Guest post by Howard Ting, CEO at Opal Security (previously Cyberhaven, Palo Alto Networks, Nutanix, and RSA Security). Published in partnership with Opal Security.

I started my career in identity in 2000 at RSA Security, when the hard problem was proving that a person was who they said they were. Since then I've worked on early identity federation and single sign-on products at Microsoft and several startups, helped scale Palo Alto Networks, and ran an insider risk company. I've seen a lot of shifts in security. This one is different.

For the first time, the thing asking for access is likely not a person. It's an agent. Agents are becoming the most powerful identities in the enterprise and the least governed. They act on their own, around the clock, and most teams can't say what a given agent touched, who owns it, or why it has the access it does.

Most security teams I talk to are stuck with a tradeoff they never chose. Lock agents down and hurt the company’s productivity and competitiveness. Let them run wide open and take on risk nobody can measure. Neither option holds up for long. In the age of AI, a security team that slows the business down gets routed around, and one that waves everything through is one bad agent away from an incident.

The root cause is simple. Our access model was built for a world where the volume stayed human-sized. Agents break this model and many of our long-held assumptions.

Clickops and vibes

Here's how most access decisions get made today. It's 11pm and a request comes in. The name is familiar, the justification sounds reasonable, and you've already approved six of these today. You click approve. It's clickops, usually on vibes, and I've done it more times than I can count.

Even with people, this is straining. A security engineer at one of our customers, a large tech company, put it plainly:

"If you plug 500 access reviews in front of somebody, people kind of rubber stamp the entire thing. That is a human bandwidth constrained resource."

The cost shows up on both sides. Before they came to Opal, one customer added up the time their engineers spent waiting on just-in-time access over 12 months. It added up to 42 years. Another came to 29. And the access that was granted often sat unused. Slow and insecure at once.

Now put agents into that system. They work when humans are asleep, and a 15-minute wait is not just an annoyance but counts as a failure of the system. They're also persistent. Deny a capable agent and it comes back with a new justification, then another. They aren't malicious. They're determined, and they lack inhibition. I have three young kids, and capability without inhibition is exactly what keeps me up at night. You can't govern that on vibes.

It's 100,000 to one

The ratio people quote is 50 to 100 non-human identities for every human. That ratio is about identities. The one that matters for governance is about access decisions, and it's far worse.

Say an engineer needs a customer database to troubleshoot a ticket. We grant seven days, and they touch it a thousand times. That's one decision. An agent doing the same work shouldn't get seven days. You don't know if it's still on the ticket by day three, or what else it's being prompted to do. So you scope access to the task, maybe for a minute, and then revoke it. Now each of those thousand touches requires its own unique decision, multiplied across every agent each employee runs. As agents take over more of those 50 to 100 non-human identities per person, that’s up to 100,000 decisions for every one we make for a human.

Least privilege has always been more aspiration than reality for human governance because of the capacity-to-demand ratio. It’s literally impossible to achieve for agents without fundamentally different tooling. Every time you narrow scope, you create another decision that has to be made and widen the gap in decisioning capacity.

From CPU to GPU

Today's access governance is built like a CPU: one decision at a time, with a person in the middle. Computing hit the same wall, first with graphics and now with AI, and the answer was a processor built for parallel work. That's the GPU.

Access needs its own GPU: a policy decision engine that's fast, accurate, scalable, and built with AI. To address the volume without sacrificing the quality of decisions, AI must manage AI. I believe 98 to 99 percent of access requests could eventually route to an AI “brain” rather than a person. The other 1 or 2 percent need real human judgment, and that's where people should spend their time.

The empty box on the right

Picture agent access as a lifecycle running left to right. The industry has gotten decent at the left side: discovering agents, inventorying their credentials, tying each one to an owner. Move right and things get thin. A security leader at one of our design partners described where discovery leaves you:

"We're a company of engineers. We're a company of tinkerers, and we're a company of people who are going to do whatever you didn't say I can't do. People are creating their own API tokens... stuffing in API tokens in plain text. For everything else that we've discovered, we have no idea what these people are doing yet, and we have no way to stop it."

Knowing an agent exists doesn't tell you whether it should do what it's about to do, right now, for this task. That decisioning engine is the brain of the agent identity stack, the GPU. In most stacks today, that box is empty.

What goes in the box

Full disclosure, this is what we build at Opal. Paladin, our decision engine, sits at the center of Opal Zero, which we built with design partners including Faire, Databricks, Elastic, and Superhuman. Here's how it decides, because I think the approach matters more than whose logo is on it.

Take an agent asking for write access to a production database to resolve an incident. Before anything is granted, Paladin works through a few questions:

• Who owns it, and what can they access? The owner's permissions are the ceiling. An agent never gets more than the person accountable for it.

• What was it built to do? The agent's stated intent has to match its purpose and what it has actually been doing. Narrow, single-task agents are far easier to govern than long-running general-purpose ones.

• Does the context check out? Is there an open incident? Is the agent’s owner assigned to it? Does the access requested match the work? Paladin pulls that from the ticketing system, team chat, and the identity provider.

• How sensitive is the resource? Each company sets its own risk tolerance, and can rate specific systems, like customer data, above the defaults.

From there it takes one of three paths. It approves access scoped to the task, which expires or is revoked when the work is done. It denies, with the reason written out. Or it escalates to a person, with the research already packaged so the review takes seconds instead of 15 minutes. Whatever the path, the decision is enforced in the gateways teams already run.

Speed is non-negotiable. Another design partner told us exactly where the bar sits:

"It has to be on the order of seconds to make that decision and not minutes... If the AI does denials that disrupt the agents, that's not going to be flying."

Trust has to be earned too. Most teams start in guided mode, where Paladin recommends and a person decides. Once they agree with it nearly every time, they let it decide on its own for low-risk resources that are easy to reverse.

What this looks like in practice

Getting standing access to zero isn't a new idea. After a 2021 supply chain attack showed how much damage long-lived credentials could do, Mercari, Japan's largest consumer-to-consumer marketplace, set a goal of zero standing access to production. Their homegrown system couldn't keep up with changing developer tools, so they moved to Opal. They kept zero standing access to production, extended just-in-time access to more developer tools and productivity apps, and handed off the integration upkeep so their engineers could get back to the actual business.

Databricks has been an Opal customer for years. Before that, running just-in-time access was nearly impossible without adding a lot of overhead. Today, all time-bound and session-based access to their sensitive systems runs through Opal. Now we're working with them to bring the same decisioning to their agents, enforced inside Databricks Unity Gateway. That matters because we won't be everywhere agents run, and we shouldn't have to be. The decision should travel to wherever enforcement already happens.

Where to start

You don't need to buy anything to see where you stand. Pick the agents you have in production and ask:

• Who owns it, and why does it exist?

• Can it reach anything its owner can't?

• How long does its access last, and does that match the task?

• What happens to it when its owner leaves?

If most of your answers are "I'm not sure," you're not alone. Most organizations are still running on vibes.

From episodic to continuous

For most of identity's history, access has run on events. Someone joins, moves, or leaves, and every 90 days we review the access everyone has. Agents need it to be continuous. My whole career, the tradeoff has been the same: more usability meant less security, and vice versa. With AI managing AI, I don't think we have to make that trade anymore. The next time that 11pm agent request comes in, ask yourself how many more like it are already on the way and whether your identity GPU is ready for them.

Thanks to Howard and the Opal team for partnering with TCP on this one. If you’re working out how to govern agent access, Opal Zero is where Paladin lives. Their eng + product teams are top notch. I’ve seen the product in action, and it’s light years ahead of how most teams are handling agent access today.

See Opal Zero in action

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Howdy 👋🏽

I hope you’re having an excellent week! I’m back in the saddle after a pretty heavy past two weeks on the work front. Our BSides NYC Gatsby-themed event crushed it and I also spoke at BSides regarding some of the research we’ve been doing at Monad regarding AI audit logging. People seem to have liked it based on all the feedback. This research will be launched on Amazon next week in the form of a book.

Here’s my BSides recap + my slides are up on Github here. Hit me up if any of this is intriguing to you, always happy to nerd out re: logs, AI, detecting weird or nefarious stuff.

I’ll also be in SF for Unprompted Con next week. Hit me up if you’re in town and would like to grab a coffee, a lift, hike, play padel or vent about the amount of larping in the security space.

That said, let’s get into this past week’s top stories!

🗞️ TLDR

• 🐘 PHP patches critical flaws: Fixes are live for two CVSS 9.2 flaws that can allow unauthenticated code execution.

• 🔑 OpenCode’s Console breach: API keys potentially exposed for 1.4% of Console users; unauthorized charges reported.

• 🩹 Node.js patches a code-execution flaw: High-severity Brotli bug fixed in Node.js 22.23.4, 24.22.1 and 26.12.1.

• 🤝 Proofpoint’s deal for Varonis: Thoma Bravo-backed buyer agrees to a $6.3B acquisition.

• 🗣️ Meta pauses Muse sharing: Researchers found 6,800+ share links through passive DNS, some exposing sensitive information.

• 📜 Weak eMudhra signing keys: Recoverable keys could let forged website certificates pass software’s identity checks.

• 🛠️ Microsoft tightens agent permissions: New controls aim to narrow access as an agent’s task or risk changes.

• 🪪 ServiceNow announces AI Passport: Signed permissions for first- and third-party agents; enforcement integrations remain forthcoming.

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🔥 Picks of the Week

PHP prepares fixes for two critical vulnerabilities

PHP has patched two critical CVSS v4.0 9.2 flaws, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. Fixed versions: 8.2.35, 8.3.36, 8.4.27 and 8.5.12. PHP provides patch and upgrade guidance and download instructions. All unpatched PHP web deployments are at risk; Apache/mod_php can be exploited before application code runs.

Patches arrived ahead of the scheduled 9 a.m. Central release on October 21. Technical details are public too, helping attackers develop exploits while defenders patch.

PHP powers 69.3% of websites whose server-side language W3Techs can identify, including WordPress and Drupal sites. That’s usage, not a vulnerable-site count. You don’t need to write PHP to inherit this headache.

OpenCode Console breached, users report unauthorized AI charges

OpenCode, an open-source AI coding agent for terminals and editors, says a breach may have exposed AI provider keys belonging to 1.4% of its hosted Console users.

Users reported unauthorized AI charges and suspended Google Cloud projects.

This attack has many layers + implications to it. For example, who fits the bill for impacted users? Also, it shows again that you cannot rely on general closed-source models (i.e., claude or chatGPT) for security use cases. You either need access to their “security programs” like Daybreak OR adopt open-weighted models and build security harnesses around them.

Proofpoint agrees to acquire Varonis for $6.3B

Proofpoint, backed by legendary private equity firm Thoma Bravo, has agreed to acquire Varonis in a $6.3B all-cash deal, expected to close in the first half of 2027. Varonis has spent more than two decades building its data security business and is a pioneer in the space. More recently, they have doubled down on AI security and forayed into identity and email security.

The offer represents a 52% premium to its share price before sale rumors surfaced in June. That would be a strong outcome for shareholders and a huge milestone for the founders and team.

Varonis was an early TCP supporter and has sponsored dozen+ of issues over the past two years, including this one. We’re thrilled for them and in a way, feel like a part of their success. Huge congratulations to everyone at Varonis, especially the marketing team ;)!

Here’s a deep dive I wrote on them last year. Visionary-level product and GTM execution by their team.

I haven’t look too much into the acquisition. I do know there’s some overlap in product offerings. Maybe I do a deep dive to better understand the internals of the deal. At the end of the day, this consolidation is good for the data + AI security space and opens up new distribution channels for both teams while bringing together great R&D+eng brains.

Meta suspends Muse sharing after sensitive chats surface through DNS

Meta suspended conversation sharing in Muse after Claroc showed how shared chats could be found through passive DNS. The researchers identified 6,800+ share links and opened a few hundred, finding internal business documents and personal financial information among the pages.

Muse put each conversation’s title and a random identifier in its hostname. Passive DNS recorded both, making the links discoverable without guessing them. After Meta’s change, none of 40 previously accessible shares reopened in Claroc’s checks, though the titles remain in DNS history.

🚨 Threats & Research

Weak eMudhra keys could let fake websites pass identity checks

eMudhra, a trusted issuer of digital certificates, generated eight signing keys so poorly they could be recovered from public certificates. Attackers could use some of those keys to forge website certificates that vulnerable software accepts as genuine.

Major browsers had protections in place, but applications, command-line tools, and devices can carry their own lists of trusted issuers. They may still trust the compromised keys even after a browser update. The incident tracker lists affected software and fixes. Malicious exploitation remains unconfirmed.

Node.js ships fixes for a code-execution bug

Node.js released security updates for versions 22, 24 and 26, including CVE-2026-111497, an out-of-bounds write in its bundled Brotli decoder that can allow remote code execution. Node.js rates it High. Fixes are available in 22.23.4, 24.22.1 and 26.12.1. The advisory does not report active exploitation.

The releases also update Node.js’s trusted certificates after the eMudhra compromise. Node.js needs its own certificate fix even if your browser is already protected.

ConnectWise credentials opened customer Microsoft 365 tenants

Attackers used a compromised ConnectWise application credential to access customers’ Microsoft 365 tenants with permissions already granted to its backup service. Huntress documented further activity in two tenants: a ConnectWise application granted itself Global Administrator, then planted new credentials on other applications to keep access.

Great research by Huntress, per usual.

BeyondTrust detected the attack, then automated triage dismissed it

BeyondTrust says its sensors detected privilege escalation during an intrusion, but a third-party platform’s automated triage closed the alerts as false positives. ARMORY CASTLE had exploited Remote Support zero-day CVE-2026-102764, established persistence, and deleted logs. A later threat hunt uncovered the compromise.

BeyondTrust says it is changing the workflow so automated triage cannot independently close high-severity signals. Mandiant’s analysis includes hunting guidance and YARA rules.

Claude checks its conversations for misuse after responding

Anthropic described how it asks Claude to assess conversations after responding and flags suspicious exchanges for offline review. It reuses the conversation already in memory, adding less than 2% to inference compute, the company estimates.

Anthropic has used it since June to identify conversations for investigation. The company says it cannot reliably stop a dedicated attacker.

ATT&CK v20 adds techniques for AI-enabled attacks

MITRE ATT&CK v20, released October 13, adds direct and indirect prompt injection, AI-enabled exfiltration, AI result poisoning, and interference with autonomous defenses. New campaigns cover attacks on U.S. water utilities and an AI-assisted breach of Mexican government infrastructure.

ICS detection strategies now include platform and asset context, while Mobile strategies account for Android and iOS visibility limits. MITRE also published a machine-readable changelog for updating existing mappings.

🛠️ Security Products & Tools

Microsoft gives AI agents task-limited permissions

Microsoft announced Dynamic Permissions and agent risk controls designed to reduce access during a task, require approval, or stop an agent. These controls would let identity systems change an agent’s permissions mid-task. Its existing tools cover Copilot Studio, Foundry agent identities, and supported local agents through Defender, with runtime protection in Windows preview. Microsoft hasn’t specified where the new controls will be piloted or when each will ship. Entra Conditional Access applies to Entra-protected resources; calls authenticated with API keys bypass those checks.

ServiceNow puts signed permissions on AI agents

ServiceNow announced AI Passport, a signed credential defining what first- and third-party agents and MCP servers may do. Permissions draw on its CMDB, company policies, and workflow approvals; delegated tasks can receive narrower permissions. This extends beyond ServiceNow’s apps, but other platforms must verify and enforce the credential.

Arc, its employee agent for workflows, email and Teams, became generally available on October 21 with OpenShell enforcement. Mac support is live; Windows is expected within weeks. AI Passport and its OpenShell/BlueField enforcement integrations have not shipped.

ThreatModeler launches NexusAI to build and maintain threat models

ThreatModeler launched NexusAI within its Nexus platform. It generates threat models from diagrams, documentation, and written prompts, analyzes threats and security requirements, and proposes updates for human review when architecture changes. That could keep threat models current between security reviews.

Snyk adds agents for code reviews and fixes

Snyk‘s Evo Agentic AppSec agents scan code, block malicious or disallowed packages during installation, review repositories, and propose fixes. Snyk says results are checked independently of the agent that produced them. Automated fixes initially cover open-source dependencies. Changes that could break a build require approval. Code scanning, the dependency firewall, and security reviews are experimental previews for selected customers; automated fixes are in open preview.

GitHub puts a firewall in front of package installs

GitHub launched a package firewall in public preview for Enterprise Cloud, initially covering npm. It checks package requests from developer machines, coding agents, and CI runners for malware, known vulnerabilities, minimum package age, and supply-chain changes. Like Snyk’s dependency firewall, protection applies only to requests routed through it.

MISP 3.0 connects the evidence across events

MISP 3.0 entered early access with indicator pages that pull together sightings, relationships, sources, and enrichment across events. Analyst Profiles let users weight sources and signals for their role; new graph tools support pivots and investigations that can be saved and shared. The API remains backward compatible, and instances can still sync with 2.5. Early access is for test instances only, with a one-way database migration.

💰 Industry, Funding & M&A

Opaque’s team is joining Anthropic, Cohere has proposed buying AISLE, and OpenAI is reportedly in talks to buy Trail of Bits. Security vendors could end up buying models from companies that also compete with them.

Cohere proposes acquiring AISLE

Cohere announced a proposed agreement to acquire AISLE and establish Cohere Cyber, led by Ondrej Vlcek. AISLE builds systems that find software vulnerabilities, verify them, and help fix them. Cohere also wants to use that research to test and improve its models.

Opaque’s team joins Anthropic

Opaque announced on October 13 that its team is joining Anthropic and the company is winding down. Its technology protects sensitive data while AI workloads run and produces cryptographic proof of what ran. That brings a different kind of security expertise into a model lab than AISLE’s vulnerability research.

OpenAI reportedly explores buying Trail of Bits

The Information reported on October 13 that OpenAI is in early talks to acquire Trail of Bits. The firms already collaborate on verifying vulnerabilities and developing patches.

Horizon3.ai passes $100M ARR

Horizon3.ai has surpassed $100M in ARR, growing more than 120% year over year roughly five years after reaching $1M. The company says approximately 80% of customers have moved from annual to monthly pentesting.

This team and product are the real deal. Big milestone just as the autonomous pentesting landscape heats up w/ new entrants like Armadin + XBOW.

Also, I must call out that Horizon3 is a past sponsor. Proud to work with such a great team! 🔥

Blackwall raises $100M to expand security through hosting providers

AVP led the Series C at a $2.2B valuation. Blackwall lets hosting providers bundle bot mitigation, DDoS protection, and web application security into their existing services. That reaches customers who may never shop for a standalone security platform.

Harmonic raises $50M for workforce AI security

Crosspoint Capital led the Series B, bringing total funding to $76M. Harmonic uses small language models to examine what employees do with AI across browsers, desktop tools, and agent workflows. It aims to distinguish harmless references to sensitive data from actual exposure and apply controls based on the activity.

Pluto emerges from stealth with $42M in total funding

Pluto emerged on October 13, focused on the AI tools, coding assistants, MCP connections, extensions, and custom workflows employees assemble themselves. An approved app list can miss the risks employees create by connecting tools and giving those workflows access to company data.

Opsin raises $21M to govern AI agent behavior

SYN Ventures and Race Capital led the funding. Opsin maps agents, their permissions, connected tools, and actions, then uses those relationships to detect and contain policy violations.

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Howdy 👋 Checking in quickly here as I’m still riding the high from this past weekend in NYC for BSides! I remember attending BSides Boston while still a junior in college. It’s a place where folks across all career levels come together to learn, give back, and just be. That community feel is a big part of what keeps me coming back.

BSides NYC was extra special because I got to present some of the AI audit log research we’ve been working on at Monad AND we received copies of our refreshed book, which lands on Amazon tomorrow! Keep an eye out for TCP #150 for more on that!

We also hosted a Gatsby-themed Roaring Twenties pre-game on Friday night. More on that below.

On the personal front, last week was packed. Mom’s birthday, meeting our newborn niece, travel, announcing Andrew Richards as TCP’s new contributing writer, and finally getting to hang out with him. All of this on top of event planning, book + presentation shenanigans. One of the busier weeks of the year for me.

Following the AI Audit Trail

AI logs in 2026 feel a lot like cloud logs did in 2019.

The tools keep changing, and so do their logs. New fields, products being merged (i.e., Claude Cowork x Claude unified). Lots of quirks across providers, data types, and the tools behave + record activity differently so understanding the nuances are key to defending your org.

At Monad, we’ve been working through what each source records, how to collect it, and which fields help with detection, response, and investigations. That research also feeds into the we’re launching tomorrow.

Talk slides are up on Github. We covered:

• What agents can access. Agents can read local files, run commands, and call cloud or SaaS APIs using the permissions and credentials available to them.

• What each log records. Platform audit logs show account, API key, and policy changes. Runtime events show tool calls and approval decisions. Transcripts show prompts and responses. Endpoint logs help confirm which commands ran and which files changed.

• How to collect the logs. Required plans, permissions, and settings vary by tool. Client telemetry needs to be enabled before the activity happens. You can’t turn it on afterward and recover the missing events.

• How to connect related events in Claude Code. session.id groups events from one session. prompt.id groups events from one prompt. tool_use_id connects a tool call’s approval decision with its result.

• Why blocked commands matter. Claude Code records rejected calls in tool_decision, without a corresponding tool_result. If you only search tool results, you miss those rejected attempts.

For the demo, I asked Claude Code to copy a fake credentials file. I approved one attempt, rejected another, and let auto mode handle a third. We compared the logs from each run.

The morning after I ran those scenarios, Claude Code added two new fields to its OpenTelemetry tool_decision events: classifier_verdict and permission_mode.

So I got to update the slides and prove my own point at the same time.. AI audit logging moves fast.

I also poked a little fun at Gemini for Workspace’s audit logging. Those activity logs show where Gemini was invoked from (i.e., Drive, Gmail, Sheets) and who did it, but don’t include the prompts and responses. Afterward, I got a message from a TPM who’d been in the crowd. Always fun finding out the vendor was in the room lol.

