stops being "what's vulnerable?" and becomes "what's actually exploitable against us right now: and would our defenses catch it if someone tried?"

This is exactly the question Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) was built to answer.

Why BAS Becomes the Cornerstone Against AI-Powered Attacks

BAS takes real-world adversary techniques, the TTPs behind the campaign in the latest headline, and safely runs them against your live prevention and detection stack. Not a scan. Not a theoretical mapping. An actual exercise that shows what your tools will actually block, what they'll detect, and what will slip through.

In a world drowning in disclosures, that does three things that vulnerability management alone can't. BAS:

• Separates the theoretical from the real. A flaw your WAF, IPS, and EDR already neutralize is a very different problem from one that waltzes straight in. BAS shows which is which, so teams stop treating every CVE as a five-alarm fire.
• Validates the controls you've already paid for. Most enterprises run anywhere from ten to seventy security tools with countless overlapping policies; BAS measures whether they fire as configured and surfaces the residual risks hiding in the gaps.
• Buys time to patch safely. When you can prove a critical asset is already covered by hardened controls, the patch can move through normal change control instead of an emergency rollout. When it isn't covered, you know to mitigate first.

That payoff is starting to show up in budgets: field reports increasingly point to CISOs reserving dedicated spend for BAS that wasn't a separate line item a year ago.

This is the shift Gartner now labels Adversarial Exposure Validation: blending security effectiveness ("Are my controls working?") with business context ("Which assets matter most, and what's truly reachable?") to prioritize by your organization's reality instead of by hypothetical raw scores.

Paired with autonomous penetration testing, which proves whether an attacker can chain exposures from their initial foothold to your organization's crown jewels, BAS completes the picture.

One side asks, "Wait, can they breach us?" The other asks, "But would we catch it?"

Running together, BAS and autonomous pentesting replace guesswork with evidence.

BAS Has to Run Autonomously at Machine Speed Too

There's a catch.

If adversaries are operating autonomously, a validation cycle that takes a human a week to complete is obsolete on arrival. Machine-speed attacks demand machine-speed defenses, and the only thing fast enough to counter autonomous offense is autonomous defense.

The honest objection to pointing raw generative AI at this is safety. As Picus CTO Volkan Erturk has warned, a model told to invent an exploit might hand back a live malware sample, or hallucinate techniques a group never uses. You don't want unvetted binaries detonating in production, or defenses built against attacks that don't, or can't, exist.

You can watch it on demand here.

Picus' fix is to put the model in charge of coordination, not creation.

Rather than asking AI to write payloads, Picus' agentic BAS matches a fresh threat report against a curated, pre-vetted library of safe, ready-made test building blocks. A security team names a threat, and a multi-agent system takes it from there: one agent identifies the threat and builds a research plan, others gather and validate the intelligence from multiple sources, and a builder agent maps the adversarial TTPs into attack chains ready for simulation.

The output is an accurate, ready-to-run simulation, assembled in minutes.

This collapses the loop. A CISA alert or a forwarded headline becomes a scoped test, a posture score, prioritized mitigations, and an executive report, often in minutes, with humans reviewing exceptions rather than driving, and slowing down, every step.

This Is What the Picus Platform Is Built For

Patching is still essential, but where AI discovers flaws by the thousands and weaponizes them in hours, patching alone can't be your whole strategy. If the offense is autonomous, the defense has to operate at least at the same speed, and that's exactly what Picus was built to do.

What scales with the threat is validation: confirming what your controls will actually stop, proving what's exploitable, and spending remediation time and talent only where it will change the outcome. AI-powered, agentic BAS is one of the core pillars of the Picus Platform, continuously testing whether your defenses block and detect what matters without waiting on a human to kick off the process or advance to the next cycle. And when a gap is uncovered, the platform points to the vendor-specific mitigation needed, and doesn't just create another ticket on the pile, then re-validates to confirm that the gap has actually been closed.

The need to say, on the spot, whether a fresh headline puts the business at risk isn't going away anytime soon. The Picus Platform gives security teams that answer before anyone asks.

Find out if the next headline puts you at risk, before it drops. Request a demo.

Note: This article was written by Sıla Özeren Hacıoğlu, Security Research Engineer at Picus Security.

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