Google warns that Armory Castle, a suspected PRC state-sponsored espionage actor, exploited the critical BeyondTrust Remote Support vulnerability CVE-2026-102764 (CVSS 9.3) in August 2026, well before BeyondTrust disclosed it on October 15. The actor escalated privileges to root and established persistent access on compromised appliances.…
Volexity published Part 3 of its "Mind the (Patch) Gap" series. It shows how Volexity Volcano and Surge Collect Pro were used to analyze a VM compromised with the zero-day exploit chain and payloads used by UTA0560 (Chrome and Windows zero-days, described in Part 1). The post is mainly product and workflow documentation rather than new in…
F5 Labs assesses the security risks and rewards of Chinese open-weight LLMs (Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiMo, MiniMax, DeepSeek). It finds that strong offensive and defensive cyber capability does not translate into consistent resistance to attack. Cited examples include Kimi K3 finding 19 vulnerabilities in Redis and GLM 5.2 being self-hosted by H…
Hardware hacker Joe Grand found tampered Trezor Model T and Trezor One wallets sold through unauthorized third-party channels (Facebook Marketplace in Canada in 2025, and a TikTok shop in August 2026, shipped from China). The attackers replaced the microcontroller with one running malicious firmware that hands users one of about a dozen p…
ByteDance, owner of TikTok, has created a dedicated AI safety team inside its Seed research unit and opened a global search for ten researchers. The team, named Alignment & Preparedness, will work to ensure AI systems follow human objectives and safety requirements, including on complex multi-step tasks. Positions are located in Beijing a…
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued an order requiring federal civilian agencies to stop using DeepSeek products and remove them from government systems. The order also covers products from DeepSeek's affiliates and third-party products or services built on DeepSeek technology. DHS cites concerns that the Chinese gov…
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has ordered federal civilian agencies to stop buying DeepSeek products and services and to remove them from government IT systems, citing national security concerns. The order also covers third-party products and services built on DeepSeek technology, though agencies may request exceptions. DHS…
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act (FASCSA) order directing federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek AI products from their IT systems and to stop acquiring them. The notice is due to be published in the Federal Register on October 20, 2026 and names Hangzhou DeepS…
ThreatBook announced RedAgents on October 16, 2026. It is a SaaS platform that runs several AI penetration testing agents in parallel against authorized targets and shows the findings in one interface. The platform combines Artex Pro, Cyber(YanJi), Yanxun and CyberStrikeAI Enterprise Edition. ThreatBook says that combining agents improves…
The US Department of Homeland Security issued an order directing federal civilian agencies to stop using products from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek and to remove existing implementations. The order also covers "DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations." That wording is vague an…
CISA and the UK NCSC, with co-sealing partners, published advisory AA26-113A on China-nexus cyber actors' use of large, dynamic covert networks of compromised devices, mainly SOHO routers and IoT devices. These networks are shared by multiple threat actors and each may contain hundreds of thousands of endpoints. This makes static IP block…
The NSA, CISA and FBI issued joint advisory AA26-251A warning that China-based AI companies are running industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns against U.S. frontier AI models. The named companies are DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI. According to the agencies, they have extracted billions of tokens acro…
A joint advisory (AA26-281A) attributes China-based malicious cyber activity to Integrity Technology Group (Integrity Tech), a for-profit company with links to the Chinese government. The company builds and sells tools, hosts infrastructure and compromises networks worldwide. The actors' TTPs are consistent with Flax Typhoon, Ethereal Pan…
F5 Labs published its 2026 cybersecurity predictions and scored its 2025 forecasts at 6.5/8, by its own assessment. The 2025 review cites AI-powered botnets, attacks on AI model APIs, AI side-channel attacks on cryptography, APT use of hacktivist personas, and expanded Roskomnadzor powers to isolate or reroute Russian internet traffic fro…
Kaspersky analysis of an installer first classified as adware (MD5 c24e99f9437feacaa63766a3cde3fe3d) found that it delivers the ValleyRAT backdoor. The installer drops a modified, signed Chinese wallpaper tool, QN Wallpaper, and uses it for DLL sideloading of a malicious libcef.dll. The adware's advertising function does not work. Attacke…
Mandiant and GTIG attribute exploitation of the critical BeyondTrust Remote Support zero-day CVE-2026-102764 to Armory Castle (formerly tracked as UNC5221), a likely Chinese government-backed espionage group. BeyondTrust dates the first known exploitation to Aug. 29 and says it detected and contained the activity Sept. 28. Only a small nu…
The Department of Homeland Security is barring civilian federal agencies from buying or using IT products and services from Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence and its affiliates. The notice, due in the Federal Register, cites the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Act and a review by the Federal Acquisition Security Council. An accom…
Recorded Future's Insikt Group (report of October 16) tracks a suspected Chinese-speaking actor, TAG-217, linked to attacks on South Korean financial institutions. The actor used Claude Code, DeepSeek, Grok and Zhipu AI alongside ARTEX, an open-source Chinese-language AI penetration testing framework. Public reporting cited in the investi…
The US State Department is offering up to US $10 million through Rewards for Justice for information on Zhang Yu, 44, a Chinese national accused of being a key figure in the state-sponsored group Hafnium (also tracked as Silk Typhoon). Zhang is described as a director at Shanghai Firetech Information Science and Technology, working under …
Nvidia has released Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120-billion-parameter open-weight model aimed at agentic workloads, together with two edge models, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B 24GB and Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB. Nvidia claims it is 5x faster than the next-best model in its class, based on Artificial Analysis benchmarks that ranked InclusionAI's…