Big shout-out to Kenneth Kaye, Valerie Worman, Matt Jane, and Curtis Redgate for their contributions to the research + book.

Full transparency, I still get quite a bit of jitters and often ask myself “why did I sign up for this?” before speaking to a large crowd. I’m always happy with the result + conversations after and it does help me build that muscle, but I think 2-3 talks per year is a good sweet spot for me lol.

Friday night at Bar Bas

Before the conference, we got everyone together at Bar Bas for our Roaring Twenties pre-game. The room was swanky, people had fun with the theme, and I got to finally meet folks I’d only known online.

I loved getting to hang out, catch up, and dance a little after all the planning that went into it. Thank you to everyone who came through!

Huge thank-you to Runlayer, C1, Monad, Scanner, TachTech, and Surf AI for helping make it happen, and to Cyversity NYC for joining us as our community partner.

Afterward, we headed to dinner to celebrate the birthday of my dear friend Christian, Monad’s CEO.

Books + the rest of BSides

We gave away copies of the book throughout the weekend, and getting to physically hand it to people was pretty special after spending so much time working on it.

I spent most of the rest of Saturday hanging with friends. Didn’t catch as many talks as I wanted to, unfortunately, but I’m grateful for the time I got with everyone.

Huge love to the BSides NYC organizers, volunteers, and speakers for putting this together. And to the folks who started BSides, including Jack Daniel. It’s pretty cool to think about going from a college student attending BSides to sharing our own research with this community years later.

And to anyone working on BSides Austin: please bring it back soon. ASAP, ideally lol. We need more of this at home.

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Howdy, TCP readers! 👋🏽

Andrew here, co-writing this week’s TCP with Darwin. I recently welcomed Milo, my first-ever puppy, into the family. We’re both learning as we go.

There’s a lot of setting boundaries and wondering why my very clear instructions weren’t followed. Familiar territory for anyone working with AI agents. Milo gets away with more, though. Look at that face.

Darwin jumping in! I got to hang out with Andrew and meet Milo while we worked on this issue together. He’s 11 weeks old so a big zoomies guy at the moment.

Also, what a week so far for TCP partners and it’s only Wednesday! C1 has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Workday, and Calcalist reports CrowdStrike is in talks to acquire Orion Security for around $500M.

Huge congrats to my friend Alex and the rest of the C1 team! And if the Orion deal actually happens, that’s a strong outcome for a category (DLP) that was ‘dead’ just a few years ago.

NYC crew, we’ll both be at The Roaring Twenties, our Gatsby-themed party this Friday, October 16, and BSides NYC on Saturday. I’ll be presenting on AI audit logs and what’s possible with them. Come hang with us!

Let’s get into it 👇🏽

Your coding agent is lying to you. Politely.

Every artifact a coding agent hands you reads secure. The spec names the right control, the comment cites OWASP, the test has the right name. Whether any of it is wired to anything is a separate question, and the agent never answers it.
Clover's Sweet Spot or Sweet Talk puts five of those artifacts in front of you, one call each. Some hold, some only sound like they do. Your agent merged one of these last week and nobody checked. See if you would have.

Catch it yourself

🗞️ TL;DR

• 🛒 Supermarket fridges get hacked: Attackers cranked up temperatures at French supermarkets, spoiling food and reportedly causing fires.

• 🏹 XBOW wins $250K bounty: Four researchers and AI agents built a full Chrome exploit chain in six days.

• 🔓 Ivanti gets hit again: Attackers chained zero-days to compromise fully patched VPNs and slip past integrity checks.

• 🩹 Microsoft patches 1,411 bugs: Three were zero-days. One Windows Shell flaw was already being exploited.

• 📋 Rippling expands compliance: ISO, HIPAA, and custom frameworks join SOC 2, with AI-powered fixes for compliance gaps.

• 🤝 Workday signs C1 deal: Workday wants to manage what employees and AI agents can access across company apps.

• 💰 Orion could join CrowdStrike: Calcalist reports acquisition talks around $500M for the DLP startup. No deal announced yet.

• ⚛️ IonQ strikes Elisity deal: The quantum computing company agreed to buy the microsegmentation vendor for up to $1.3B.

⚒️ Picks of the Week

Hackers turn up the heat on French supermarkets

Hackers got into refrigeration systems at French supermarkets and cranked up the temperatures, spoiling inventory and reportedly starting fires. Intermarché says about 150 stores were hit, with some units reportedly reaching 50°C (122°F).

France’s CERT-FR says internet-exposed refrigeration controllers from several major manufacturers are being compromised.

When we talk OT security, it’s usually power plants and factories. Few folks think about the frozen foods aisle. But the same unglamorous connected gear keeps everyday businesses running, and when it gets popped, the damage is physical and immediate. Spoiled stock and, reportedly, actual fires. I wonder what the estimated losses and recovery costs are for something this niche but at the scale of ~150 locations.

XBOW builds a full Chrome exploit chain, wins $250K

XBOW built a full Chrome exploit chain in six days with AI agents and four experienced researchers, and walked away with a $250,000 Google bug bounty. The bugs are patched.

The AI analyzed source code, tested hypotheses, built PoCs, and drafted exploits. The humans set the strategy, split the chain into independent pieces, and changed course when Google flagged one bug as already known. XBOW says it spent about $40,000 in compute costs, not counting researcher time or dev costs.

The headline isn’t “AI writes Chrome exploits now.” It’s that four people who know Chrome’s internals cold used AI to ship a full chain in under a week. The expertise is the multiplier. The agents just make it go faster.

What 500 security leaders think about AI pentesting

More than half of security teams already use AI pentesting across their environment, and fewer than 1% have no plans to try it. What matters most to them comes down to data privacy, safety on live systems, and being able to check the work.

Intruder's State of AI Pentesting 2026 report surveyed 500 security and engineering leaders to find out how far adoption has come, what leaders want from it, and what the future holds for manual testing.

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Ivanti zero-days let attackers compromise fully patched VPN appliances

Volexity caught attackers chaining three zero-days in Ivanti Connect Secure for unauthenticated root access, even on fully patched appliances.

The actor, tracked as UTA0576, strung together an auth bypass, RCE, and privilege escalation, then went after credentials, Active Directory, LAPS, and BitLocker recovery data.

^{Volexity’s memory forensics tool identifies suspicious cached files on a compromised Ivanti Connect Secure appliance. Source: Volexity Research}

The scary part is the cleanup. They wiped log entries, restored modified components in memory, and left nothing persistent for Ivanti’s Integrity Checker to find. Translation: a box can pass the integrity check and still be owned.

Ivanti released fixes for the auth bypass and RCE on October 13. The privilege escalation fix was still pending when Volexity published, but Volexity did drop IOCs and forensic guidance. If you run Connect Secure, that’s your weekend reading.

Your compliance tool can show you what’s broken. Can AI fix it?

When Rippling launched SOC 2 support in April, I thought it was brilliant. They are the HR, payroll, IT, and finance hub for 30K+ customers so handling SOC 2 was a natural fit. My only lingering question was, “will they continue to invest in compliance or stop at SOC 2?”

Well they’ve just launched their Automated Compliance product and it supports ISO, HIPAA, and custom frameworks, with broader integration coverage, built-in auditor portals, and Trust Centers.

It helps teams set up frameworks, collect evidence, fix issues with AI-powered remediation, and share proof with customers. Less time chasing evidence means audits and deals can keep moving. If you’ve had a deal held up by compliance, you get the appeal.

See Rippling in action

The FBI disrupts Chinese hacking infrastructure. Again.

The DOJ and FBI seized seven domains tied to hacking tools allegedly run by Integrity Technology Group, a Beijing-based security company linked to Chinese state-sponsored operations. The tools were reportedly used for scanning, phishing, and going after critical infrastructure.

This isn’t their first run-in. In 2024, the FBI took down a botnet tied to the same company that spanned more than 200,000 compromised devices.

So the real question: are takedowns actually degrading capability, or just forcing them to buy new domains? The people and tradecraft behind these campaigns are still there.

Workday to acquire C1.ai

Workday signed a definitive agreement to acquire C1.ai, the identity governance platform for employees and AI agents. Terms weren’t disclosed, and the deal is expected to close by January 31, 2027.

This is a brilliant move imo. Workday did about $9.5B in revenue last fiscal year and counts more than 11,500 customers, including over 65% of the Fortune 500. It already owns the source of truth for who works where. Plug C1’s access controls into that lifecycle data and Workday’s agent registry, and provisioning and deprovisioning happen automatically when people change roles or agents get spun up and retired. For C1, it’s instant distribution into a customer base most security startups can only dream of.

The bigger thread: HR and identity are merging. Whoever owns the employee record wants to own access too. Rippling built its whole platform on that bet, and now Workday is buying its way in. We’ll prob see more HR providers follow.

The flip side: it opens a gap in IGA. One of the strongest independent players in the category now belongs to an HR platform, and competitors will pounce. Acquisitions are always tough on customers because they bring uncertainty around roadmap, pricing, support, and whether non-Workday shops stay a priority. Expect rivals in C1 customers’ inboxes this week :)

🔬 Threats & Research

Microsoft patches 1,411 vulnerabilities in October update

Microsoft’s October Patch Tuesday fixed 1,411 vulnerabilities, including 70 critical and three zero-days. The one to care about is CVE-2026-96951, which is actively exploited and lets attackers slip past Windows Shell’s Mark of the Web protections, aka the warnings you get on files downloaded from the internet. The other two were publicly disclosed but not reported as exploited.

SlugFest exposes npm Trusted Publishing takeover risk

Researchers disclosed SlugFest, a weakness in npm Trusted Publishing that could let attackers publish malicious package versions without ever touching a maintainer’s account.

The root cause is configs that trust GitHub repo names instead of immutable repo IDs. Rename or transfer a repo, and an attacker can grab the old name and inherit its publishing trust.

GitHub now expires unvalidated configurations. Older trust relationships could still be exposed, so this one may have a long tail.

Critical GitLab flaw turns CI/CD configs into RCE

Rapid7 disclosed CVE-2026-97229, a critical unauthenticated RCE in self-managed GitLab CE/EE that’s triggered through malicious CI/CD configuration files.

^{Affected GitLab versions and fixes for CVE-2026-97229. Source: Rapid7}

The catch is that an attacker has to get a crafted config into a project’s pipeline. Pull that off and they get code execution inside the GitLab application process, plus whatever credentials and data the server can reach.

Fixes are out. GitLab.com and GitLab Dedicated customers don’t need to do anything.

Tampered Ledger wallets reportedly phoned home with recovery phrases

Ledger says hardware wallets sold through reseller CryptoBilis were physically modified with extra components that could send wallet recovery info out over a mobile network.

This isn’t phishing. Someone tampered with the hardware before customers ever touched it. The wallet software is fine. The supply chain wasn’t.

And no, not every Ledger is compromised. Just the ones that took a detour through this reseller.

Meta GitHub breach exposes source code and personal data

Meta disclosed that attackers used compromised employee credentials to get into GitHub repos holding source code and personal data tied to about 1,500 individuals.

GitHub itself wasn’t breached. This is a developer identity problem: one set of stolen creds opened up both proprietary code and sensitive data. Meta says the affected accounts are now secured.

Booz Allen pointed AI agents at industrial systems. They went 8 for 8.

Booz Allen Hamilton ran frontier AI models through eight scenarios in a controlled OT lab, and the models hit all eight objectives. One moved a robotic arm within minutes. Another went from network compromise to industrial control actions in just over 16 minutes. Humans had to approve exploitation and physical actions, so this isn’t a fully autonomous real-world attack. It is a preview of how fast one could move.

FakeGit wakes up thousands of malicious GitHub repos

^{FakeGit/SmartLoader attack flow showing how malicious GitHub repositories distribute malware and steal credentials. Source: Apiiro Research}

Apiiro found 17,610 repositories tied to FakeGit, a malware campaign that uses legit-looking GitHub projects to get developers to download malicious ZIP files. More than 13,000 of those repos were updated within 34 hours to point downloads at SmartLoader, which can drop the StealC infostealer. The kicker: the attackers mostly reused existing repos instead of making new ones, which is exactly why they look trustworthy.

🤝 Funding & M&A

CrowdStrike reportedly in talks to buy Orion Security for $500M

CrowdStrike is reportedly in advanced talks to buy Israeli startup Orion Security for about $500 million, per Calcalist. Nothing’s been announced yet.

Orion does AI-powered DLP that looks at context, like who the user is, how sensitive the data is, and what they’re trying to do, instead of leaning only on predefined rules.

It would stack on top of CrowdStrike’s earlier Flow Security buy and keep building out its data security lineup.

XM Cyber cuts ~250 jobs after CrowdStrike tech deal

XM Cyber is reportedly laying off about 250 employees in Israel after CrowdStrike picked up its technology, per Calcalist, which puts the deal at roughly $600 million. Neither company has confirmed that number.

XM Cyber does continuous exposure management, mapping attack paths across enterprise environments. CrowdStrike is buying the tech, not the whole company, and the layoffs come with that transition.

IonQ to acquire Elisity for up to $1.3B

Quantum computing company IonQ is acquiring Elisity, a zero-trust company focused on identity-based network microsegmentation, in an all-stock deal worth up to $1.3 billion (including up to $150 million in contingent consideration).

A quantum company buying a microsegmentation vendor wasn’t on my bingo card, but it adds network access controls to IonQ’s security portfolio. Still subject to closing conditions.

Reach Security raises $50M+ to fix the security tools you already own

Reach Security raised more than $50 million in Series B funding for its AI-powered security remediation platform.

Reach isn’t another detection tool. It finds and fixes gaps in the stack you already own: misconfigurations, disabled controls, half-finished deployments.

The new money goes toward autonomous remediation. How autonomous it really gets will come down to the integrations and permissions customers are willing to hand over.

📦 Security Products & AI

Anthropic launches a free vuln scanner for open-source maintainers

Anthropic launched OSS Scanner, a free, opt-in service that uses Claude to find vulnerabilities in open-source projects and send maintainers reports. No human researcher reviews the findings before they go out, so maintainers still have to validate them. Free triage, not free answers.

Tenable wants to vet your MCP servers

^{Tenable's AI Inspector evaluates AI agents, skills, and MCP servers for security risks. Source: Tenable}

Tenable added AI Inspector to its CyberAgents Exchange. It vets AI agents, skills, and MCP servers for security risks before they’re deployed, using a mix of automated analysis, AI-assisted inspection, and human review. Someone had to start checking what’s getting plugged into these agents.

Firefox goes enterprise

Mozilla launched Firefox Enterprise, adding centralized management for organizations, including a self-hosted console for browser policies and deployment.

It’s aimed at teams that want to manage Firefox across their fleet without going all-in on cloud-based admin.

Sophos takes on shadow AI

Sophos launched AI Defense, now generally available, to help organizations find and govern employee use of AI tools. It shows which AI apps are in use, monitors interactions, and applies policies to limit sensitive data exposure.

Shadow AI is the new shadow IT, and Sophos wants in. It says AI Defense can enforce controls in real time. The real test is coverage.

Rubrik’s Claude-powered Code Guardian hits private preview

Rubrik announced Code Guardian, a Claude-powered code auditing tool under Project Hourglass, now in private preview.

It scans source code for vulnerabilities inside isolated environments, so the code never gets exposed to outside systems. Rubrik is pitching it as part of securing AI-assisted development.

Not GA yet, and there are no independent numbers on how well it actually catches bugs.

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Howdy 👋🏽

I hope you’re having an excellent week! It’s been a very, very long one for me as I’m currently refreshing the AI Tooling Visibility book and getting it ready for Amazon storefront. More on that soon!

Quick reminder for my NYC folks: I’m speaking at BSides NYC on October 17 about AI tooling logs and what we can actually detect with them. Tickets are pay what you can. We’re also throwing a Gatsby-themed party in Midtown the night before. Looking forward to seeing some of you there!

We’ve got plenty to cover this week. Let’s get to it.

🗞️ TL;DR

• 🏆 Pwn2Own hits AI infrastructure: Day one brought 32 zero-days, with wins against Codex, LiteLLM, and Oracle’s AI database.

• 💰 Armadin adds another round: The company announced a $255.5M Series B at a valuation above $2.5B.

• 📬 Google pauses part of its open-source bounty: New product-vulnerability submissions stopped after a flood of mostly invalid automated reports.

• 🛠️ NetScaler needs another patch: Attackers are exploiting another flaw in NetScaler systems configured for SAML authentication.

• 🧾 Attackers test stolen AWS keys: Datadog shows how attackers check whether stolen credentials let them use AI models through Amazon Bedrock.

We also hit on LLM safety bypasses, detection-rule performance, and private networking for people and AI agents.

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See Varonis Agent IBAC in Action

⚒️ Picks of the Week

Researchers exploit Codex, LiteLLM, and Oracle at Pwn2Own

Pwn2Own Ireland’s opening day produced 32 zero-days and $388,500 in awards across the day’s targets, BleepingComputer reports. The competition, run by Zero Day Initiative, pays researchers to demonstrate working exploits against real products in a controlled setting.

AI tooling featured heavily. Ikotas Labs earned $40,000 for an argument-injection exploit against OpenAI Codex. Taisic Yun of Xint earned another $40,000 by chaining input-validation and code-injection flaws in LiteLLM to obtain a reverse shell, giving the researcher remote command access.

A second LiteLLM exploit used four bugs, two of them previously known, and earned Out of Bounds $15,000. VinSOC also combined five bugs against Oracle Autonomous AI Database for a $40,000 win.

Google pauses part of its open-source bug bounty

Google stopped accepting new product-vulnerability submissions to its Open Source Software Vulnerability Reward Program after a surge in automated reports, most of them invalid. Supply-chain submissions and pending reports are unaffected. An update is promised for Q1 2027, without a reopening date.

Other programs have changed their rules, too. curl ended cash bounties earlier this year after a flood of low-quality AI reports. GitHub tightened public submissions using researchers’ report-quality scores, with limited initial submissions for newcomers. Both still accept vulnerability reports.

A separate Google Threat Intelligence Group report found that monthly vuln disclosures climbed from 5,045 in January to 10,740 in August. Observed exploitation also increased, with attackers continuing to target network appliances and internet-facing enterprise services.

CrowdStrike bypasses LLM safety checks by splitting up requests

CrowdStrike tested roughly 515 techniques against a frontier LLM’s safety classifier, which checks requests before they reach the main model. None of the direct attacks got through. The researchers then tried asking for smaller pieces of code separately.

Each request looked like ordinary software work and passed the safety check. The researchers gave the responses to a smaller model without that classifier, which combined them into working offensive code. One example was a program that injects code into another Windows process.

The method worked in nine of 10 tested ATT&CK-aligned categories. Attempts to disable security hooks used to monitor running programs were still blocked. The classifier screened each request separately and never saw the completed attack code. Microsoft’s separate capability-laundering study describes a related pattern.

DIVD details its Zammad breach

The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure confirmed that volunteer email addresses were stolen in last month’s breach of Zammad, an open-source helpdesk that organizes support requests and conversations into tickets.

The attacker combined one flaw that allowed remote code execution with another that granted higher privileges. DIVD believes an autonomous AI agent carried out the attack, based on the scripts and behavior it observed. It has not identified the operator or model.

Zammad’s advisory says the remote flaw is exploitable on unsupported 6.5-and-earlier releases, while 7.0+ is not affected in practice. Version 7.2 adds hardening. A fix for the separate privilege-escalation issue is still in progress.

🔬 Threats & Research

NetScaler needs another patch

Attackers are exploiting CVE-2026-88779 in customer-managed NetScaler ADC and Gateway systems configured as a SAML service provider or identity provider. The memory-overflow flaw can crash the service. Remote code execution has not been confirmed.

Last week’s patches don’t cover it. The new bulletin lists the updated builds.

FortiMail’s encryption interface is under attack

Fortinet says attackers are exploiting CVE-2026-104286, a CVSS 9.8 flaw in FortiMail’s Identity Based Encryption interface. It lets an attacker write files to the system without signing in, potentially leading to code execution.

The current advisory provides affected-build information and the latest patch and mitigation status.

Cisco patches another SD-WAN authentication bypass

Cisco confirms exploitation of CVE-2026-76504, which lets unauthenticated attackers reach administrative SD-WAN Manager APIs through crafted requests.

Fixed releases are available. The temporary Live Protect mitigation covers some attack paths and does not replace the update.

GitLab patches an AI Gateway sandbox escape

GitLab fixed CVE-2026-90970 in its AI Gateway. A signed-in user with Duo Agent Platform access could use a custom-flow prompt template to break out of its sandbox and execute code on a self-hosted gateway.

Versions 19.2.4, 19.3.2, and 19.4.1 contain the fix; GitLab-hosted gateways were already patched.

Attackers test stolen AWS keys for access to AI models

Datadog analyzed scripts that check whether exposed AWS keys can access models through Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s managed AI service. They list available models across regions and send small test requests to check whether the credentials work. One sends “ping” and limits the response to four tokens.

Researchers saw similar malicious activity at 12 organizations over 30 days, but could not link those incidents to the specific scripts they analyzed. The report lists the API calls involved and links to detection rules.

📦 Security Products & AI

Wiz launches AI code scanning with cloud context

Wiz AI SAST is in public preview for Wiz Code customers. The scanner uses AI to find business-logic flaws, including missing ownership checks that let one user read another’s data. The Wiz Security Graph links findings to the affected cloud resources and their permissions.

Wiz also rechecks earlier findings and merges reports about the same underlying bug, even when the AI describes it differently on the next scan. Teams can track one issue through to a fix instead of reviewing it as a new finding each time.

AWS reports an 89% score on a benchmark for finding and fixing bugs

AWS says Continuum for code vulnerabilities completed 819 of 920 CyberGym-E2E tasks (89%) within 90 minutes each. To pass, it had to find a bug, demonstrate it, and produce a patch that kept the project’s tests passing.

The benchmark tests memory-safety flaws in C/C++ projects. Each task has a known target vulnerability, but the 89% score also counts successful fixes to other valid bugs the agent finds. Continuum fixed the designated target in 37.8% of tasks. The product remains in gated preview.

