Unit 42 reports that a threat actor using the handle BUGSTER set up DeepSeek V4 as the reasoning engine of an AI-assisted cybercrime operation against organizations in India, including universities. AI-generated reconnaissance and scripts were used to brute-force a university website. In a separate intrusion, the actor exfiltrated a Mongo…
GreyNoise observed automated scanners impersonating the web crawlers of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Amazon while requesting environment files, cloud access keys, private keys and password stores. A cluster of 13 forged AI crawler names from eight companies was seen; six names (belonging to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google…
Unit 42 analyzed the operational environment of a previously unreported, financially motivated, English-speaking actor using the handle BUGSTER. The actor ran the Hermes Agent framework with DeepSeek V4 as its reasoning engine and the Cursor IDE as a secondary tool, with safety controls disabled in both. With AI-generated scripts and reco…
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…
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), under Secretary Markwayne Mullin, has issued an order under the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018 (FASCSA). It directs federal civilian agencies to stop buying and to remove products and services from Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd. and its affiliates. It a…