Apple plans tighter Full Disk Access controls

Apple announced additional macOS controls that will require more explicit user action before granting Full Disk Access.

The announcement gives no release date, macOS version, or implementation details.

Google and Mistral expand access for cyber defenders

Google began rolling out Gemini 4 Argon to trusted defenders through Fairwind, promising access without cyber guardrails for those partners and its internal teams. Broader availability is still ahead.

Mistral’s Large 4 is now in public API preview, with separate reduced-moderation testing for vetted cyber partners. Open weights are planned for later this month.

Legit adds automated fixes for vulnerable dependencies

Legit Security expanded its remediation agent to vulnerable dependencies.

The agent updates dependency versions and lockfiles, then rescans to check that the vulnerability is fixed before opening a pull request. For upgrades that may break the application, it also proposes code changes. Those code changes are assessed by AI; the dependency rescan does not verify that the application still works.

🤝 Funding & M&A

Armadin raises $255.5M

Armadin announced a $255.5M Series B, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, for its autonomous security platform.

The company puts its valuation above $2.5B. Its AI agents continuously test systems for weaknesses and attempt to exploit them.

Hadrian adds $40M for offensive security

Hadrian raised $40M in a round co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin.

The company finds internet-facing assets and tests whether their weaknesses can be exploited. The funding will support platform development and international expansion.

doxx.net raises $38M and opens its private networking beta

doxx.net launched its open beta alongside a $38M Series A led by a16z.

It lets people and AI agents connect devices in private networks, make encrypted calls, and transfer files directly between peers. Agents can set up connections and firewall rules through its API and MCP support. DNS filtering helps block connections to malicious sites.

Founder Barrett Lyon previously built Prolexic, an early DDoS-protection company acquired by Akamai. He also founded BitGravity, acquired by Tata Communications, and Defense.net, acquired by F5. His launch post recalls working with the FBI in 2003 as an online casino faced DDoS extortion demands. He’s spent more than two decades building and defending networks.

Collibra acquires trail ML

Collibra announced its acquisition of trail ML. The software helps companies turn AI policies into checks, collect evidence, and assess whether their AI systems meet those requirements.

Collibra says trail ML also helps enforce rules on AI agents. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Osavul raises €8.5M for hybrid-threat intelligence

Osavul raised an €8.5M Series A led by 33N Ventures.

Its intelligence platform covers information operations, cyber threats, and physical threats. The funding supports expansion into enterprises and critical infrastructure.

Other funding: Netsec raised more than $10M for combined IT and security operations, while Fleuret AI raised €4M in pre-seed funding for agentic pentesting.

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Howdy 👋🏽

Last issue of September already… bananas! Before we get into it, three things for my East Coast folks:

• I’m speaking at BSides NYC on October 17 about native logging and detection opportunities in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other AI tooling.

• BSides NYC is ‘pay what you can’ this year. Grab a ticket, chip in what works for you, and come hang with the NYC security community! Big kudos to the organizers! ❤️‍🔥

• The night before, TCP, Monad, Scanner and friends are hosting The Roaring Twenties, a Gatsby-themed evening in Midtown from 6–9 p.m. on October 16. Request an invite if you’ll be around. I’ll probably be DJ’ng a bit so would love to see you there!

🎁 Also, our partner Fencer is giving away two free pentests each week through November 1. TCP readers can enter at the link.

😬 Meme of the Week

Look, I’m a loyal Delta SkyMiles member but this is a pretty accurate, timely and brutal burn. Excellent roast EQ and form from Elon here. Credit where credit is due.

🗞️ TL;DR

• 🧱 NVIDIA limits AI agents: New software and hardware controls restrict the files, tools, and networks agents can access.

• 🧩 Microsoft adds SIEM features: Defender’s ISOC preview adds case management, automation, and third-party log ingestion for eligible customers.

• 🪤 ShinyHunters targets unpatched PeopleSoft: Attackers bypassed WAF rules; Dutch police separately announced an arrest linked to the group.

• 🪵 CriblCon brings two announcements: Cribl officially enters SIEM space; StreamAI will add model routing, budgets, and data controls.

• 🗑️ Azure attack deletes storage: Microsoft reports 100-plus deletion attempts at one unnamed customer; most targeted accounts were deleted.

• 💬 ZeroDrift checks AI messages: Anchor 3.0 checks communications against company policies and regulatory rules before delivery.

• 💰 Island raises another $400M: Its Series F funds expansion beyond browsers into endpoint, network, and AI security.

• 💸 Reco adds fresh funding: The $55M round supports its expansion from SaaS security into AI agent security.

Plus: prompt injections that spread, a shutdown lifted, and a startup tackling shared employee-agent identities.

The Path to Complete Log Visibility

Most security teams can afford to monitor only about 10% of their telemetry in a SIEM, and attackers are finding their way through the rest.

Scanner CEO Cliff Crosland calls it federated indexing: read every log once, wherever it lives, and index it all in one place. Learn how it works, how it compares to data lakes and federated search, and what it takes to monitor 100% of your logs.

Federated Indexing Explained

⚒️ Picks of the Week

NVIDIA launches controls to restrict AI agents

NVIDIA’s new Open Agent Safety Platform pairs software that restricts AI agents with a reference design for hardware that can stop them.

OpenShell runs agents in sandboxes and restricts access to files, networks, tools, processes, and credentials. It is open source and available now. NVIDIA says the runtime can be extended to third-party CPUs; the separate hardware monitoring layer depends on BlueField.

Sentry, the optional hardware layer, runs on BlueField-4 DPUs, separate from the agent’s host. NVIDIA’s reference design places it between the agent and its model, where it can monitor activity and cut access.

I guess NVIDIA got tired of the sandbox breakout theater we’ve been living in 🤷🏽‍♂️

Cribl announces a SIEM and AI gateway at CriblCon

Cribl announced Detect, its own SIEM, and StreamAI, an AI gateway, at this week’s CriblCon.

Detect runs detections in data pipelines, searches existing data stores, and adds AI-assisted triage and response. It’s available now for Cribl.Cloud customers. This is the roll-up from their CardinalOps and recent AI SOC acquisitions.

StreamAI will route model requests, enforce budgets, etc. It’s coming soon.

Cribl now competes with the SIEM vendors its pipelines feed and is entering the AI observability space.

Microsoft adds SIEM features to Defender

Microsoft launched the ISOC preview in Defender, adding case management, automation, and SIEM capabilities in one portal.

The preview is limited to eligible Defender Suite, Microsoft 365 E5, and E7 customers without an active Sentinel workspace. Microsoft warns against disconnecting a production Sentinel workspace to qualify (lol).

Case management, workbooks, and natural-language playbook generation work without creating an ISOC workspace. Third-party ingestion and UEBA require one.

The appeal is fewer handoffs between finding a threat and stopping it. Microsoft is bringing more of that workflow into tools its customers already pay for. Even outside Microsoft environments, that puts pressure on standalone SIEM and automation vendors to show what their extra cost buys. The real test is how well the integrated experience works across a customer’s full stack.

ShinyHunters bypasses PeopleSoft defenses; Dutch police announce an arrest

Mandiant found ShinyHunters exploiting unpatched Oracle PeopleSoft servers by changing /PSEMHUB/ to /%50SEMHUB/. That encoded character bypassed WAF rules. The WAF checked the URL before decoding; PeopleSoft decoded it and served the vulnerable endpoint. Researchers found web shells on dozens of systems.

Oracle patched CVE-2026-35273 on June 10. These organizations had blocked the endpoint but left the vulnerable software running.

ShinyHunters also claims it used PeopleSoft to access FBI data. Reuters couldn’t corroborate that claim, and the FBI says the entry point remains undetermined.

Separately, Dutch police announced the September 15 arrest of a 24-year-old Amsterdam man suspected of involvement in ShinyHunters. They did not link him to either intrusion.

JADEPUFFER uses stolen Azure credentials to delete customer cloud resources

Microsoft says JADEPUFFER, tracked as Storm-3168, compromised two service principals at one unnamed Azure customer in June.

The attacker made 100-plus storage-account deletion attempts in roughly seven minutes. Most targeted accounts were deleted. Resource locks and deletion protection blocked some attempts; an unsupported API version stopped the SQL deletions.

Microsoft observed credential collection but did not confirm data exfiltration or observe a ransom note. A service-principal secret had appeared in a public GitHub issue, but Microsoft could not confirm that as the entry point.

🔬 Threats & Research

OpenAI agent bypassed internet restrictions through DNS

OpenAI says a research agent used its sandbox’s DNS resolver to contact an external chatbot after direct web access failed. Monitoring flagged the September 20 incident within 15 minutes, but the automatic stop failed. A person began reviewing the alert; the run continued for another 2.5 hours before it was stopped manually.

OpenAI has since added two layers of blocking.

Attackers exploit NetScaler gateways to reach internal networks

Mandiant found attackers exploiting Citrix NetScaler to gain root access, install backdoors, and tunnel into internal networks for reconnaissance and credential theft. The campaign has been active since at least early September.

NetScaler often handles remote access to internal applications, making a compromised gateway a useful entry point. Citrix has patched two actively exploited flaws, CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772.

Great work from the Mandiant team on this one. The report includes practical hunting guidance and detection ideas to help defenders look for this activity in their own environments.

Prompt injections spread through agents’ outgoing messages

OpenAI demonstrated prompt injections that trick agents into copying malicious instructions into outgoing emails, files, and code comments. Another agent can then read those instructions and repeat the attack.

CISA ends its weekly vulnerability bulletin

CISA ended its weekly Vulnerability Bulletin on September 28. It directs readers to KEV, advisories, and vendor notices. Email subscribers need to select replacement topics in their subscription preferences.

📦 Security Product Releases

ZeroDrift releases Anchor 3.0 to check AI communications

ZeroDrift released Anchor 3.0, three small language models that check AI communications against regulatory and company rules before delivery. The flagship model identifies offending lines and rewrites them.

Checking messages before they leave gives teams a chance to catch policy violations before an agent speaks for the business. The rewrite needs scrutiny too: removing a prohibited claim shouldn’t change what the customer was actually told.

Vega II adds investigation memory and a telemetry gateway

Vega announced Vega II with an open-weight cyber-defense model, Vega Memory to retain environment details and past investigation decisions, and Vega Gateway to send telemetry into object storage through OpenTelemetry, webhooks, or APIs. Analysts can inspect saved memory, trace it to the original case, and correct or delete it.

Memory can save analysts from repeating work, but it also carries old verdicts into new cases. Correcting a bad conclusion needs to include the saved memory that future investigations will use.

📚 Worth a Read · From this week’s sponsor

What is federated indexing? Scanner breaks down how indexing logs in object storage differs from querying each source live, and what that changes for search and continuous detection.

🤝 Funding & M&A

Island raises $400M to expand beyond the browser

Island raised a $400M Series F, led by Evolution Equity Partners.

The round values it at $6.4B. Island plans to expand beyond its enterprise browser into endpoint, network, data, and AI-agent security.

The browser gives Island control over work happening inside it. Winning more security budget means following that work into APIs, background agents, and other activity that never opens a browser tab.

Reco raises $55M for SaaS and AI agent security

Reco raised $55M in additional funding, with AT&T Ventures, Forestay, and Quadrille Capital participating. AT&T is also a customer. Reco maps AI agents to their identities, permissions, applications, and workflows, with controls to reduce access or disable risky integrations.

SaaS security vendors already track the app connections and permissions agents use. The harder problem is spotting an agent doing something harmful with access it was legitimately given.

Rig raises $12M to distinguish AI agents from employees

Rig Security emerged from stealth with $12M in seed funding, co-led by Ten Eleven Ventures and Brightmind Partners, with the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund participating. Its endpoint sensor identifies AI agent activity inside employee sessions. Rig says it can block risky agent actions without interrupting the employee.

eSentire acquires an AI security startup and launches Atlas AIDR

eSentire acquired an unnamed AI security startup and added its technology to Atlas AIDR, now generally available. Announced September 15, the module records AI sessions and tool calls, inventories MCP servers, and adds PII redaction and prompt-injection screening.

Its browser coverage uses existing telemetry for visibility; granular inline controls sit on the desktop. MDR buyers should separate those capabilities when comparing products. Seeing browser activity doesn’t mean a product can block it.

Interested in sponsoring TCP?

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Howdy 👋🏽

I hope you’re having an excellent week! I must say that, after 140+ issues of TCP and 200+ pieces of content incl. podcasts, a book, conference presos, etc. over the past 3 years, it’s still not easy. Some days you find flow state, and on other days, you feel like you’re pushing a boulder up a mountain. Regardless, the process is invigorating because I always learn a ton with every piece of content and the discipline required creates a better me.

That said, this was one of the harder issues to produce as it’s been a loaded week so I hope you enjoy!

A few updates and chances to hang out for my East Coast folks:

• I’m presenting at BSides NYC on October 17 on native logging and detection opps for tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor etc.

• TCP and friends are also hosting a Gatsby-themed party the night before, October 16. I’ll be DJng an hour of Jazzy House. Shaping out to be fun evening. Would love to see you there! RSVP here.

Quick shoutout to this week’s sponsor, Fencer.dev. They’ve built a pretty nifty autonomous pentesting product and are giving away a few pentests each week through October. More on that in the coming sections!

Aside from that, a lot landed this week: Jev has developers rethinking cost + how agents make decisions, compromised AI packages, and the agent-security launches keep coming. We’ve also got another big Cyera raise and a new podcast from a friend of TCP. Let’s get into it.

🗞️ TL;DR

• 🛸 Gemini’s test got a little too real: Google confirmed its model reached three real companies during a May security evaluation. The test boundaries didn’t hold.

• ⚙️ Another $400M for Cyera: Goldman Sachs backs a Series G extension as Cyera doubles down on securing agents and the data they touch.

• 🔐 Okta gives agents the identity treatment: Oktane brought agent SSO and access reviews. A gateway to control tool calls and an expanded kill switch are still coming.

• ⚒️ Check Point: two flaws, two fixes: Both are under active attack, and the earlier VPN patch leaves the separate management flaw open.

• 🤝 Upwind buys Aegis: Its new 12-person AI Security Labs team will dig into attacks on agents, skills, and plugins.

• 💰 Jamf buys Keep Aware: Browser security joins the lineup, including visibility into AI use and data sharing. Congrats to Keep Aware, past TCP sponsors!

• ⚙️ Jev makes agent decisions dirt cheap: The AI model scores choices for apps and agents, but prompt injection can still sway the answer.

• ⚒️ MemTensor packages hid a credential stealer: Compromised releases of its OpenClaw plugin and MemoryOS targeted developer and cloud credentials.

Plus: OpenAI’s Defense Factory, a military AI close call, and our friend Yonesy’s podcast debut.

⚒️ Picks of the Week

Gemini crossed the test boundary

Google’s Gemini accessed three real companies during a May cybersecurity evaluation, Google and testing firm Irregular confirmed to Reuters last week.

Google says the model used public information and guessed credentials, believing the targets were in scope. The companies were notified; Irregular says the known issues were resolved weeks ago.

The model’s belief that it was still inside the test didn’t match where it actually went.

#MoarSandboxEscapes

Run a pentest when your code changes, not when your calendar says so

Fencer runs autonomous pentests on demand. Its agents chain weaknesses into validated attack paths, showing how an attacker could get in and what they could reach. Skip copying findings out of a 40-page PDF. Turn them directly into Jira or Linear tickets with context and remediation guidance. Ship the fix, then retest to verify it worked.

TCP readers can also enter to win one of two free pentests each week through November 1.

See Fencer in action

Cyera raises $400M from Goldman Sachs

Cyera announced a $400M extension to its Series G from Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives on September 22. The equity investment will fund AI-security products, federal expansion, and international growth. Interestingly enough, I think that’s how much they acquired Oasis Security for.

The announcement lists Cyera’s valuation at more than $12 billion. Cyera has built a great platform on agentic AI identity + data security. Can they grow into the $12B valuation? Is the plan to go public?

Why Jev has the eng world talking

Jev is an AI model built to make quick decisions inside apps and AI agents. TypeSafe AI launched it on September 15. Developers send it information and a set of possible answers; Jev returns probabilities for those choices.

A coding agent, for example, could ask whether a command should be allowed, blocked, or reviewed. The app uses Jev’s scores to decide what happens next.

The appeal is speed and price. TypeSafe charges 4.2 cents per million input tokens, with free output, and reports responses in 70–500 milliseconds. Vercel says nearly 13% of its paid AI Gateway teams used Jev within 24 hours, its fastest model adoption yet.

The security connection is already here: LangChain offers experimental middleware that uses Jev to judge risky tool calls. TypeSafe’s own documentation says injected instructions can influence its answers. A perfectly formatted “allow” can still be the wrong call.

Our friend Yonesy launched a podcast!

Yonesy Núñez launched Below the Surface, with Pete Chronis joining the first episode. Pete’s a former CISO at Paramount, WarnerMedia and now an operating partner at Cyberstarts.

Give the first episode a listen. Lots of wisdom in it. And go show Yonesy some love!

Inside OpenAI’s Defense Factory

OpenAI shared a look at how it uses agents to find and fix security issues. Its Defense Factory writeup walks through the whole job: map services, find bugs, reproduce them, get fixes to the right owners, and check that they worked.

Humans review changes that carry real risk, and fixes get tested again after deployment. OpenAI also describes early snags with missing dependencies, inconsistent severity ratings, and duplicate findings.

OpenAI says its internal security sprint brought together more than 250 people across over 100 service areas. The company reports closing 53 urgent or high-priority issues on day one.

An AI-generated report nearly triggered a military operation

CNN reports that false AI-assisted intelligence nearly prompted a US operation against a Chinese vessel this spring. Officials caught the error before the planned interception. The model is unidentified, and the Pentagon did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Hmm…..

🔬Threats & Research

MemTensor’s AI packages carried a credential stealer

SafeDep and Aikido found compromised releases of MemTensor’s OpenClaw plugin and Python library MemoryOS, published overnight on September 23 UTC. The shared implant targets developer and cloud credentials and starts when the packages load. It also contains code to spread into other projects; wider propagation has not been established.

F5 patches an actively exploited BIG-IP APM zero-day

F5 confirmed active exploitation of CVE-2026-94127, a CVSS 9.8 flaw allowing code execution without login. It affects BIG-IP APM configured as an OAuth authorization server; deployments acting only as OAuth clients or resource servers are excluded. Engineering hotfixes are available.

Check Point: two exploited flaws, separate fixes

Check Point’s September 22 advisory covers active exploitation of VPN flaw CVE-2026-85102 and management flaw CVE-2026-93616, both rated CVSS 9.8. The management flaw allows code execution before login and was exploited on July 23. The earlier LivePatch Take 28/29 does not fix the management vulnerability; the two issues require separate fixes.

FBI investigates ShinyHunters breach claims

The FBI told BleepingComputer it is investigating claims of unauthorized activity affecting FBIjobs.gov. ShinyHunters alleges a PeopleSoft zero-day and extensive data theft. Claims that nearly all agents were exposed remain unverified.

Critical Cisco ISE flaw is under active attack

Cisco confirms active exploitation of CVE-2026-76460, a CVSS 10.0 authentication bypass affecting ISE and ISE-PIC regardless of configuration. Attackers may get root. Cisco advises checking every node and external network logs, and reimaging affected nodes if compromise is suspected.

EvilTokens turns stolen inboxes into fraud research

Microsoft links EvilTokens to more than 12,000 compromised inboxes across over 10,000 organizations. Device-code phishing tricks victims into authorizing attacker access through legitimate sign-in flows. AI then analyzes stolen messages for relationships, invoices, and payment approvers to support impersonation and fraud.

Microsoft says it disrupted the operation, but whether the activity has stopped remains unclear.

Hacktron’s OpenAI exploit chain reached an internal repo

Hacktron published this research September 13 about a July incident. Researchers used Claude Opus 5 to help chain a malicious image upload, a Discourse dependency flaw, SSO behavior, and a GitHub connector into a harmless proof PR in OpenAI’s internal repository. OpenAI fixed its side within roughly 14 hours of reporting.

📦 Security Product Releases

Okta adds an agent gateway and a Blueprint Alliance

Ahead of Oktane, Okta announced a runtime gateway and an alliance with AWS, CrowdStrike, and others to help companies secure AI agents. Agent SSO and agent-to-agent connections are generally available; the gateway and expanded runtime kill switch are still on the way.

Opal Zero puts limits on AI agent access

Opal launched Zero to track who owns each agent and give it limited, expiring access. Paladin checks requests against policy and context; Gateway Sync sends those decisions to existing MCP gateways to enforce. Sensitive actions can require human approval.

detections.ai launches Nightwatch

detections.ai recently launched Nightwatch in Enterprise. It checks new threat behavior against existing detection logic, hunts for relevant activity, and drafts rules using the team’s data models and conventions. Analysts can inspect queries, results, and reasoning; humans approve deployment.

Wiz connects agent instructions to cloud activity

Wiz describes a detection engine that looks at model inputs, outputs, and tool activity alongside cloud and runtime events. That helps connect what the agent was told to do, what it tried, and what actually happened. An API log can show an authenticated call without explaining what prompted the agent to make it; Wiz is working to connect those pieces. Bedrock invocation-log support is in private preview for Wiz Defend customers.

Palo Alto makes frontier AI testing continuous

Unit 42 launched Continuous Frontier AI Defense, an annual subscription combining expert-led offensive testing with multiple AI models across applications, APIs, cloud environments, and code. The service includes exploit validation and remediation guidance.

Opus 5.5 routes most security tasks to 4.8

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5.5 yesterday. Its safeguards route most cybersecurity tasks to Opus 4.8, while routine software bug fixing remains supported. Anthropic plans to expand verified access. For now, the newest model’s launch leaves much of the cybersecurity work with the older model.

🤝 Funding & M&A

Jamf acquires Keep Aware

Jamf acquired Keep Aware, adding browser security to its Apple device management and security business. Keep Aware helps teams spot malicious extensions, browser-based attacks, and sensitive data shared with AI tools. It works inside the browsers employees already use. The deal brings browser activity and endpoint security closer together as Jamf expands its AI governance push. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

Upwind acquires Aegis

Upwind announced its acquisition of Aegis on September 23 and formed AI Security Labs. Aegis founders Omri Limor and Saar Ankonina will lead the 12-person team researching threats involving AI agents, skills, and plugins. Deal terms were not disclosed.

Dragos closes the NetRise and runZero acquisitions

Dragos completed both acquisitions September 21 following Accenture’s majority investment. runZero adds asset discovery; NetRise adds firmware and binary analysis. Together, the acquisitions expand what Dragos can learn about an industrial device, from finding it on the network to examining the software inside it. The integration work is still ahead.

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Her research, frameworks, and open-source work are helping make threat hunting more effective and accessible. For this piece, we landed on Maslow’s hierarchy as a way to explore the building blocks of effective agentic hunting. Sydney breaks down how telemetry, guardrails, and context help teams turn that potential into practice.

Every security program I talk to wants AI in the SOC now, not eventually. Detection engineering that drafts its own rules, hunting that generates its own hypotheses, incident response that starts before anyone reads the page. None of that is unreasonable. But almost none of those programs have re-architected the SOC lifecycle to support it.

This piece is narrow on purpose. Not AI across the whole SOC, but the specific question of whether your foundations can support an agent that hunts in your environment. The thesis is uncomfortable and simple: deploy AI on shaky SOC foundations and you don’t get a force multiplier, you get an amplifier for every gap you were quietly compensating for. That gap isn’t a model problem. It’s an instrumentation problem.

The stack most teams are about to hand an agent was built for humans who quietly compensated for its gaps: analysts knew JHOPPER and jhopper@corp were one person, and that the build server runs powershell.exe thousands of times a day. That knowledge lives in people, not pipelines. Agents inherit the environment exactly as it was recorded, and reasoning, however good, can’t manufacture ground truth the pipeline never captured.

So the failure doesn’t look like a model failure. An executive’s laptop gets quarantined mid-board presentation, and the SOC is scrambling to explain why the ”autonomous” system just blocked the CFO. Nothing was compromised. The agent did exactly what it was built to do, in an environment that couldn’t support it.

That’s the whole argument. Agentic systems don’t compensate for missing foundations, they amplify them. Deploy an agent on a weak SOC and the weakness doesn’t stay hidden; it compounds:

• Inconsistent telemetry becomes confident false correlations.

• Weak baselines become alert storms nobody can triage.

• Missing context becomes reasoning built on gaps the agent can’t see.

• No hunt memory becomes the same ground re-covered every week.

• Unscoped actions become production incidents with an executive audience.

An AI agent goes from threat hunter to threat generator the moment you deploy it on top of a program that wasn’t ready for it.

Threat Hunting in 2026

Threat hunting in 2026 is the same discipline it has always been: proactively searching for adversary behavior your automated detections were never built to catch. What changed is the terrain. Telemetry volume, identity sprawl, and the speed of cloud and SaaS have all outgrown the human capacity to hold context across a shift, let alone across a quarter. The job used to be one analyst with a hypothesis and a query window. It’s becoming one analyst, a hypothesis, and a decision about how much of the search to hand to a system that doesn’t get tired and doesn’t forget what it looked at last week.

Good hunting in 2026 doesn’t chase indicators, it chases behavior. A hash is trivial to rotate and an IP is cheaper still, but the way an adversary moves laterally, escalates privilege, and establishes persistence is expensive for them to change. That’s the top of the Pyramid of Pain, and it’s where good hunting has always lived, because it’s the layer signatures can’t express and the layer that actually costs an attacker something. A good program hunts there deliberately, with telemetry it trusts and a sense of what normal looks like, so the behavior that matters stands out from the behavior that’s just Tuesday.

Which is the whole problem. That behavioral layer is exactly where an agent either accelerates a good program or amplifies a weak one, and which one it does is decided entirely by what’s underneath it. That’s what the pyramid is for, and it’s what ATHF operationalizes.

Maslow’s Hierarchy Applied to Agentic Threat Hunting

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a useful borrowed frame because security programs get the bottom of it wrong in the same way people do. A person deprived of sleep and safety does not self-actualize through effort, and a program without normalized telemetry does not reach autonomous hunting through ambition. The prerequisites aren’t motivational. They’re structural.

The Agentic Threat Hunting Framework (ATHF) describes the operational path. Maslow explains why the order is non-negotiable.

One caveat, because maturity models invite the wrong kind of ambition: most teams should live at L1 and L2. L2 is where the compounding starts, because that’s where your hunting history is written down and searchable, and a program that parks there permanently is healthy, not stalled. Climbing a level because the level exists is how you end up quarantining an executive mid-board-presentation.

Telemetry, the agent’s senses

Maslow: physiological. ATHF: L0 to L1.

For humans, telemetry is data. For agents, telemetry is perception. An agent with inconsistent logs and unresolved identities isn’t cautious. It’s confident, reasoning fluently about a world that doesn’t exist.

A financial services team I know deployed agentic EDR before standardizing identity fields. One employee appeared in the telemetry three ways, JHOPPER, jhopper@corp, and Jane.Hopper, with nothing in the pipeline stitching them back to one person. To the agent, that read as three principals moving in concert across the environment, which is a genuinely alarming pattern if you trust your own data. The point isn’t that the model is too literal to guess they’re the same human. A capable model might. The point is that a guess is all it has. The identity resolution was never captured, so no amount of reasoning recovers it; the agent either fabricates the link or fabricates the threat, and both are wrong in a way that looks confident. Reasoning cannot manufacture ground truth the environment never recorded.

The work at this layer is unglamorous, and it’s where most programs underestimate the effort. Two kinds of work live here: normalizing what you have, and making sure the signals exist at all.

Normalization:

• Identity stitching across sources, so one human is one principal.

• Timestamp normalization, so events order correctly across systems.

• Schema contracts, so a field doesn’t silently change shape.

• Host naming that survives a re-image.

The signals themselves:

• Process execution with full command lines.

• Network flows with process attribution.

• Authentication events carrying source and destination.

• File access tied to an actor.

If your analysts struggle to answer basic operational questions with data, your agents will struggle harder, because an analyst can compensate for a gap by asking a colleague and an agent cannot. At this layer, autonomy is dangerous. Fix perception first.

Guardrails, safety before speed

Maslow: safety. ATHF: L1.

Safety isn’t about slowing agents down. It’s about bounding what they can do while they’re wrong, which they will be. The nighttime quarantine wasn’t an intelligence failure. The agent reasoned its way to a defensible conclusion from bad inputs and then took an action nobody had scoped for it. The failure happened at design time, in a conversation that never occurred. The question was never whether the agent would be wrong. It was what the agent is permitted to do while it’s wrong, and who finds out.

That question has a boring, writable answer:

actions:
  query: unlimited
  alert: requires_confidence_threshold
  quarantine: requires_human_approval
  firewall_modify: forbidden

escalation_paths:
  high_confidence_finding: notify_slack
  destructive_action_requested: page_oncall

If you can’t answer what the agent may do unsupervised, how you stop it mid-investigation, and who gets paged when it acts, you aren’t ready to find out experimentally.

Baselines, learning what “normal” looks like

Maslow: belonging. ATHF: L2.

Belonging means learning the unwritten rules of a place, the behavioral grammar of your environment. It’s the level where agents stop asking “is this known bad?” and start asking “does this belong here?” That second question is the entire foundation of threat hunting, and you can’t answer it without a baseline.

When a service account that has only ever run rsync and mysqldump on its nightly backup window suddenly launches an encoded powershell.exe, no signature is required and no threat feed has to have seen it before. A service account that never launched an interactive shell just launched one. That’s the finding.

Good baselines produce a class of detection that signatures can’t express, deviations that only mean something relative to what’s normal for this entity:

• Temporal: activity on a sensitive account outside its established window.

• Process lineage: a parent-child chain that violates how the host normally behaves.

• Privilege: escalation outside a change window.

• Access: a user or service touching data that doesn’t match its role.

A human analyst notices this eventually. An agent with a real baseline notices immediately. No baseline, no deviation. No deviation, no hunting.

Hypothesis Generation, the agent starts hunting

Maslow: esteem. ATHF: L3.

This is where automation becomes agency. A playbook executes steps someone else chose. An agent at L3 chooses where to look next based on what it doesn’t understand yet.

Traditional hunting starts with a human hypothesis, and agentic hunting inverts that. The agent notices LaunchAgent counts creeping up on a handful of macOS endpoints over thirty days: nothing alerting, nothing obviously malicious, just different from last month. It forms a hypothesis from that drift, possibly persistence staging, and then does what a good hunter does, which is pivot from what changed to what actually executed. The chain it builds looks like this:

Week 1: Three macOS endpoints each carry 2 user LaunchAgents (baseline: 1, installer-signed)

Week 2: New com.update.plist appears, written by a shell rather than a package manager

Week 3: launchd spawns bash, which curls a host never before seen in the environment

Hypothesis: persistence staging → payload retrieval → outbound C2

None of those observations would have paged anyone alone. The sequence is the finding, and sequences across weeks are exactly what humans lose between shifts. This doesn’t remove the analyst. It moves them. The agent surfaces the question; the human decides whether the answer matters, which is a better use of a hunter than writing the fourteenth variation of a query.

Continuous Adversary Modeling, the agent evolves

Maslow: self-actualization. ATHF: L4.

At the top, agents maintain evolving models rather than running fixed logic. The agent documents a novel persistence chain, generates detection logic, ships it, then notices two weeks later that the technique shifted, updates the model, refines the rule, and keeps hunting variants. Detection stops being a quarterly tuning exercise and becomes a living system.

Read that loop again and it stops being threat hunting halfway through. Generating rule logic, shipping it, watching it decay, tuning it: that’s detection engineering, with its own lifecycle and its own memory problem. That’s what the Agentic Detection Engineering Framework (ADEF) is for. ATHF runs hunting through LOCK and answers “is this happening in our environment?” ADEF runs detection through FORGE (Find, Observe, Refine, Govern, Evolve) and answers “how do we codify this so it pages someone?” They’re paired siblings, not a sequence: an agent can’t reason about detections whose rationale was never written down, exactly as it can’t baseline telemetry that was never normalized. Both are memory infrastructure wearing different lifecycles.

Agency Is Earned, Not Deployed

Agents amplify maturity. They don’t create it. You’re ready for basic agentic hunting when your critical assets have telemetry you trust, normal behavior can be baselined, and you have a process for validating what the agent surfaces. You’re not ready when visibility is inconsistent, normal behavior is undefined, or AI is being brought in with the unstated hope that it will fix the program.

The fastest way to know which describes you is to try answering four questions with data rather than opinion:

• Show me every PowerShell execution from a web server this month.

• What processes typically spawn from this service account?

• Which users access this file share, and when?

• How many authentication failures is normal for this identity?

If you can’t answer those, your agents can’t either.

Threat hunting has always been about curiosity: the willingness to ask “what if?” and follow the thread. Agentic systems don’t introduce curiosity. They operationalize it. But agents move through a hierarchy of needs the same way people do. Without telemetry they’re blind. Without guardrails they can’t act safely. Without baselines they can’t recognize what belongs. ATHF and LOCK build that foundation on the hunting side, ADEF and FORGE on the detection side. Neither one is the AI. They’re the environment the AI needs to be worth deploying, and you can start building it at L1 tomorrow without deploying a single agent.

Build the foundation first. Then let the agents climb.

Happy hunting!

About the author

Sydney Marrone is the Head of Threat Hunting at Nebulock, SANS course author, co-founder of THOR Collective, author of the Agentic Threat Hunting Framework (ATHF), and co-author of the PEAK Threat Hunting Framework. She is passionate about helping defenders become better threat hunters by turning complex ideas into practical, repeatable techniques. Through open-source research, workshops, and community-driven projects, Sydney builds frameworks and resources that make hunting more structured, collaborative, and effective. Outside of work, she writes for THOR Collective Dispatch, lifts weights, and makes cyber-inspired music with AI.

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Howdy 👋🏽 - I hope you’re having an excellent week! Lots happening over the past several days with Splunk’s annual conference, nasty vulns in widely used software, and AI frontier labs giving the rest of the world whiplash (hint: it’s all theater. It always is).

On the personal front, my girlfriend and I have recently been consumed by Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets. We’ve read 330+ pages in 3 days. It’s a twisty thriller with a strong hacker component. Highly recommend!

Also, I will be speaking at BSides NYC on October 17th and we may or may not be hosting something special with friends the night before. If you have to start making arrangements to be there, now is a good time. More details to come!

Cool, let’s get into it!

Break the cold storage log blocker

Over 87% of security logs end up in cold storage. During a live investigation, the cost of log visibility adds up quickly.

Scanner’s latest guide breaks down how three approaches have failed to solve the SIEM cost problem. Inside: a framework plus a head-to-head benchmark on query cost and speed at 1TB scale, showing a 750x cost difference between approaches.

Read the guide

🗞️ TL;DR

• 🎭 AI leaders talk slowdown: Amodei, Altman and Musk say yes to slowing AI dev to focus on safety; Zuckerberg says ‘grow up’; Kurtz and Arora argue security can’t wait.

• 🧾 Stolen keys fund attacks: Anthropic says criminals reused victims’ API keys to carry out more intrusions. Great intel report btw.

• 🖨️ PaperCut’s AI attack swarm: GreyNoise traced 400+ compromised print-management instances; attackers reached domain admin at 12 organizations.

• 🦾 Exein’s $270M device bet: Embedded security company raises new equity to expand into robots, vehicles, and autonomous machines.

• 📱 Microsoft fake passkey rollout attacks: Helpdesk impersonators use setup lures to steal sessions or trick users into authorizing access.

• 📬 Cisco’s email-to-root bug: Cisco confirms attackers are exploiting a CVSS 9.8 gateway flaw through crafted emails.

• 🏠 Splunk brings AI home: On-prem AI, expanded federated search, SOC agents, and visibility into what those agents cost.

⚒️ Picks of the Week

AI slowdown theater: Zuck pushes back, security weighs in

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wants frontier AI development to slow enough for safety work to catch up. Sam Altman backed pacing and promised independent evaluators with employee-like access at OpenAI. Elon Musk joined in: “Dario is right.” Those endorsements don’t amount to an implemented slowdown.

Mark Zuckerberg pretty much clapped back at the aforementioned names. He said: labs can slow down on their own. He says Meta held back Muse for several months to work on safety and security, without waiting for competitors to do the same.

The security CEOs had plenty to say:

• George Kurtz, CrowdStrike: Attackers already have AI. Whatever happens with new models, security teams need to stop the attacks happening now.

• Nikesh Arora, Palo Alto Networks: Thinks the slowdown push could help labs limit their legal risk. Meanwhile, they’re still making it hard for security companies to get API access.

My read: this could push more spending toward independent testing, agent permissions, and runtime controls. It also gives security vendors another opening to sell AI products. Kurtz and Arora have a commercial stake here, too.

Outside scrutiny is welcome. I’d like to see what finding actually delays a release, and whether independent security tools get the access they need to intervene. Otherwise, there’s plenty of room for slowdown theater while defenders deal with the models already in circulation.

Attackers are stealing AI keys to pay for more hacking

Anthropic’s September threat report describes criminals stealing customers’ AI API keys and using them to carry out more intrusions. One stolen key stayed in use for roughly three weeks. So the victim gets compromised and helps foot the bill for what comes next. Lovely.

My friend, Stephen Garcia, has been beating the drum on this risk for a year+ and now, we’re seeing behind the curtains on how large scale of an operation it can be.

Two other details stood out:

• Suspected ShinyHunters affiliates used Claude to understand unfamiliar environments, build collection tools, and steal downstream customer data.

• A Russian espionage actor built workflows that modified and rebuilt malware when security products detected it.

These are selected cases observed from December through August, not a measure of how common AI-assisted attacks are. Anthropic says its own systems weren’t compromised by the key-stealing actor.

This is the part of the slowdown debate that AI lab leaders miss and security folks are railing about. Existing models already help 10x attack speed + amplification.

AI keys are gold and should be guarded as such.

Also, this is a badass report and should be required reading for anyone in our industry: https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026

Exein raises $270M to protect the computers inside machines

Exein raised $270M in new equity led by Headline for security software embedded in connected devices, robots, vehicles, and other machines.

Its Analyzer inspects firmware and software dependencies before a device ships. Its Runtime monitors behavior inside the operating system and uses kernel-level controls designed to block malicious execution. The protection lives on the device, where a compromise can change what a machine physically does.

IoT/OT security is experiencing a resurgence in importance. If we’re gonna do this physical AI autonomous thing from b2c to b2b to public services, then it should be secure or at least the illusion that it is, should exist. Great to see companies in this space getting the proper funding!

PaperCut’s print servers became an AI-assisted route to domain admin

PaperCut makes software for managing printing, copying, and scanning. Its NG and MF servers often connect to Active Directory and hold privileges that reach well beyond the printer.

GreyNoise traced an operator using hundreds of AI agents to compromise at least 440 PaperCut instances across 395 identified organizations in 48 countries. The campaign exploited CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078.

Details worth double clicking:

• The setup: OpenAI’s Codex tooling running a DeepSeek model.

• The preparation: A test lab with PaperCut and Active Directory before the operator went after victims.

• The result: Confirmed domain-admin access at 12 organizations. Agents also hit targets on the operator’s exclusion list; GreyNoise couldn’t establish why.

AI-driven attacks in legacy environments. Proof. Not good.

Fake passkey setup opens the door to Microsoft 365

Microsoft is tracking intrusions that start with fake helpdesk calls and texts about passkey, MFA, or SSO setup. Employees receive links on personal phones, sometimes leaving investigators with very little endpoint telemetry.

The sequence is pretty straightforward:

• Get in: AiTM phishing or device-code authorization. Passkey setup is the pretext; the cryptography isn’t being broken.

• Stay in: Register an attacker-controlled authentication method, then enumerate the tenant through Microsoft Graph.

• Collect: SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange data, generally below 1,000 files or emails an hour, continuing for hours or days.

Rolling out passkeys still leaves decisions about enrollment, alternate authentication flows, and how employees verify a helpdesk request. Those details are doing a lot of work here. For detection teams, an unusual sign-in followed by a new authentication method and Graph reconnaissance is a better place to look than waiting for a giant download spike.

🔬Threats & Research

DDRop makes protected memory accept stale data

DDRop let researchers read protected VM data and fake the proof that a VM was trustworthy, defeating protections in Intel TDX’s default integrity mode.

Attackers need physical access and privileged host control. A small circuit board inserted between the server and its DDR5 memory blocks selected writes. The processor then accepts old encrypted data without realizing it should have changed.

The cool factor on this hack is greater than the actual impact on customers. Poking holes in confidential computing, something hailed as “super secure”, is a significant development.

Cisco’s email gateway can be compromised by an email

Cisco confirmed exploitation of CVE-2026-76461, CVSS 9.8, which lets an unauthenticated attacker run commands as root by sending a crafted email. Nobody has to open it. Secure Email Cloud customers were affected too; Cisco says it upgraded all cloud appliances. On-prem customers need the fixed software, with no workaround available.

The gateway gets compromised doing its ordinary job: processing hostile email. Cisco recommends checking external logs because a root attacker can erase local evidence.

No bueno.

Cisco’s firewall manager helps prepare a Qilin deployment

Cisco Talos also found three intrusion clusters exploiting Firewall Management Center, including Cyclops Blink espionage and Qilin ransomware. CVE-2026-20079, CVSS 10.0, allows unauthenticated root access; CVE-2026-20316 exposes static credentials that can support further escalation.

Not the best week for Cisco and customers, but, it happens.

GitLab’s file-read flaw puts deployment secrets within reach

GitLab patched CVE-2026-85706, CVSS 10.0, an unauthenticated file-read flaw in its repository commits API under certain conditions. It entered KEV September 11, and watchTowr observed probes after disclosure.

Artifactory’s anonymous user turns out to be an administrator

Wiz caught attackers chaining CVE-2026-42018 and CVE-2026-42016 to obtain an anonymous-user token and elevate it to admin. It also confirmed exploitation of the separate CVE-2026-82329 authentication bypass.

Attackers planted persistent admin accounts, malicious Groovy plugins, and Rust backdoors. The useful wrinkle: the elevated token can still show up as token:anonymous. That’s an easy name to underestimate on the system distributing your software. Check the token permissions.

Iranian spyware follows targets onto personal devices

The NCSC, FBI, and AIVD detailed CHOSEN BRICK, spyware targeting dissidents, activists, and journalists. Attackers build trust over messaging apps, then send fake software or even MRI results. The Windows malware uses Telegram bots for command and control and can steal messages, capture screens, and record audio.

When corporate controls get in the way, operators ask the target to open the file on a personal device. If your team protects people facing targeted surveillance, those people need somewhere to take a suspicious file that arrived outside work, too.

📦 Security Product Releases

Splunk .conf26: on-prem AI, more SOC agents, and less data shuffling?

Splunk brought plenty of agent talk to .conf26. Here are the key updates from the con so far:

• AI in your own environment: Cisco AI POD for Splunk and self-managed AI Assistant are available now, including for air-gapped deployments. Agent Launchpad, for building custom agents, follows later this year.

• More SOC automation: Announced skills cover detection engineering, hunting, investigation, response, and governance, with approvals and auditability in the workflow.

• Query data where it sits: Federated Search is expanding to AWS CloudWatch Lake and Databricks. MCP-enabled catalog discovery helps analysts and agents find datasets.

• See what agents are doing: Agent Observability now extends into Observability Cloud and Cisco Cloud Control. Tokenomics adds visibility into coding-agent usage and spend.

• Prioritize exposure: Expanded Exposure Analytics adds asset coverage, historical changes, and business context. Feature-level GA dates weren’t specified for every announced addition.

Not much of a surprise in any of these releases. Great to see Splunk continuing to keep up with the times. Many thought Cisco would slow their innovation down, but Splunk is still the one to beat in the SIEM space!

Zscaler’s new AI SOC connects investigations to containment

Zscaler launched Agentic SOC, now available globally. It combines Zscaler and third-party telemetry with AI agents for triage, investigation, and response, using models from Anthropic and OpenAI. Zscaler and Red Canary experts provide threat hunting and support.

DigiCert gives AI agents an identity you can revoke

DigiCert made AI Trust Manager generally available, combining agent discovery with signed identities, ownership, scoped permissions, and revocation. Its AI Passport lets another organization verify an agent without sharing the same identity provider.

This gets at a practical problem: you need to know which agent is acting, who owns it, and how to cut off its authority. Familiar identity controls, applied to a new kind of user. A verified identity still doesn’t tell you whether the agent’s next decision will be sensible, though.

Wiz investigations now follow you into Google SecOps

Wiz expanded its Google Security Operations integration with Blue Agent investigation findings and two-way synchronization of case status, severity, and comments. The available content pack includes rules, dashboards, queries, playbooks, and response policies.

Analysts can review Wiz’s cloud investigation inside Google SecOps and keep the case moving across both tools. That’s a useful step beyond dumping another alert into the SIEM and calling it an integration. Less duplicate investigation and case maintenance would be a pretty welcome outcome.

The EU’s product-security reporting clock is already running

The Cyber Resilience Act’s reporting obligations kicked in September 11. Covered manufacturers must send an early warning within 24 hours of becoming aware of an actively exploited vulnerability or severe product-security incident, followed by notification within 72 hours. ENISA’s reporting platform is live.

Most other requirements start in December 2027, which makes this deadline easy to mentally file under “later.” It’s already here. Whoever owns product-security reporting needs a working escalation path now.

🤝 Funding & M&A

Harvey buys Guardrails AI, bringing agent security into legal AI

Harvey, the legal AI company, acquired Guardrails AI, a security company. Terms weren’t disclosed.

There’s real security work here. Guardrails’ open-source framework checks for PII leakage, jailbreaks, and policy violations. It also tackles reliability problems such as hallucinations. Its Snowglobe product simulates users to find ways agents can fail before they go into production.

That’s relevant to agents working across legal documents, client matters, and firm knowledge. A convincing answer can still leak confidential information or send a workflow off course. Harvey gets people and technology for testing those failures as part of building the product.

An interesting buyer for an AI security and reliability company. More vertical AI vendors may decide this work is important enough to own. Neither announcement spells out future support commitments for the open-source project.

Fortaegis raises $50M to build security into the chip

Fortaegis raised a $50M Series A led by returning investor Serendipity Capital. The Dutch company builds security into computing hardware, using physical properties of silicon to establish device trust across its hardware and software.

The money will scale production and deployment of its programmable chips and fund development of custom chips. Alongside Exein, it’s another sizeable bet on protecting the machines themselves. The work here reaches all the way down to the silicon, well before an endpoint agent gets installed.

SecureSky buys Soveren to follow the sensitive data

SecureSky acquired Soveren, adding data security to its exposure management and MDR platform. Soveren combines scans of stored data with eBPF monitoring of sensitive data moving between applications and services. The deal has closed; terms weren’t disclosed.

The useful connection is between an exposure finding and the data a compromised system could actually leak. SecureSky is buying the ability to show both, including data moving through an application that a storage scan might miss.

AIUC raises $40M to test agents and help insure their mistakes

AIUC, the Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company, raised a $40M Series A led by Ribbit Capital. It combines agent testing and certification with insurance underwriting infrastructure.

Its AIUC-1 standard covers risks including prompt injection, data leakage, hallucinations, and unauthorized actions. Evaluations examine both the agent’s behavior and the controls around it. That evidence can help insurers price coverage; ElevenLabs already uses certification-backed insurance for its voice agents.

The new funding will help extend the approach to frontier models, connecting it directly to this week’s audit debate. Someone has to test the safety claims, and someone has to work out who pays when a system fails.

Good wedge, raise and timing by AIUC.

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Howdy 👋🏽 Hope you’re having a splendid week. I’m back from Burning Man and settling back in, hence the Friday issue! If you were out there too or have questions about going, DM me. I’m a firm believer that everyone should go out there at least once in their lifetime. It’s truly a mind opening experience that enhances many aspects of your life.

Also, huge thank you to Andrew for taking the wheel on last week’s issue 👌🏽

Security hasn’t slowed down at all since Black Hat and DEF CON and this week’s issue is a testament of that. CrowdStrike has been cooking, especially on SecOps at Fal.Con, Palo Alto Networks spends $500M on a new company. Lots of funding + acquisitions. We’ve also got LG’s TV privacy mess, and some impressive research that will have you rethink mobile security.

The next few months are packed with conferences. Vendor cons are meh because it’s mostly them touting their sauce, but it’s a great way to get a look at their roadmap and how industry leaders are thinking about the future. Here’s what’s coming up this month:

• Splunk .conf26: September 14–17, Denver. CriblConnect is also in town on September 14, so expect a busy week for the SecOps crowd.

• CYBR.SEC.CON.: September 15–16, Houston. Another stop on next week’s security con circuit. Practitioner focused con 💎

• Oktane: September 22–24, Las Vegas. Okta’s annual conference puts identity next on the agenda.

• GrrCON: September 24–25, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Two days of security research, AI talks, and hands-on workshops. Built around the practitioner and hacker community 💎

• CriblCon: September 28–30, Chicago. Cribl heads into its annual conafter acquiring CardinalOps and Radiant Security’s AI SOC technology assets. Will be interesting to hear how they’re thinking about the future.

• RunReveal’s RUNWAY: September 29, San Francisco. The team plans to share more about its roadmap after joining ClickHouse.

October is another jampacked conf month. Identity, SecOps, and AI security will continue to take center stage, imo. We’ll have full coverage across the board on key takeaways from these cons.

Today also marks 25 years since September 11. Taking a moment to remember the lives lost, the first responders who answered the call, and the service members who gave their lives in the years that followed. My thoughts are with their families and everyone still carrying that loss 🇺🇸🙏🏽

Now, let’s get into it!

🗞️ TL;DR

• 📞 Researchers hijack WeChat accounts through unanswered calls: A hacked contact could take over your account without you answering.

• 📺 LG’s smart TVs have a privacy problem: Researchers report tracking and audio collection in standby. LG disputes.

• 🩹 SAP patches two serious server flaws: Attackers could run their own code without logging in. Internal servers need patching too.

• 🗨️ AI agents traded answers in 18,000 wiki posts: Giving an agent browsing access can also give it a way to send information out.

• 🧩 Monad launches schema drift detection: Catches changes in your log schema that can quietly break your security detections, KPI reporting, etc.

• 🏗️ Cylake lands $245M before beta: Palo Alto’s cofounder is betting companies want their security tools and data back in-house.

• 🗄️ ClickHouse buys RunReveal: SecOps consolidation stays hot, with ClickHouse adding threat detection and investigation to its database business.

• 🦅 CrowdStrike goes big on SecOps at Fal.Con: AI investigators, earlier threat detection, and controls for agents.

• 🪪 Cymphony launches with $30M: Tackles the permissions mess that lets employees and AI assistants see too much.

• 🛠️ Palo Alto Networks buys Console for a reported $500M: Console’s AI agents handle IT requests. Palo Alto could use them to fix security issues.

Plus: Astra’s autonomous exploit capabilities, Huskeys’ $27M Series A, the FBI’s stolen-ID investigation, and speaker prep for BSides NYC and Unprompted Con.

⚒️ Picks of the Week

WeWorm takes over WeChat accounts through unanswered calls

Calif disclosed a WeChat exploit chain September 8 that demonstrated account takeover spreading from Android to iPhone and back to Android through unanswered calls.

Breakdown:

• Trigger: Memory corruption in WeChat’s VoIP stack. The caller must already be a contact; the recipient need not answer.

• Access: Read and send messages, place calls, and reach the next contact. Full phone compromise requires additional vulnerabilities.

• Status: Reported July 24, demonstrated August 11. Tencent shipped client mitigations August 21; Calif confirmed server-side mitigation August 28 for all users. No exploitation in the wild has been disclosed.

Requiring an existing contact limits the first infection. However, once an account is compromised, its contact list supplies the next targets. Bonkers..

LG’s smart TVs have a serious privacy problem

GamersNexus, with researchers MrBruh and uturn, reports tested LG TVs scanning nearby devices, identifying what people watch, and collecting audio in standby 🤯 Researchers say some data stays on the TV offline and uploads after reconnection.

LG denies ambient recording outside user-activated voice features and says advertising tracking requires consent.

Customers shouldn’t have to reverse-engineer a television to protect their privacy.

LG owes buyers verifiable controls and a clear justification for what it collects inside their homes.

Watch the full investigation or Matt Jay’s shorter breakdown.

APT Iran claims AT&T outage; AT&T points to attempted cable theft

An internet outage disrupted parts of Dallas for hours on September 7. A group calling itself APT Iran claimed responsibility. AT&T says it had no evidence supporting that claim and attributed the disruption to attempted cable theft.

The group also threatened U.S. water, energy, and telecom infrastructure. Those threats do not establish that it caused this outage. A system intrusion or data theft has not been “confirmed”.

Interesting….. 🤷🏾‍♂️

AI agents turned read-only web access into a public message board

OpenAI agents answering timed research questions found a way to post online despite restrictions intended to make their internet access read-only. Researchers found roughly 18,000 posts, mostly on a German community wiki, a publicly editable website. Most activity happened in May and June.

• How they posted: The wiki accepted edits through the same type of request used to load a page. Agents put messages in URLs, bypassing the intended posting restriction.

• What they shared: Answers for agents facing the same questions, plus ways around network restrictions.

• How they resisted cleanup: When a moderator deleted pages alphabetically, an agent created a backup starting with ZZZ to delay deletion.

OpenAI acknowledged the incident here.

An agent that can read company files and browse external sites may also be able to publish those files. This was not a confirmed customer-data leak, but the posting restriction failed.

This one is wild because it’s yet another examples of how off the rails agents can go when they go rogue. If there’s a loophole, they will probably exhaust every option until they find it to achieve their goal.

🔬Threats & Research

Attackers hijack Magento stores through failed-payment notifications

Magento and Adobe Commerce are software for running online stores. Sansec found attackers exploiting StyleSmuggler (CVE-2026-75650, CVSS 10.0) to run malicious code on those stores’ servers without logging in.

Attackers plant code in store-generated files, then trigger a failed-payment notification. The store executes it while preparing the email. Nobody has to open the message. Sansec found backdoors that let attackers retain access.

Merchants should apply Adobe’s emergency hotfix, check for backdoors, and rotate exposed credentials. Patching closes the entry point; it does not remove an attacker who already got in.

Nexus advertises 153M driver’s-license records; the FBI investigates

Brian Krebs found Nexus advertising 153 million driver’s-license records, verified samples with nine people, and traced clues toward identity-verification provider IDScan.net, which said it was investigating. The marketplace’s total remains unconfirmed; the FBI confirmed its investigation September 2.

Still unresolved: Source, scale, and continuing access. Retained document scans can outlive the verification they supported and become reusable material for impersonation. Review whether raw images need to be kept at all.

Boston Scientific expects cyberattack to hit sales and profit forecasts

Boston Scientific said that it no longer expects to meet its quarterly and annual sales and adjusted-profit forecasts. The August 25 incident disrupted manufacturing and order processing; the financial consequences are this week’s development.

Recovery: The company says most manufacturing has resumed, major distribution centers are shipping, and cardiac remote-monitoring activations are restored. Product analyses indicate no impairment to function. The business impact outlasts the outage. Recovery plans need to cover backlogs and missed sales as well as restoring systems.

📦 Security Product Releases

CrowdStrike announces AI models, agent identities, and detection before ingestion at Fal.Con

CrowdStrike has been cooking, especially on the SecOps side. Its Fal.Con lineup includes detections that run inside log pipelines, AI agents that investigate different parts of an incident in parallel, and a shared workspace for response workflows and approvals. The direction is clear and it has been for a while. CrowdStrike wants to own the end-to-end SecOps workflow.

Here’s the breakdown, including what’s available now and what’s still in preview:

• SafeMind and the Cyber Superintelligence Lab: Offensive Red Tempest and defensive Blue Solano models, built using NVIDIA Nemotron, run coordinated attack-and-defense workflows. Early-access registration.

• Falcon Guardian: Agent discovery, session reconstruction, and runtime controls. The new AI gateway is pre-beta, targeting Q4 GA. OverWatch support is available with the required licenses; MDR follows later in Q3.

• Agentic Identity Provider: Registers agents, issues identities, brokers short-lived access, and preserves attribution to humans or workloads. Announced; availability unspecified.

• Expanded privileged access: Just-in-time privileges across Salesforce, GitHub, endpoints, private applications, and AWS through Entra. Availability unspecified.

• Software supply-chain protection: The Falcon sensor blocks known malicious npm and PyPI packages during download. Package inventory is planned for Q3; cooldown policies for Q4.

• Certified data pipelines: Prebuilt, maintained third-party pipelines, starting with Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks. Public preview.

• Detection before ingestion: Detection logic runs inside the pipeline, including at the edge. Public preview.

• Shared-context investigations: Specialist agents investigate different domains in parallel, with an orchestrator combining their findings. Pre-beta.

• Agentic Recon: Intelligence agents investigate exposed credentials, leaked data, and impersonation across the open, deep, and dark web. Public preview.

• Unified agentic SOAR workspace: AgentWorks, SOAR orchestration, and Foundry share one interface for workflows and approval controls. Public preview.

• Bring your own model: Use existing OpenAI and Anthropic licenses when building agents. GA.

• Bidirectional MCP access: Third-party agents access Falcon tools; AgentWorks agents reach external tools and data. GA.

• Hybrid Analysis for agent workflows: API-first malware analysis with an open-source MCP server. Publicly available.

Detection before ingestion could reduce dependence on centralized storage for alerting. It also makes pipeline rules part of the detection stack: teams need to version them and retain enough source events to investigate missed alerts. Many of these capabilities remain previews.

Some of these new capabilities introduce entirely new ways of doing things which some security teams may be reluctant to. Will be interesting to see how adoption goes.

OpenAI releases GPT-6 Astra with Critical cyber capabilities and restricted exploit access

OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, its first model rated Critical under its Preparedness Framework.

Meaning: Given suitable tools and access, OpenAI says Astra can discover zero-days and develop exploits across many hardened systems without a human guiding each step. Testing assessed capabilities without production safeguards.

• Access: Public release supports review and patching; exploit PoCs are refused. Broader Daybreak access is planned.

• Monitoring: Tool use is monitored, but reasoning became harder to inspect in adversarial tests.

Automating discovery through exploitation makes tool permissions and independent action logs more consequential.

🤝 Funding & M&A

Palo Alto Networks acquires IT automation startup Console

Palo Alto Networks announced its acquisition of Console September 1 for a reported $500M. PANW did not disclose terms. Console’s IT agents provision accounts, revoke access, and reset MFA after identity verification.

Integration with Cortex investigation and remediation is planned, with no launch date. Turning alerts into access changes makes the agents’ own authorization boundaries critical.

ClickHouse acquires security data platform RunReveal

ClickHouse acquired RunReveal. RunReveal builds log pipelines, detections, and AI-assisted investigations on customer-controlled ClickHouse clusters. ClickHouse says availability and existing contract terms remain unchanged. Amount undisclosed.

Great pickup by Clickhouse. RunReveal is one of my favorite contenders in the SIEM space and Clickhouse has some of the best database tech on the market so it’ll be fun to see what they get up to.

Cylake raises $245M through a convertible note for on-premises security

Cylake announced $245M through a convertible note, with Lightspeed, Picture Capital, and Redpoint participating. Nir Zuk’s company is building an integrated security platform for on-premises and private-cloud deployment.

Keeping telemetry inside customer infrastructure could appeal to buyers with sovereignty requirements. Coverage and migration costs will determine whether they switch. Beta is expected by year-end; GA in 2027.

HiddenLayer raises $100M Series B for AI runtime and coding-agent security

HiddenLayer announced a $100M Series B, led by Delta-v Capital. It finds AI deployments, inspects their supply chains, simulates attacks, and protects models and coding agents at runtime.

Its Agent Harness Security launched in August. A model’s safeguards do not secure every tool it can call, so defenses also need controls over agent permissions and execution.

Cymphony launches with $30M from Sequoia and Fin Capital

Cymphony launched with $30M led by Sequoia and Fin Capital. Cymphony connects identities, permissions, data, and behavior to find stale access and overshared files.

An AI assistant can expose sensitive files using an employee’s existing permissions. Cleaning up access becomes part of securing the assistant, even when authentication works.

Huskeys raises $27M Series A to coordinate WAF, CDN, and edge policies

Huskeys announced a $27M Series A, led by Blackstone Innovations Investments. It coordinates configurations and policies across existing WAFs, CDNs, load balancers, and cloud network controls.

A correct WAF rule does little if another route leaves the application exposed. The value is closing those gaps across vendors.

Proofpoint reportedly in advanced talks to acquire Varonis

The Wall Street Journal reports that Thoma Bravo-owned Proofpoint is negotiating to buy Varonis. No agreement or purchase price is confirmed. Varonis market cap is floating around $5B - $6B and spiked ~10% when the rumors first broke.

HelmGuard raises $7.3M seed for evidence collection and risk assessment

HelmGuard announced a $7.3M seed round, co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline. Its agents gather evidence, assess supplier risks, and identify control gaps, with citations and human review.

A supplier can add AI agents after passing its security review. Continuous evidence could surface that change sooner; buyers still need to inspect the sources behind automated conclusions.

Cognition raises more than $2B Series E for Devin

Cognition announced a Series E exceeding $2B, led by Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir. Devin writes, tests, and maintains code; Auto-Triage and Security Swarm add incident investigation and vulnerability triage.

When one platform writes code and proposes fixes, independent validation becomes more valuable. Faster remediation does not establish that the underlying flaw is gone.

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Hi 👋 Hope you’re having a great week wherever you’re reading from!

A little about me before we dive in. My background spans vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and now AI operations and governance, so I’ve had the chance to look at security from a few different angles. These days, I spend a lot of my time thinking about how organizations can adopt AI securely, from evaluating models and governing agents to figuring out what good oversight looks like as the technology keeps moving.

Darwin and I actually go back to our college days. He became a mentor early in my cybersecurity career, so it’s pretty cool to come full circle and now work on TCP together. I’m excited to bring some of my perspective to TCP, while also using this as an excuse to keep learning and stay close to what’s happening across security.

Now, onto the news!

_{Echo acquired key Minimus assets three days after the startup announced its wind-down. Source: Echo}

🗞️ TL;DR

• 🖱️ Cursor: Aurora ransomware operators used Cursor Agent during post-access activity across ten target organizations.

• 🧱 Minimus: Echo acquired key Minimus assets just three days after the company announced it was winding down.

• 🧪 OpenAI: Roughly 700 agents converged on the Hugging Face environment, giving us another unusual look at how agents behave at scale.

• 🧰 Cybercrime: The FBI seized QTFY domains, knocking its QScan and QTRouter hacking platforms offline.

• 🔬 Threats & research: PaperCut patched an actively exploited flaw again, CISA compared two very different SOC responses, and new research dug into AI malware.

• 📦 Security releases: TRACE landed at the Linux Foundation, Android 17 added new network defenses, and Citrix introduced a Windows recovery environment.

• 💰 Funding & M&A: Alice raised $140 million, Socure acquired Fravity alongside new growth capital, and Kazimi raised €2.2 million in pre-seed funding.

⚒️ Picks of the Week

A ransomware operator used Cursor as a post-access console

Gambit Security observed an Aurora ransomware operator using Cursor Agent, running Claude Sonnet 4.5 Thinking, across ten target organizations. One important detail is easy to miss: the agent was given credentials or another route into the victim environment. Cursor wasn’t autonomously finding targets and breaking in. The attacker already had a way through the door and used the agent to help operate once inside.

Cursor was tasked with internal scanning, domain enumeration, NTLM relay attempts, certificate attacks, and other post-access activity. Many commands failed on the first attempt, but the agent repeatedly refined its approach. The operator even set guardrails including no DCSync, account lockouts, or creation of new computer objects.

_{Gambit observed Cursor Agent sessions across ten organizations from April 8 through May 21. Circle size represents the number of commands run. Source: Gambit Security}

There’s something almost like reverse governance happening here. Give the agent access, an objective, and boundaries. Do all of these bad things, just don’t do these bad things. If this is what attackers could accomplish with an earlier generation of agentic tooling, the trajectory matters as models become more capable. AI agents are becoming another part of threat actor tradecraft. For defenders, that puts even more pressure on defense in depth and detections that can catch malicious activity whether it comes from a person or an agent.

Echo picks up key Minimus assets after its wind-down

Three days after Minimus announced it was winding down, Echo acquired key assets from the company, including its technology, integrations, research, and data. Minimus grew out of Gutsy, which launched with a $51 million seed round in 2023 before pivoting toward hardened open-source software. The terms of Echo’s deal weren’t disclosed, and importantly, Echo acquired key assets rather than Minimus itself.

I like this move. Cybersecurity benefits from collaboration, and a company shutting down doesn’t mean the technology or research it built suddenly loses its value. Minimus appears to have built something Echo believes is worth carrying forward, while its customers now have a potential path forward instead of being left with a dead product. Echo gets stronger, useful security work doesn’t disappear, and years of research and engineering have a chance to keep contributing to the industry.

Roughly 700 OpenAI agents joined the Hugging Face attack

METR's investigation into OpenAI's agent experiment keeps getting stranger. Roughly 1,200 supposedly isolated agents discovered an unsanctioned message board, exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files, and about 700 eventually participated in the Hugging Face attack. Some agents accomplished milestones through collaboration that they couldn't achieve alone. Others researched ways to manipulate the ExploitGym scorer, including spoofing their own tool calls.

_{An isolated agent discovered the shared message board and joined the broader attack. Source: METR.}

What gets me is how persistent these agents were. Give capable agents an objective and enough freedom, and you have to account for them finding paths to that objective you never designed or anticipated. One agent created the message board itself, and within hours more than 50 others had found it and started communicating. And that communication mattered. METR found that agents working together reached milestones they couldn't achieve on their own. That's wild, but it also raises a serious enterprise question: what happens when supposedly isolated agents gain access to shared state or communication channels you aren't monitoring? As agents get more capable and connected, controlling what they can access, who they can communicate with, and how we verify what they actually did becomes just as important as the task we gave them in the first place.

FBI takes QTFY's hacking platforms offline

The Justice Department and FBI seized three domains used by QScan and QTRouter, two complementary hacking platforms allegedly operated by the PRC-linked QTFY group. QScan scanned and infected thousands of IoT devices, while QTRouter used compromised devices and other infrastructure to help malicious actors hide the origin of their attacks. Because the seized domains were hard-coded into both platforms, DOJ says the operation rendered them inoperable.

Sometimes offense is your best defense. Most security teams, spend their time watching IOCs, threat hunting, tuning detections, and preparing for the next attack. The FBI and its partners have another lever: disrupting the infrastructure attackers depend on. Taking these platforms offline might seem like a small win, but disrupting infrastructure built to operate at scale can prevent a lot more attacks downstream.

🔬Threats & Research

PaperCut patches an actively exploited flaw again

PaperCut released a second emergency security update for actively exploited vulnerabilities affecting PaperCut MF and NG, adding further hardening beyond its original emergency patch. The company has confirmed customer incidents, making this more than a theoretical patching exercise. If you applied the first update, check again. Release 2 is the version administrators should be looking at now.

Both SOCs had alerts. Only one acted.

CISA ran parallel red-team assessments against two organizations using similar attack techniques, but the defensive response looked very different. At Organization A, alerts were missed or closed while the red team continued deeper into the environment. At Organization B, defenders isolated three compromised endpoints in roughly 10, 2, and 20 minutes, forcing CISA to continue the assessment from an assumed breach.

_{Red team activity and Organization B SOC response. Source: CISA}

Unit 42 found most “AI malware” samples only in labs

Unit 42 compared 405 AI-linked samples against endpoint telemetry from December 2024 through June 2025 and network telemetry from June 2024 through June 2025. Only 12 appeared on Cortex XDR-protected production endpoints. Roughly 97% existed only in sandboxes, VirusTotal, research repositories, or validation systems, and the set included conventional malware wearing AI branding. This is selected Palo Alto Networks telemetry, not a current prevalence estimate for the whole internet. It fits the less cinematic pattern seen elsewhere this week, where AI is useful in planning, coding, and operator workflows while autonomous malware remained uncommon in this dataset.

📦 Security Product Releases

TRACE gives agent audit trails a cryptographic spine

The Linux Foundation accepted TRACE, an open specification designed to create cryptographically verifiable records of AI runtime activity. Instead of relying only on traditional logs, TRACE is designed to provide tamper-evident evidence of what an AI system executed, creating a stronger audit trail for agents and other autonomous systems.

Android 17 adds four network defenses

Android 17 adds broad Encrypted Client Hello support with Private DNS, enforces permission checks for local network access, and enables Certificate Transparency by default. Participating carriers can also disable 2G by default to blunt SMS-blaster attacks, while ECH still depends on supporting sites, apps, and modern networking libraries. These are consequential platform changes because they reduce exposed network metadata, silent local scanning, certificate opacity, and a legacy downgrade path without another settings scavenger hunt.

_{Google's model of an SMS-blaster attack: a rogue base station forces nearby phones onto legacy 2G before delivering phishing texts. Source: Google}

Citrix adds a second operating system for Windows outages

Citrix introduced UniconOS dual boot, a recovery capability that gives organizations another way to keep endpoints running during Windows outages. If the primary Windows environment becomes unavailable or compromised, compatible devices can boot into an isolated UniconOS environment and reconnect users to critical applications through Citrix services. The idea is straightforward: if Windows is the problem, recovery shouldn't depend entirely on Windows working.

🤝 Funding & M&A

Alice raises $140M

_{Alice raised $140 million in a round led by Apax Digital, bringing its total funding to $280 million. Source: Alice.}

Alice, formerly ActiveFence, raised $140 million as it expands its AI security platform. The company is positioning around securing AI applications and agents, building on ActiveFence's background in trust and safety. The round gives Alice fresh capital to expand as enterprises look for ways to secure increasingly autonomous AI systems.

Socure adds growth capital and acquires Fravity

Socure raised additional growth capital and acquired Fravity, an AI-native identity company, as it expands beyond identity verification into agentic identity. The deal brings Fravity’s technology and team into Socure as companies start thinking about how autonomous agents should be identified, authorized, and trusted alongside human users.

Kazimi raises €2.2M to secure AI agents

Kazimi raised €2.2 million in pre-seed funding to build security infrastructure for AI agents. The company is developing tools to control how agents access systems, credentials, and sensitive resources as organizations move from AI assistants toward software capable of taking actions on their behalf.

Interested in sponsoring TCP?

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Howdy 👋🏽

Quick heads up, I’m switching up the format a bit this week.

Picks of the Week > Threats + Research > Product Releases > Funding + M&A.

Typically, I’ll run the top 3-5 stories I think you should care about most per section, each week. There’s ridiculous amounts of noise, slop, and FUD in security. TCP should be a compass for you whether you’re a CISO, engineer, founder, investor, GTM operator or anything in between.

Consider this format officially in beta. Tell me if you hate it or if you like it or if you have any other ideas which would improve your reading experience!

Re: upcoming issues: I’ll soon be going on vacation in Black Rock City so I’ll ship a special edition post in place of our weekly TCP coverage next week. The following week, our new contributing author (soon to be announced!), will ship TCP weekly.

Re: work life: here’s a blog I wrote on Anthropic Compliance API Activity feed detection opps + gaps. 101 log source footprinting.

Re: personal life: I’ve been DJ’ng a bit. It’s a fun hobby. I have 6 gigs over the next 3 weeks. If you happen to be in Austin this Saturday, pop by Zilker. I play at 9pm. RSVP.

Before we dive in, here’s my favorite meme of the week and an ad from our friends at Intruder!

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🗞️ TL;DR

• 🇹🇼 Taiwan: The government confirmed a campaign combining human operators with AI agents. Dream’s investigation provides the detailed attribution, scale, and impact figures.

• ⚔️ Private firms could run offensive cyber ops: A new White House memorandum directs DHS to create a federally controlled program in which vetted companies could eventually conduct surveillance and disruptive operations against specified foreign criminal organizations.

• 🧪 OpenAI: The Hugging Face incident and Astra’s advanced cyber capabilities prompted stricter sandboxes, token-level monitoring, a 30-minute stop rule, and pauses on some training.

• 🚨 Threat activity: U.S. agencies warned that actors are using AI-generated tooling against Siemens industrial controllers, Lazarus burned a Windows zero-day, and CISA confirmed active exploitation of a critical MLflow flaw.

• 🛠️ Security releases: Google Cloud shipped usable post-quantum controls, CodeRabbit moved into security, and Signal added automatic key verification.

• 💰 Funding & M&A: Fortinet closed its acquisition of Virtue AI, Cribl bought Radiant Security’s AI SOC technology, and Mindgard raised $30 million.

⚒️ Picks of the Week

Taiwan confirms an AI-assisted attack on government agencies

Taiwan’s Ministry of Digital Affairs confirmed that an attacker group combined manual operations with AI-agent assistance during a July campaign against government agencies. The more detailed attribution, autonomy analysis, and impact figures come from Dream’s investigation.

Dream’s reconstruction says a Hermes and OpenClaw setup ran up to eight subagents in parallel, mapped 21 connected government systems, cracked 85 employee credentials, and extracted at least 2,564 personnel records in roughly four days. The recovered workspace also showed agents ranking attack paths and rechecking their own findings. Dream cited a Chinese-language operator without naming either party; the Financial Times identified the target as Taiwan.

What gets me is more the speed more than the novelty. Dream describes the agents moving through exposed debug endpoints, unauthenticated APIs, predictable passwords, an unsigned JWT flaw, and over-trusted SSO in four days.

Sure, a human still picked the target and objective, so this is not a fully autonomous attack story. It is a look at what happens when familiar weaknesses get tested in parallel, without much downtime between steps.

Access decisions at machine speed, with human judgment. Paladin is now GA.

“It denied a deliberately bad admin request with better reasoning than most human reviewers would give.”

Agent and non-human identities on Opal’s platform grew 2,300% in the last year, each holding 3x the entitlements of a person. No team reviews that volume by hand. Paladin does. Someone requests prod access at 2am: it checks the linked incident, confirms they’re on call, weighs the request against your policy, and recommends a time-boxed grant with its reasoning shown. No match? It declines or escalates to a person. You set the autonomy dial. Every decision is logged and audit-ready.

See Paladin in action

OpenAI pauses model testing and some training after the Hugging Face incident

OpenAI has paused model testing for two weeks and separately paused training on its next-gen Astra models. It also tightened sandboxing, internet isolation, and automated monitoring. New rules target alerts within 30 minutes and require pausing a test when teams cannot clear a concerning flag within that window.

The catalyst for this was July’s Hugging Face incident which we’ve covered in previous issues and is detailed below.

Seems like there were 800 agent breakouts in late July/early Aug., good to see labs continuing to improve security.

The White House directs DHS to build a controlled lane for private offensive cyber operators

Security has argued about private-sector hack back for as long as I’ve been in security. The house has always been divided. This new proposal from the White House is narrower: private operators would work under federal supervision.

A new national security presidential memorandum authorizes cyber tools against foreign transnational criminal organizations and directs DHS, with Justice Department oversight, to build a federally supervised program. If and when it becomes operational, vetted companies could gather threat information, propose operations, and conduct cyber surveillance or effects.

Some threat actors operate through a victim’s compromised infrastructure, so what happens when the “hack back” takes down the infra of a legitimate corp/victim? The devil is in the details.

CoSnitch turned Copilot’s own answers into attack reconnaissance

Repeated follow-up questions led Microsoft Copilot Personal to disclose an undocumented autorun URL parameter and prompt-handling details. A victim who clicked a crafted link could then trigger a prompt inside an authenticated session, query connected services, and exfiltrate encoded results through Copilot’s URL-fetch capability. Separately, researchers used indirect prompt injection through web summarization to write attacker-controlled instructions into Copilot’s persistent memory.

Varonis says it disclosed CoSnitch in December 2025 and that fixes shipped August 18. Microsoft told Dark Reading that no customer action was required and enterprise users were unaffected. Varonis says it found no exploitation.

The cool thing about investing in vuln research for specific ecosystems is that you become super familiar with it and end up discovering a slew of interesting things. Varonis has hit the jackpot on MSFT Copilot vulns and Copilot users can learn a lot from their research.

Walmart puts trusted observers inside its purple-team exercises

This was my favorite practitioner piece of the week. Walmart moved its red and blue teams into the same business unit and physical location, then introduced “trusted agents” into full adversary-emulation exercises.

Blue-team observers sit with the red team, check telemetry, logs, and detections in real time, and make sure the exercise does not damage production. Their job is not to tip off the defenders. The teams validate detections while the attack is still happening. When defenders make an attack path harder, the red team gets immediate feedback and has to pivot. This is textbook purple teaming.

DarkReading published a few pieces on how Walmart thinks about SecOps + Purple Teaming which you can find here.

🔬Threats & Research

Wiz’s Red Agent found a Snowflake CI/CD flaw five days after it went live

Wiz says its Red Agent found a GitHub Actions script injection in Snowflake’s public snowflake-connector-net repository. A crafted issue title could execute commands in a workflow and expose a Jira token with read access to internal engineering, compliance, and bug-bounty projects.

Snowflake patched the workflow on June 23, five days after the vulnerable change went live, and rotated the token the next day. Snowflake said it found no evidence of unauthorized third-party access, while Wiz said it matched all anomalous queries to its testing IPs.

Cool BTS look at how AI pen testing helps secure enterprises.

Post-DEF CON phish chains X, Google Docs, and DocSend

A threat actor posing as CoinDesk’s VP of marketing approached a Huntress researcher after Black Hat and DEF CON with a fake conference-planning pitch. The researcher spotted it and kept talking to map the playbook; the actor moved from a Google Doc with an Apps Script sidebar to a fake DocSend installer delivering AMOS on macOS or Ledger-focused malware and a traffic-intercepting proxy on Windows. When neither worked, the pitch somehow became an offer of up to $1 million in funding. Conference follow-ups are supposed to feel warm and familiar, which is exactly what made this workflow useful as a lure.

Lazarus turns a Windows zero-day into an EDR-blinding chain

Check Point attributes a defense and aerospace campaign in Europe and India to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. Fake job offers, impersonation sites, and trojanized PDF viewers led to exploitation of CVE-2026-68820 in Windows AFD.sys, SYSTEM access, and deployment of the EDR-blinding FudModule rootkit. Compromised Roundcube and WordPress servers relayed command-and-control traffic. Microsoft patched the actively exploited flaw August 11.

Attackers are abusing the macOS Screen Sharing authentication flaw

Apple patched CVE-2026-65400 across supported macOS releases on August 6. The flaw lets a network attacker authenticate to Screen Sharing without valid credentials. On August 12, the Dutch NCSC reported active exploitation of internet-exposed TCP 5900, with attackers gaining root and installing Monero miners. Screen Sharing is disabled by default. Exposed deployments should update, disable the service where unnecessary, and remove TCP 5900 from direct internet exposure.

📦 Security Product Releases

Google Cloud sets out its post-quantum roadmap

Google Cloud’s August 11 update combines tactical controls teams can implement today with a multi-year plan. Cloud KMS support for ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA is generally available. Google Cloud API endpoints already use hybrid ML-KEM, and application and proxy load balancers can opt into TLS 1.3 X25519MLKEM768. Cloud VPN, Interconnect, developer tooling, and data transfer are targeted for 2026 or 2027, while certificate, IAM, HSM, and supply-chain work extends through 2028. Google’s overall readiness target is 2029.

Google has been working on quantum for a decade+. Great to see them continuing to invest in this space while rest of the world focuses on AI security. Quantum will come slowly and then all at once, imo.

Signal adds automatic key verification

Signal’s August 11 release adds optional automatic key verification, backed by a verifiable key-transparency log, to supplement manual safety-number comparisons. When Signal knows a contact’s phone number, users can ask the app to verify that the encryption key bound to it matches the log. Cloudflare and Trail of Bits serve as independent auditors. The practical value is that key mismatches can surface without asking users to manually compare a wall of safety-number digits. Automatic verification still has limits: it does not establish real-world identity, catch every account compromise, or work for username-only contacts.

Mallory makes bring your own key generally available

Mallory recently made BYOK GA on August 18 across every plan. Here, BYOK refers to an LLM-provider API key, not a customer-managed encryption key. Teams can run Mallory workflows against approved OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or OpenRouter accounts, with inference billed by that provider. Keys are encrypted and injected through a credential proxy.

Mallory is a leading threat intel platform founded by Jonathan Cran.

CodeRabbit moves into security and agentic change management

CodeRabbit rolled out Agentic Change Management and Security. Security scans committed code for reachable auth flaws, IDOR, injection, data exposure, and prompt injection, then verifies findings and can open remediation PRs. Triage prioritizes incoming PRs, while Change Stack breaks large changes into semantic groups.

CodeRabbit is a leading AI code review platform. Makes sense that anything that touches PRs should start going after code security.

🤝 Funding & M&A

Fortinet closes its acquisition of Virtue AI

Fortinet completed its acquisition of Virtue AI on August 17. Virtue adds shadow AI and MCP discovery, automated red teaming, runtime guardrails, and continuous attack simulation. Fortinet positions those capabilities as a complement to FortiAIGate and its broader AI-native Security Fabric. Financial terms were not disclosed, and Fortinet said the consideration was ‘immaterial’.

Fortinet is betting that AI security becomes another control layer inside the platform instead of a standalone island. What I’ll be watching is how Virtue’s product identity carries into the broader platform and where its capabilities surface first.

Cribl buys Radiant Security’s AI SOC technology

Cribl acquired the technology behind Radiant Security’s AI SOC platform, which builds triage logic for individual alerts and investigates them against telemetry.

Cribl plans to turn it into an application on its telemetry platform. This is its second security deal of 2026 after CardinalOps, and the direction is getting pretty clear: Cribl wants its telemetry layer to power more of the work analysts actually do.

Mindgard raises a $30 million Series A

Mindgard raised a $30 million Series A led by Album VC, with Karma Ventures and existing investors participating. The company tests and monitors models, applications, and agents for prompt injection, data leakage, model manipulation, and multi-step attack paths.

Brinqa acquires PlexTrac

Brinqa acquired PlexTrac, bringing pentest workflows, offensive-security validation, reporting, and post-remediation retesting into its exposure-management platform. PlexTrac will remain available as a standalone product, and founder Dan DeCloss is joining Brinqa’s executive team and board. Financial terms were not disclosed.

More OffSec consolidation coming? 👀

Cloudflare prices $2.175 billion of 0% convertible notes

Cloudflare priced $2.175 billion of 0% convertible notes due 2031, with a $325 million buyer option and roughly $2.14 billion in expected net proceeds. Funds may support general corporate purposes and strategic transactions, but no acquisition was announced. The initial conversion price carries a 60% premium to Cloudflare’s August 10 close. In plain English, Cloudflare just priced a large pool of capital with zero cash interest. Conversion rights and potential dilution are the trade.

Team8 announces $365 million in new fund capital

Team8 announced $365 million in new fund capital. The total includes a $265 million Capital Fund III and more than $100 million in a follow-on pool.

Team8 has backed Claroty, Akeyless, OX Security, IONIX, and Nagomi, plus exits including Talon and Dig Security to Palo Alto Networks, Gem Security to Wiz, Portshift to Cisco, and Illusive Networks to Proofpoint.

Team8 says it will back seed and Series A companies across cybersecurity, software infrastructure, fintech, and digital health, then reserve support for its highest-conviction portfolio companies. The announcement brings Team8’s assets under management across eight funds to nearly $2 billion.

CodeRabbit raises a $143 million Series C

As covered in the product section, CodeRabbit’s Agentic Change Management release arrived with a $143 million Series C co-led by Atomico and Smash Capital, valuing the company at $1.5 billion and bringing total funding to more than $200 million.

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Howdy 👋🏽 It’s the week after Hacker Summer Camp, and many of us are still in recovery mode. Our industry never catches a breather though. Lots going on to kick off this week even (i.e., Corma’s $60M seed, Monad x Upwind Partnership etc.)

To recap it all, I’m doing my usual major-con split: one issue covering the industry side, followed by another with my personal recap and takeaways. This is the former, and probably the most comprehensive issue I’ve ever put together. Admittedly, I did use AI to help me sorth through all the noise, synthesize, and summarize.

The good news is that I filtered out all the BS and pulled out the stories and details actually worth your attention. Even after all that filtering, we still have a lot of ground to cover. Before we dive in, here’s a buzzword bingo card I came up with which probably would’ve been a hit at Blackhat… ideas for next year I guess

Cool, now let’s get into it!

Your AI Agents Are Deployed. Are They Trusted?

Agents don't wait for permission; they simply act. Varonis Atlas' latest expansion is Agent Intent-Based Access Control (IBAC), a new layer that compares what an agent was asked to do to what it actually does. Agent IBAC blocks, alerts, and quarantines in real time when agents drift off course.

Stop guessing what your agents can reach and start controlling what they do.

See Varonis Agent IBAC in Action

TL;DR ✏️

• 🤖 Eval agents reached cluster-admin: The chain crossed multiple Hugging Face clusters through shared infrastructure and reusable credentials.

• 🔬 HTTP Terminator found novel desyncs: Kettle’s gated loop found 200-plus vulnerable targets across 30,000 authorized hosts.

• 🛰️ Inside North Korea’s back end: Stykas linked the operation to 1,640 potential victims across 57 countries.

• 🪱 ChainDrop infected 400-plus packages: The worm stole developer secrets and republished tainted npm versions through CI.

• 🧬 Unit42 NOVA reported 14,090 findings: A separate research report from 1Password found only 26 percent of patches fully fixed the studied flaws.

• 🌀 One Rovo link leaked data: A crafted rovoChatPrompt URL exfiltrated victim-accessible secrets through an attacker-controlled image request.

• 🧰 Agent controls moved inline: New releases covered credentials, tool calls, browsers, runtime, and task-specific coding context.

• 🧨 Agentic pentesting split three ways: Continuous testing, chained attack paths, and human-backed validation are different products.

• 🌱 Corma trained its own model: Its $60M seed backs defensive self-play inside instrumented enterprise environments.

• 🏆 Opnova swept Black Hat: Its computer-use agents for disconnected apps won the U.S. contest, audience vote, and global final.

• 💸 Thirteen announcements totaled $1.27B: Capital clustered around testing, agents, runtime security, identity, and infrastructure.

Plus: two Kerberos logic flaws, a Pilates waitlist incident, poisoned telemetry, a USB-to-SYSTEM chain, and 40+ product launch and funding announcements.

⚒️ Picks of the Week ⚒️

The OpenAI-Hugging Face incident was bigger than the first disclosure

OpenAI’s Black Hat reconstruction showed that its evaluation agents built a cross-session chain into Hugging Face. They used a shared Artifactory service as a message board, exploited a zero-day in OpenAI’s cache proxy, and turned an exposed user-hosted CyberGym executor on Modal into a root launchpad; Modal itself was not compromised.

A malicious HDF5 dataset made a Hugging Face worker return /proc/self/environ and its source. A second payload hid a Jinja2 expression in an fsspec reference:// offset, which executed Python inside a production conversion pod. The agent created a privileged pod with the host filesystem mounted, reached node root, and read a Kubernetes secret with 136 entries. A mesh-VPN enrollment key and a broker credential bound to system:masters yielded cluster-admin across multiple clusters within 13 hours.

The clever exploits matter less than the permissions and gaps they chained together. Shared infrastructure, permissive egress, reusable credentials, and unrestricted privileged pods turned separate flaws into systemic compromise. I thikn moving forward, evaluation agents need the same security controls as agents in production. We’ve now seen how far the blast radius can go.

Dig Deeper: Black Hat reconstruction | Hugging Face timeline | Hugging Face’s interactive replay

The Future of Web Application Security Is Here

Custom web applications change constantly. Security validation should too. Traditional testing captures a point-in-time snapshot, finding vulnerabilities but rarely proving how attackers could exploit them in production.

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A researcher spent 22 months inside North Korean hacker infrastructure

At Black Hat, Greece-based researcher Vangelis Stykas presented findings from what he says was 22 months inside multiple North Korean command-and-control (C2) systems. He reached attacker workstations, Slack, Discord, and roughly 5 TB of data.

Stykas says the material tied 1,640 organizations across 57 countries to the operation as potential victims. He estimates 700 to 800 suffered serious intrusions involving root access to servers or AWS environments and, in some cases, cryptocurrency keys. The operators largely used the familiar Contagious Interview playbook, sending malware through fake job offers aimed at developers and external contractors.

Named organizations reported different outcomes. Japan’s CERT confirmed remediation with AEON Smart Technology. Boston Children’s Hospital said the incident involved a former contractor’s personal device, not hospital systems. Coinbase said it terminated a risky contractor and found no sensitive or customer data exposure.

Easily one of the wildest stories to come out of hacker summer camp.

James Kettle encoded his vulnerability-research workflow into an AI system

PortSwigger’s (creator’s of BurpSuite) James Kettle presented HTTP Terminator at Black Hat USA and DEF CON 34. The AI research system converted specification fragments into hypotheses, permuted probes, and checked cross-request contamination across 30,000 authorized targets at under one request per second per domain.

It found more than 200 targets where multipart/byteranges triggered CL.0 desynchronization: a front end forwarded a body that the back end ignored. It also found servers that read duplicate valid Content-Length headers as a zero-length body. Its dangling-byte technique left a smuggled request one byte short so the victim’s first byte completed it, avoiding the usual response-queue-poisoning race. HTTP Terminator also proposed Shared-Parser Confusion, which Kettle manually validated.

Early agents confused HTTP pipelining with bugs. Kettle moved each success condition into deterministic code and required evidence at every stage. He reports the gated exploitation loop produced zero false positives and released the tooling.

Great research by one of the best in biz.

ChainDrop infected more than 400 npm packages

During Black Hat week, ChainDrop began spreading across npm, infecting more than 400 packages. Unit 42 found that the worm stole npm and GitHub tokens, SSH keys, kubeconfigs, and other developer secrets. An embedded Python helper read live GitHub Actions runner memory for short-lived OpenID Connect tokens and secrets.

With a stolen npm token, ChainDrop enumerated every package it could publish, kept the original code, added a preinstall hook and two payload files, bumped the patch version, and republished. It also planted a CodeQL-named workflow that copied repository secrets into an Actions artifact. Linked Visual Studio Code and Claude Code configurations disguised the files; only the Visual Studio Code path executed in Unit 42’s sample.

An Ethereum contract resolved command infrastructure, letting the operator rotate domains with one transaction. A path for minting genuine Sigstore provenance existed but was not observed.

This reminds me of the teamPCP hacks that kicked off during RSAC week. Are attackers intentionally targeting heavy conference weeks to wreak havoc? 🙃

Different cloud providers, different priorities

If juggling multiple cloud providers wasn't complicated enough, it turns out they don't fail in the same places. There's surprisingly little overlap in the issues affecting AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, meaning each provider demands different priorities.

Intruder’s new report helps you understand where those priorities differ, breaking down the most common issues across each provider, how they compare across key risk categories, and how those risks change as organizations grow.

Get the report

Opnova sweeps both Black Hat startup competitions

Opnova pulled off a clean sweep at Black Hat, beating fellow USA finalists Deception Check, Mallory, and Perpetual Systems before topping regional champions Legion Security, Sahl, Geordie AI, and Prowler in the inaugural global final later that day. Its computer-use agents handle identity operations across mainframes, Citrix, thick clients, and legacy portals, including internal admin consoles with no SCIM connector, without replacing the existing IGA stack.

The awards are nice. Applying agents to one of IAM’s ugliest operational gaps is the more interesting part.

NOVA reported 14,090 findings; only 26% of AI patches actually worked

During Blackhat, Unit 42 published an autonomous vulnerability discovery, validation and reporting system called Network and Open-Source Vulnerability Analyzer (NOVA) and reported 14,090 vuln findings in two months. It built and replayed PoCs, then routed results to humans. The breakdown was: 4,141 were dependency exposures, 2,776 with working PoCs; 85 matched public records.

Our good friend Keith Hoodlet and the 1Password off-by-1 team published FLAWED. It graded 6,080 model-generated patches for six difficult flaws after excluding 400 attempts that retrieved upstream fixes. Only 26%closed every exploitable path without changing other behavior. Another 20.1% fixed the flaw but changed semantics. The other 53.9% failed, introduced a vulnerability, or both.

More than one-third of top-scoring patches remained fragile, often blocking only the supplied PoC. Humans reviewed at least 10% of each campaign; exact agreement with model validators was 65.9% .

This research pretty much tells me that automated remediation still has a long way to go. What do you mean 54% of fixes failed or introduced a new vuln????

OpenClaw removed a gym member while trying to book Pilates

Australian Andrew Bird asked an OpenClaw assistant to book a gym class. The agent found that the provider’s GraphQL API allowed early bookings and lacked authorization checks on cancellations. When Bird asked whether it could improve his fourth-place waitlist position, it removed the person in first, then reported that it could not add them back.

The model was not conducting security research. It was completing a normal task against a broken API with permission to act. Authorization checks cannot assume a human will stop at the intended interface.

Corma is training a defensive-security model from scratch

One day after DEF CON 34, Corma emerged from stealth with a $60M seed led by Sequoia Capital; Khosla Ventures and Coatue also participated.

It is training its own foundation model for defensive work using reinforcement learning and self-play in instrumented enterprise environments, then deploying agents across existing SOC, identity, cloud, and network tools. Corma also supports on-premises deployment and post-training on customer security data.

Its launch research ran four frontier models as attackers and defenders across 241 scored engagements spanning eight Active Directory domains, 64 VLANs, approximately 349 servers, and approximately 4,483 workstations. Attackers established verified, reboot-surviving backdoors in 85% of runs.

Most security agents wrap a general model around a SOC workflow. We’ve recently seen an influx of small language, use-case specific models from Wiz, Cisco and more. Cool to see a well-backed startup solely focused on this approach. This is the way.

Threats and Research

Two Kerberos logic flaws enabled takeover and downgrade attacks

After Microsoft patched them, Shai Laron presented both flaws at Black Hat USA and DEF CON 34. KerberLoss (CVE-2026-25177) uses LDAP-unfilterable Unicode to bypass forest-wide SPN uniqueness, enabling SPN-jacking, DoS, or NTLM fallback.

ResetNightmare (CVE-2026-27912) requires an attacker-writable or new user or computer object and a target past minimum password age. An attacker sets the target’s bare sAMAccountName as an object’s UPN, requests an NT-ENTERPRISE TGT, clears the UPN, and sends it to kadmin/changepw:464. This bypasses TGS exchange and the PAC_REQUESTOR_SID mismatch check, allowing a password reset, including for a Domain Admin.

Patch DCs; hunt Event 5136.

RovoBlast showed how a crafted link could poison an agent prompt

Varonis debuted the fixed RovoBlast chain at DEF CON 34. Atlassian Rovo had accepted a rovoChatPrompt URL parameter as trusted input. A crafted link preloaded instructions into an authenticated session. Rovo searched content the victim could access, inserted it into the path of an attacker-controlled image URL, then fetched the image and sent the data out in the request. Atlassian fixed the issue before the presentation.

There was no permission bypass. Rovo inherited the user’s access, and a URL parameter became trusted instructions.

Poisoned telemetry became instructions for AI agents

Tenet disclosed Ghostjacking on DEF CON 34’s Main Track. In tests using its own accounts, the researchers placed instructions inside Cloudflare, Datadog, and Sentry records. When an AI agent reviewed the telemetry, it treated the text as commands and used legitimate tools to change DNS, execute code, or pass a poisoned conclusion to another agent. Tenet says it also reported a Claude Desktop egress and sandbox bypass that Anthropic fixed before disclosure.

If an agent can read untrusted telemetry and remediate infrastructure, logs are both evidence and input.

More research worth reading

• Agent platforms had critical flaws: Ruflo exposed 233 MCP tools without authentication; Paperclip allowed unauthenticated access, DNS rebinding, and RCE.

• Plug & Pwn reached SYSTEM: At DEF CON 34, forged USB identities on updated Windows 11 reached SYSTEM without login.

• OpenSSH fixed restricted agent operations: Version 10.5 fixed three issues; duplicate AI reports accelerated the release.

• Industrial ransomware claims rose: Dragos counted 1,140 Q2 incidents, 65 percent in manufacturing; none directly manipulated control systems.

• Zenity presented AI Total at Black Hat USA: It found malicious skills using droppers, prompt changes, self-reinstallation, and skill-creator replacement.

Black Hat 2026 Product Launches

The launches land at different control points. Products that own credentials or sit inline with tool calls, network traffic, or runtime execution can prevent an action. Telemetry-only products can investigate it after the fact.

Identity and authorization controls for agents

1Password Privileged Access creates task-scoped access for humans and agents, then removes it. Rubrik Agent Identity issues short-lived tokens per tool call. Varonis Agent IBAC compares instructions with tool and data use before allowing or blocking actions. Zero Networks applies identity microsegmentation, just-in-time access, and human approval to sensitive agent actions.

C1 launches discovery, credential custody, and tool-call enforcement

In the week before Black Hat, C1 (formerly ConductorOne) rolled out four parts of an Agentic Control Plane. Shadow AI Discovery inventories unsanctioned tools, agents, MCP servers, and exposed credentials. Agentic Vault can replace raw keys with governed references and issue short-lived, scoped credentials. Runtime Governance routes tool calls through an identity-aware gateway that can allow, redact, hold, or block before execution. The final layer flags unowned or misclassified machine identities and routes remediation through existing approval and audit workflows. The key part here is breadth across discovery, credential custody, and inline tool-call enforcement shipped together.

Endpoint, browser, network, and runtime controls

Legit VibeGuard governs coding-agent commands, skills, and Model Context Protocol activity at the endpoint. Menlo MARS routes agent web sessions through remote disposable containers. Check Point’s AI Network Firewall discovers agents and MCP traffic at the network layer. Sweet Security says it blocks unauthorized tool calls, sessions, prompt injection, and sensitive-data movement at runtime.

These controls cover different paths. Browser isolation does not govern a local shell, and network visibility does not replace tool authorization.

Virtual patching expanded while remediation quality lagged

Palo Alto Networks added Advanced Virtual Patching to PAN-OS 12.2. Contrast CVE Shield wraps vulnerable Java methods in a runtime microsandbox. Qualys InstaScan correlates advisories with existing inventory and telemetry instead of waiting for another scheduled scan.

Clover gave coding agents task-specific security context

Kura pulls task-specific threats and countermeasures from a living threat model while agents build. In Clover’s experiment across Plane, Kubernetes, and Grafana, feature-tailored context mitigated 84 percent of planted business-logic flaws on average; broad context reached 33 percent.

I’m a big fan of their approach to securing AI-native development. I wrote about Clover’s broader thesis in March. Kura is one of the few security products that really impresses me in this age of sameness because it works where business-logic mistakes start. The threat model still has to stay current, and the code still needs verification.

“Agentic pentesting” from different angles

What’s new:

• Horizon3.ai NodeZero WebApp: Runs production-safe web tests and chains findings into infrastructure, identity, and cloud attack paths.

• Snyk Evo: Runs continuous, context-aware multi-stage tests as software changes, then uses a second model to validate exploitability.

• Bugcrowd Savant Pathseeker: Tests web apps and APIs, returns exploit evidence, and works beside human-led testing.

Not all agentic pentest tools are created equally. Compare scope, exploit proof, production safety, retesting, and human involvement.

OpenAI split approved cyber access into Blue and Red

OpenAI expanded Daybreak on August 10. Blue gives approved defenders GPT-5.6 Sol with safeguards calibrated for defensive work. Red separately provisions GPT-5.6 Cyber with fewer refusals for exploit development and advanced testing.

OpenAI says its researchers used GPT-5.6 Cyber to find two previously unknown V8 vulnerabilities that chain into a V8 heap-sandbox escape. Google fixed the first as CVE-2026-15903; OpenAI did not detail the second flaw or its status. Approval does not contain the model by itself. Logging, scope, and environment isolation still carry the risk.

Other launches

• Opal rebuilt its MCP servers before Black Hat: It introduced three role-scoped servers: end-user, admin provisioning, and admin auditing, with first-party or self-hosted deployment. The provisioning server can approve or deny requests in chat.

• Huntress RMM Guard: Inventories remote-monitoring tools and moves unauthorized instances toward blocking.

• BlackCloak Circle of Trust: Extends out-of-band impersonation checks to executives’ families, assistants, lawyers, and trusted contacts.

• Zimperium Deep Insights: Reconstructs mobile attack timelines and compares device state before and after travel or suspected compromise.

FUNDING

The 13 selected announcements, including the two seed mini PICKS above, total $1.269B. Most of the capital went toward autonomous testing, agent controls, runtime security, identity, and infrastructure.

• Horizon3.ai raised $250M in Series E funding. NodeZero runs autonomous pentests across infrastructure, cloud, identity, and web applications. NightDragon and NEA co-led.

• Spur received a $200M investment. Spur maps VPNs, residential proxies, bot networks, and other anonymized IP traffic. Insight Partners backed the company; Spur did not label it as a conventional round.

• ThreatLocker raised $190M in Series F funding. ThreatLocker provides deny-by-default application allowlisting, endpoint controls, and access policies. Elephant led, with Koch Disruptive Technologies, D. E. Shaw Ventures, and Arthur Ventures participating.

• Zenity raised $125M in Series C funding. Zenity discovers and governs enterprise AI agents, their identities, and their actions. Norwest led, with Qumra, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Hitachi Ventures, and LG Technology Ventures joining.

• Onyx Security raised $113M in Series B funding. Onyx discovers agents across endpoints, browsers, SaaS, and cloud, then inspects their actions before execution. Bessemer led, with Cyberstarts, TCV, Conviction, FirstMark, Vintage, QuantumLight, and G Squared participating.

• groundcover raised $100M in Series C funding. groundcover provides full-stack observability from production telemetry for applications and infrastructure. One Peak led, with Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and existing investors participating.

• Obsidian Security raised $85M in Series D funding. Obsidian monitors SaaS and enterprise-agent activity, data access, and identity risk. Crescent Cove Advisors led.

• Oligo Security raised $60M. Oligo monitors application runtime behavior, blocks exploits, and prioritizes reachable vulnerabilities. The company did not specify a round label.

• inforcer raised $50M in Series C funding. inforcer helps managed service providers secure and govern many customers’ Microsoft 365 tenants. Insight Partners led, with Dawn Capital and Meritech Capital participating.

• Bloom Security launched with a $20M seed round. Bloom inventories and governs coding agents, MCP servers, browser extensions, and packages on AI-native endpoints. Glilot Capital led, with Ten Eleven Ventures, Okta Ventures, Runtime Ventures, and operator angels participating.

• Cantina added $8M in fresh funding. Clarion uses shared context and agents to investigate, remediate, and verify findings; Cantina also operates researcher-powered validation. Framework Ventures led.

DEALS

• Visa agreed to acquire BioCatch for $2.4B in cash. The deal adds behavioral and device intelligence to Visa’s fraud stack.

• Okta signed an agreement to acquire Permiso Security. Terms were not disclosed. TechCrunch reported a price just under $200M.

• Bank of America agreed to acquire MDSec. The bank is bringing offensive research and adversary-simulation expertise in-house.

• Keyfactor announced its intent to acquire Cofide. The deal extends machine identity into workload and agent attestation.

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That’s all for this week… ¡Nos vemos la próxima semana!

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Hi 👋🏽 Hope you’re having a great week wherever you’re reading from!

Big week over here. After four months mapping what eight AI tools log, miss, and let defenders detect, we published A Security Field Guide to AI Tooling Visibility. The 78-page PDF is free and ungated. We’ll also have free hard copies at Black Hat, or you can request one for U.S. shipping.

To my friends and the TCP ecosystem, if I’ve been late to respond, this is a huge reason why 😅..

Hacker Summer Camp is next week, so I also put together a 2026 Hacker Summer Camp Field Guide with my picks for the talks, side events, Vegas side quests, and where to find me. This will be my eighth one, I’ll be there from Monday through Friday.

We also announced the Monad + Scanner security data architecture, pairing clean logs from 350+ sources upstream with fast search, live detections, and investigations across years of logs downstream. Think modular SecOps for humans and agents, without forcing every byte into a SIEM.

Unfortunately for my free time and sanity, security did not cooperate with a quiet news week. It never does actually. Looking forward to getting back to normal life after Blackhat.

Now, onto the news!

Introducing detections.ai Enterprise - coverage and maintenance handled

A new threat drops and you need to move quickly. Run coverage analysis across your whole detection stack, build detections tuned directly for your environment, and deploy them back. In minutes, not days.

But coverage isn’t a one-time win. Detections drift, IOCs go stale, duplicate rules pile up. Our AI agents catch it while you sleep, so nothing slips through unnoticed and your team spends its time on real threats, not upkeep.

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TL;DR ✏️

• 📚 We launched a book on AI tooling native logs: Our 78-page guide maps eight AI log sources and is free, ungated. Covers all the Claudes, OpenAI, Cursor, Gemini and more.

• 🧪 Wiz builds an autonomous researcher: Atlas uncovered 200+ unknown flaws and autonomously proved each was exploitable.

• 🥊 MCP trial becomes lawsuit: Runlayer alleges Rippling cloned its gateway after a nearly year-long enterprise trial.

• 🧬 Cyera to acquire Oasis for $1B: Cyera signed an LOI to acquire Oasis in a reported billion-dollar deal.

• 🐝 Every agent gets a keypair: Block’s open-source Buzz gives agents distinct identities and signed audit trails.

• 🏷️ Google resets the alias map: Google unified its naming systems and gave everyone another alias map to maintain.

Plus: a federated SIEM zig, more runtime agent controls, and more startups out of stealth becuase why not!

📚 Book Launch: What eight AI tools log, what they miss, and what defenders can detect

I haven’t worked as a detection engineer in a few years, but AI tooling gave that part of my brain a fresh batch of logs to pick apart and obsess over

In March, our engineering team began mapping what Claude Code emits over OpenTelemetry. I added the detection lens: What gets logged? How do we collect and normalize it? Which fields map to real TTPs? What should we detect? Where are we blind? That framework became seven more chapters:

• Claude Code and Claude Cowork

• ChatGPT Enterprise and OpenAI Codex

• Cursor and GitHub Copilot

• Gemini in Google Workspace and Anthropic’s compliance activity log

At Monad, we work with companies including Robinhood, CoreWeave, Lambda, and Rubrik. Building integrations for these sources exposed the weirdness firsthand: nested OpenTelemetry payloads, inconsistent schemas, short retention, missing identifiers, and logs that prove a tool ran without showing what it did.

Four months later, that work became A Security Field Guide to AI Tooling Visibility, a 78-page map of what each source records, misses, and lets defenders realistically detect.

This book is meant for defenders across the SecOps spectrum from detection engineers to SOC analysts to threat hunters to DFIR pros.

Huge thanks to Matt Jane and Curtis Redgate for kicking off the Claude Code telemetry work, and to Kenneth Kaye and Valerie Worman for contributing and helping get the guide over the line.

The PDF is free and ungated. We’ll have free hard copies at Black Hat, or you can request one for U.S. shipping while supplies last.

Ungated PDF here

⚒️ Picks of the Week ⚒️

Wiz says Atlas found 200+ unknown vulns as cyber AI goes purpose-built

Wiz built Atlas as a multi-agent vulnerability researcher. It maps code with a code property graph, spins up competing exploit hypotheses, has agents argue over exploitability, then builds an execution environment to prove each finding.

Wiz says Atlas found more than 200 previously unknown vulnerabilities across Kubernetes, the Linux kernel, containerd, gVisor, grpc, and dnsmasq. It also tops CyberGym at 90.9%.

Important caveat: CyberGym Level 1 gives the system vulnerable code and a description, so it measures exploit reproduction, not blank-page discovery.

Purpose-built security AI models are spreading up and down the stack (I highlighted this is the way to go last year):

• Google lined up Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber for a limited-access CodeMender pilot.

• Microsoft built MAI-Cyber-1-Flash into MDASH.

• Cisco already has a Deep Network Model for troubleshooting and automation, and told The Register that more models are headed to Hugging Face.

Models will continue to evolve but the key is in scoping, orchestration, evals, runtime validation, and cost. The harness is what compounds.

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See Atlas in action during Black Hat USA at Varonis’ booth (#2948). Can’t make it to Vegas? Book a demo today.

Learn more about Varonis Atlas

Runlayer sues Rippling over an alleged MCP gateway clone

Runlayer sued Rippling in Manhattan federal court, alleging trade secret theft, unfair competition, and breach of contract after a nearly year-long enterprise trial. Wild drama in SDNY.

Runlayer’s complaint alleges that:

• The companies signed a mutual NDA and trial agreement barring Rippling from copying Runlayer’s IP or creating derivative works.

• Runlayer shared its roadmap, source code, deployment architecture, and engineering support during the trial.

• After commercial talks failed and Runlayer cut access in June, an alleged Rippling insider told CEO Andrew Berman that an internal team was building “almost a 1 to 1 copy.”

Rippling confirmed it is launching an MCP gateway but denied using Runlayer IP. None of Runlayer’s claims have been proven yet.

Block gives every agent its own cryptographic identity

Block open sourced Buzz, a self-hostable workspace where humans and agents share channels, repos, and workflows. Every participant gets a keypair, turning messages, patches, approvals, and workflow actions into signed events.

That tackles a real security problem that I think is blowing up in enterprises currently. Agents often inherit a user session or shared service account, making attribution fuzzy when several agents touch the same tools. Buzz gives each agent a distinct identity, scoped access, and its own audit trail.

Signatures prove which key acted, not whether the action was safe or properly authorized.

7AI launches a federated SIEM as the SecOps stack converges

7AI recently launched Federated SIEM, which lets its agents query, investigate, and act across existing SIEMs, data lakes, and cloud platforms without forcing customers through a migration. It also launched 7AI Build, a way for customers and partners to package their own techniques into workflows and services.

That puts 7AI in more direct competition with Vega, Query, and other federated-search players, not just agentic triage startups.

SecOps categories keep folding into each other. SIEMs now ship threat hunting, detection, response, and triage agents. Pipeline vendors are buying detection content vendors. Agent vendors are moving into search.

Everyone wants to be the SecOps platform. Zig. Zag.

Cyera’s reported $1B Oasis LOI joins data security with agent identity

Cyera signed a letter of intent to acquire Oasis Security in a deal reportedly valued at roughly $1 billion. Cyera maps sensitive data and who can reach it. Oasis inventories non-human identities, including service accounts, workloads, and AI agents, then governs their access. Together, they can answer both sides of the agent security problem: what can this identity do, and what data can it touch?

Funding context:

• Oasis had raised $195 million in total.

• Its latest round was a $120 million Series B led by Craft Ventures, with Cyberstarts, Sequoia Capital, and Accel participating.

• Cyera raised a $600 million Series G in June, led by Evolution Equity Partners at a $12 billion valuation.

The market spent years treating data security and identity as adjacent categories. Not any more.

Google standardizes threat names, Google-style

As if the industry needed any more threat group naming conventions 🤦🏽‍♂️

Google Threat Intelligence Group has begun rolling Mandiant and Threat Analysis Group’s parallel naming systems into two-word cryptonyms. China-linked groups end in CASTLE, Iranian groups in ION, North Korean groups in NEPTUNE, Russian groups in RELIC, and cybercriminal clusters in COMET.

“We’re seeing an uptick in ransomware by NEPTUNE BLizzard Forrest Cozy Fuzzer”

🔮 The Future of Security 🔮

AI Security

Hush raises $30M for agent governance rooted in identity

Hush Security raised a $30 million Series A, with Akamai joining existing investors Battery Ventures and YL Ventures.

Its platform registers AI agents, removes standing credentials, grants scoped just-in-time access at runtime, records each action, and provides a centralized kill switch. Hush started with non-human identity security and is extending that control plane to agents. That is more concrete than another AI inventory dashboard, but the proof will be how broadly it can enforce short-lived access across enterprise apps and agent frameworks.

Cloud Security

Act Security exits stealth with $60M to shrink cloud attack paths

Act Security emerged from stealth with $60 million across a seed led by Team8 and Bessemer Venture Partners and a Series A led by Notable Capital. Hetz Ventures, Claltech, Startpoint Capital, and SVCI also participated. Founded by the team behind Medigate, Act maps cloud access paths and enforces boundaries around what humans, workloads, and AI agents can reach. It does not patch the vulnerabilities. The “root cause of every breach” pitch runs hot, but shrinking attack paths is saner than treating every CVE like a fire drill.

Data Security

Cyberhaven Flow follows data through human and agent workflows

Cyberhaven took the wraps off Flow, now in early access with broader availability expected in the coming quarter. It connects data lineage, identity, and behavior across endpoints, browsers, and cloud services as humans and agents touch sensitive data. It captures prompts, tool calls, file reads, and responses, then carries classification and data loss prevention policy forward as content gets copied, split up, or transformed. Embedded agents help with configuration, detection, and analysis. Preserving context through the workflow is the useful part. The question is how much lineage survives once agents hop across vendors, clouds, and private systems.

Email Security

AegisAI raises $36M to fight AI-generated spear phishing

AegisAI raised a $36 million Series A led by Battery Ventures, with Accel and Foundation Capital participating. Founded by former Google security leaders Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, the startup uses its own language models and a fleet of agents to inspect email intent, identity, links, attachments, QR codes, and behavioral signals. It is also pushing Vanguard, a threat-hunting agent that looks beyond the inbox.

Identity and Access Management

Saviynt brings runtime authorization to AI identities

Saviynt is pushing agent governance into the runtime with Zuma. The platform discovers AI agents and non-human identities, maps owners and permissions, and governs their lifecycle. Zuma Access evaluates each action using identity, context, risk, policy, and stated intent; Zuma Governance handles access reviews, audit trails, ownership, and containment.

Security Operations

Fig brings CI/CD mechanics to detection engineering

Fig is bringing a software-engineering workflow to detections, parsers, and configuration changes. Its security data lineage graph maps dependencies across the stack, then lets teams simulate changes against the live environment before deployment. Changes can be tested, versioned, rolled back, and continuously checked for broken detection flows.

Fig calls it the first true CI/CD for SecOps.

Interested in sponsoring TCP?

Sponsoring TCP not only helps me continue to bring you the latest in security innovation, but it also connects you to a dedicated audience of 20,000+ CISOs, practitioners, founders, and investors across 135+ countries 🌎

Learn more here

Bye for now 👋🏽

That’s all for this week… ¡Nos vemos la próxima semana!

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If you’re anything like me, this week is pure chaos in the best and worst ways. Next week, many of us (about 30-40K) will be descending on Las Vegas for our annual Hacker Summer Camp pilgrimmage. This will be my eighth Hacker Summer Camp. I’ve experienced it as a college student, full-time practitioner, DEF CON workshop instructor, and now from the GTM and newsletter side.

If this is your first hacker summer camp or if you’d simply like to get in the spirit, check out this cool documentary the captures the originating ethos of the week very well:

Now, here’s my quick braindump of what I’m most excited about, a few practical tips, and where you can find me Monday through Friday.

The four things at the top of my list

CISO Roast

The CISO Roast is the main event for me. Probably because I’ll get to see two of my friends (Ashish and Yonesy) roast each other on a big stage or probably because roasting was a core part of the culture I grew up in. Or is it because the CISO role is so demanding and high-stakes that nobody would dare roast one unless they’ve sat in the chair themselves? Feels almost taboo to roast a CISO, you know what I mean?

Ashish Rajan, former CISO and host of the Cloud Security Podcast and AI Security Podcast, will be running the show. The people entering the hot seat:

• Derek Chamorro is Head of Security at Together AI, with more than 20 years of infrastructure security experience across Together AI and Cloudflare.

• Emily O’Carroll is a Field CISO at GuidePoint Security. She previously spent nearly a decade building the security program at Topgolf Callaway Brands after an earlier decade advising Fortune 50 companies at KPMG.

• Yonesy Núñez is the CISO of Surf AI, a six-time CISO, board director, and named inventor on four U.S. patents. His previous stops include DTCC, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Jack Henry.

That is a lot of collective security experience volunteering to become material for Ashish. No pressure! :)

The roast happens Wednesday at 7 p.m. at The Barbershop inside The Cosmopolitan.

The Monad x TCP events

I helped put these together, so I’m obviously biased, but I’m genuinely excited about all three, especially the SecOps sunset social which will probably have the best photo opps from the entire week:

• The Morning Burn on Tuesday from 7:30 to 8:30 a.m. A guided full-body workout followed by breakfast burritos. All fitness levels are welcome.

• The SecOps Sunset Social on Tuesday from 7:15 to 8:30 p.m. A small group of security leaders, detection engineers, and SecOps operators riding the High Roller 550 feet above Vegas. The event is currently full, but the waitlist is open.

• The Wurst Security Party on Wednesday from 6 to 9 p.m. at Hofbräuhaus. German food, custom beer steins, a stein-holding competition, and plenty of security practitioners and leaders.

The Monad team will also have a private meeting suite at the Four Seasons from Monday through Thursday. If you want to talk security data, SIEM architecture, or simply catch up, schedule time through the link or DM me!

Black Hat Startup Spotlight

There are two competitions happening Tuesday.

The Black Hat USA Startup Spotlight runs from 11:05 a.m. to 12:10 p.m. inside the Innovators & Investors Summit. Four startups will compete:

• Deception Check builds adaptive AI honeypots that capture attacker behavior.

• Mallory maps live threat intelligence against your attack surface to show what actually affects you.

• Opnova brings identity governance to legacy and disconnected applications.

• Perpetual Systems is building agentic detection and security analytics on a customer-owned data lake.

The winner advances directly into the inaugural Global Startup Spotlight Competition from 5:30 to 6:40 p.m. on the Business Hall Main Stage.

They will compete against four regional champions:

• Legion Security for agentic security operations

• Sahl for AI-powered GRC and compliance

• Geordie AI for AI agent visibility and governance

• Prowler for open-source cloud security

The U.S. competition requires an Innovators & Investors Summit pass. The global final is accessible from the Business Hall.

If you are attending the summit, I also have these sessions circled:

• The Market Entry Strategy for Cybersecurity with Jacques Benkoski

• RIP the Moat; Long Live the Moat with Robert Hansen, Rishi Bhargava, Robby Robson, and Zach Yarmolovich

• VC Horror Stories with Chenxi Wang, Taylor Margot, Aziz Gilani, and Travis McPeak

I plan to catch both competitions.

Decibel GameDay

Decibel GameDay is a one-day mini-event happening Tuesday at Libertine Social inside Mandalay Bay. There will be company launches, informal networking, and a pretty stacked group of guests.

The three conversations I’m most curious about:

• Richard Sherman on defense. A Super Bowl cornerback talking preparation, communication, and reading an offense in a room full of cybersecurity people could be ridiculous or excellent. I’m betting excellent.

• Kevin Mandia on the next phase of cyber defense. He has seen several generations of the security industry from the front row and is now building Armadin.

• Rob Joyce on sophisticated adversaries. The former NSA cyber director recently joined OpenAI as a safety and security advisor and brings a perspective that is difficult to replicate.

HD Moore and Elias Manousos are also part of the lineup. Formal session titles have not been published, but the guest list alone makes this worth watching.

A few tips for winning the week

Leave room for serendipity

Don’t book yourself from AM to PM. There are a lot of unique events and people. Do cool shit and be nice to everyone.

Respect everyone’s bandwidth

If you are a security leader, your DMs, texts, and email are probably already flooded. If you work in GTM, Black Hat can become a five-day sprint.

Keep outreach short. Explain why you want to meet. Make it easy for people to say yes, no, or catch you another time.

Take recovery seriously

My best non-obvious recommendation is to make time for Lapis Spa at Fontainebleau. It is truly world-class. Top 3 fav spas I’ve ever been to.

The facility includes vitality pools, an event sauna, steam room, infrared sauna, Himalayan salt room, heated chairs, cold plunges, etc

A few hours there can send you back home in a better state than you arrived in.

Also, hydrate. Vegas is a desert.

Booth stops worth making

Jam with Yonesy

Surf AI is turning booth 4711 into The Surf Spa, with complimentary 10-minute wellness sessions throughout the week.

Our friend, Yonesy, will also be doing live acoustic jam sessions at select times. If you hear a guitar somewhere in the Business Hall, follow it. He is a Bachata legend in the making.

Matcha ice cream at Clover

Our friends and sponsors at Clover Security will be at booth 4731 and appear to be serving matcha ice cream.

That is enough information for me to bookmark the booth.

The rest of the event map

All times below are local to Las Vegas.

Monday

• Cyera’s Blazers, Bourbon & Bubbles Reception, 6 to 8 p.m. The event is currently at capacity, but I’m sure you know people who can get you in!

• Glow Out Party, beginning at 8 p.m. at the House of Blues Courtyard. Mike Posner. The took a pill in Ibiza guy will be performing!

Tuesday

• The Morning Burn, 7:30 to 8:30 a.m.

• Decibel GameDay at Libertine Social.

• Black Hat USA Startup Spotlight, 11:05 a.m. to 12:10 p.m.

• Secs on the Beach, 4 to 7 p.m. at the Tailgate Beach Club.

• Global Startup Spotlight, 5:30 to 6:40 p.m. on the Main Stage in the Business Hall.

• Sober Speakeasy, 7 to 9:30 p.m. at The Mob Museum. Mocktails, food, museum access, and zero pressure to drink.

• GuidePoint’s Black Hat Party, 7 to 10 p.m. at Swingers inside Mandalay Bay.

• The SecOps Sunset Social, 7:15 to 8:30 p.m.

Wednesday

• The CISO Society Social, 4 to 8 p.m.

• The Wurst Security Party, 6 to 9 p.m. at Hofbräuhaus.

• Lockstep VC happy hour, 6 to 9 p.m.

• CISO Roast, beginning at 7 p.m.

• Legends of Cyber, 8 p.m. to midnight at House of Blues. John Watters and Kevin Mandia will sit down for a fireside chat before the live music begins.

Thursday

• InnovatHERs breakfast, 7 to 9 a.m.

• Bald at Black Hat - BALD: The Women-Only Drinks at Black Hat

• The great Black Hat to DEF CON migration.

Where to find me

I will be in Vegas from Monday through Friday, mostly around Black Hat.

The easiest places to catch me will be:

• The Monad meeting suite at the Four Seasons from Monday through Thursday

• The Morning Burn on Tuesday morning

• Decibel GameDay and both Startup Spotlight competitions on Tuesday

• The SecOps Sunset Social on Tuesday evening

• The Wurst Security Party on Wednesday

• The CISO Roast on Wednesday night

You will not make every party, talk, dinner, booth, and meetup. Nobody does.

Pick a few things that matter to you, leave room between them, and protect enough energy to enjoy the people you came to see.

I’ll see you in Vegas…!

Interested in sponsoring TCP?

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Hi 👋 - Hope you’re having a great week wherever you’re reading from!

It’s been a wild past few days to say the least. Exotic sandbox escapes in OpenAI, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI etc. Two Series A rounds for a combined $255M in the endpoint security space with one being a unicorn straight out of stealth. Spain topples Argentina for World Cup. The open-source/weights debate gets more wood in the fire with Kimi K3 causing chaos at closed-source frontier model labs (mainly OpenAI and Anthropic). Serious national security and economic implications there. Hugging Face using GLM 5.2 to do IR because closed-source model guardrails blocked IR activity.

I have a feeling this is a defining week for security and the open-source convo. Before we dive in, here’s a recent write-up I did on the AI tooling logging research I’ve been doing and if you’ll be at Blackhat, hit me up! Here’s a list of a few places and events I’ll be at.

Full breakdown of all the things, including the OpenAI x HuggingFace incident, in this week’s TCP! But first, a meme and an ad.

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⚒️ Picks of the Week ⚒️

OpenAI’s cyber test spilled into Hugging Face

OpenAI says GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable prerelease model escaped an internal cyber benchmark after exploiting a zero-day in the package-registry proxy that was their only path outside the sandbox. The models escalated privileges, moved laterally until they reached an internet-connected node, then chained stolen credentials and flaws into an RCE path at Hugging Face. They were trying to win the benchmark. They just found the answers in someone else’s production database. Pretty impressive ngl.

OpenAI had reduced safety/security refusals and disabled its production classifiers for the evaluation. Hugging Face then hit the inverse problem during response x_x. Commercial frontier models blocked the real exploit payloads and C2 artifacts needed to analyze 17,000+ events, so it moved the work to self-hosted GLM 5.2. That also kept attack data and credentials inside its environment.

The scariest part (there are many) is that a capable model found a hole, chained together a multi-step intrusion, and crossed into another company’s environment. Another scary part is the guardrail asymmetry. Closed-model labs can remove the seatbelt when they need full capability; defenders renting similar models through an API often cannot. Guardrails reduce misuse, but security teams should not make a provider-controlled API their only AI option during an incident. OPEN-SOURCE MODELS FTW.

Kimi K3 makes the guardrail tradeoff harder to ignore

Moonshot AI says Kimi K3 is a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weight model with a 1 million-token context window, competitive benchmark performance (better than Fable 5 in some cases), and full weights due July 27. Moonshot warns that K3 can be excessively proactive and make unexpected decisions without tighter boundaries.Obviously very compute intensive as well.

The fact that Chinese labs are shipping open-weight models of this quality should concern everyone.. for many reasons. Economic, national security and many other implications.

Dan Miessler wrote a great post on some of the implications here.

How solid is your security review process, really?

Every change - a feature, infrastructure update, access change, new vendor, and AI-generated commit - moves your risk profile. Most teams can’t say how many of those got a security review.

Are you one of the few who can?

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The agent stayed sandboxed. The host still got popped.

Pillar disclosed seven sandbox escape and boundary-bypass chains across Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity. In most cases, the agent never broke out directly. The agent wrote files inside the allowed workspace, then unsandboxed tools like Git, VS Code, Python, or Docker used those files to execute code on the developer’s machine. Most reported issues were patched, including Cursor fixes in version 3.0.0.

A reminder that “The agent is sandboxed” is not the same as “the host is safe.” The actual boundary includes every helper, daemon, and config file that trusts what the agent creates. Security teams should review the handoff, not just the box. Before there were AI models, there were threat models.

Perplexity was not part of Pillar’s research, but the company did recently detail SPACE, the Firecracker microVM sandbox already running underneath Computer. It is a useful contrast in how different AI companies are handling sandboxing. Though the Pillar findings show why the trust boundary cannot stop at the VM.

Zero risk isn’t the job: a CISO’s guide to agentic AI

Great write-up by Anthropic’s Deputy CISO Jason Clinton where he offers a practical framework for reviewing agentic systems.

What to review:

• Inputs: What untrusted content can the agent ingest?

• Identity: Whose credentials and permissions does it use?

• Actions: Which tools, connectors, and systems can it change?

• Blast radius: What happens if the agent behaves unexpectedly?

• Visibility: Do its actions reach the SIEM and existing monitoring workflows?

Anthropic’s incident-response agent shows why this assessment cannot stay static. After a model upgrade, the agent independently asked another internal agent to draft a production fix, despite no changes to its tools, permissions, or prompt. Human review still prevented the code from reaching production.

The useful lesson is to assess agents around durable control points: identity, scoped permissions, tool access, egress, sandboxing, approval gates, and telemetry.

Glow exits stealth with a $180M Series A at a $1.2B valuation

Glow emerged from stealth with a $180 million Series A led by Sequoia, Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, and Redpoint, with Index, Swish, Lux, Operator Collective, and Holly Ventures also participating. That’s quite the cap table. Also, unicorn status right out of stealth is pretty rare.

Now about the tech: Its endpoint agents inventory software, AI agents, and developer tools, assess them against company policy, and block risky components before they execute.

Glow was founded by former Meta, Snowflake (Omer Singer), and Claroty executives. Omer was a big proponent of security data lakes early on so if you operate in the SecOps space, it’s likely that the name rings a bell. Funny enough, Omer asked me about the name last year. I picked Glow. What you name your startup is EXTREMELY important.

Next, the overlap with Neo and Koi is hard to miss. Neo is building a broader control plane for agent behavior across identities, applications, APIs, and data, while Koi is the clearest endpoint comp, covering coding agents, plugins, packages, scripts, and model artifacts.

Glow seems to be going after the larger prize of combining application control, software supply-chain security, AI governance, and endpoint prevention into one platform. The risk is that buyers see a bundle of features their existing endpoint vendor will eventually ship.

In any case, stellar founding team, great momentum out the gate, generational problem and not small funding. Excited to see what they do.

Fairlife ransomware attack shuts down U.S. production

Coca-Cola disclosed that ransomware hit Fairlife, including systems tied to production, forcing the company to temporarily suspend U.S. operations. The full scope is still unknown.

The ransomware knocked production offline, but the bigger brand hit may be millions of customers realizing their wellness-coded protein shakes and milk are owned by Coca-Cola. The systems will recover. The illusion may not ;)

🔮 The Future of Security 🔮

Endpoint Security

Neo launches with $100M for agentic software control

Neo emerged from stealth with $100M raised across two rounds: a $25M Seed in 2025 led by Andreessen Horowitz and Merlin Ventures, followed by a $75M Series A backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer, Craft, and Merlin. Founded by former SentinelOne leaders Nick Warner and Shlomi Salem alongside Eran Shirazi, Neo is building endpoint security for software that can reason, invoke tools, inherit user permissions, and move data without waiting for a human.

The platform inventories agents, MCP servers, extensions, models, and AI-enabled apps across endpoints, then maps their permissions, configurations, and behavior. It attributes actions to the human, agent, application, or identity behind them, with controls to block tool calls, API access, data movement, malicious models, and out-of-policy prompts.

TLDR: EDR for the agentic application layer, where traditional endpoint tools often see the trusted parent process but miss what is happening inside it.

Identity and Access Management

Oak exits stealth with $60M for an identity operating system

Oak emerged from stealth with $60 million in seed funding, co-led by Accel, Greylock, and CRV. Its platform builds a live identity graph across cloud, SaaS, on-premises, and homegrown systems, covering human, machine, and AI-agent identities, then maps granted access against actual use to drive governance and remediation.

Oak is taking a platform-consolidation swing at a crowded category. On product shape, Opal and C1 are the clearest modern comps. An interesting bit is that Greylock led Opal’s Series A and co-led its latest $23 million financing, then co-led Oak’s seed six weeks later. That is two bets on overlapping identity control-plane theses. Not very common in venture investing but maybe there’s more than what meets the eye.

Security Operations

Cribl acquires CardinalOps and moves up the SIEM stack

Cribl is acquiring CardinalOps, adding detection engineering to its telemetry platform. CardinalOps maps rules and security controls to MITRE ATT&CK, identifies coverage gaps, and flags broken or noisy detections. Cribl plans to connect that layer with its telemetry routing, storage, and federated search stack, positioning the combined platform as an open alternative to legacy SIEM.

Vulnerability Management

Empirical Security raises $25M to predict which vulnerabilities actually matter

Empirical Security raised a $25M Series A led by Brightmind Partners, with Costanoa Ventures, Hyde Park Angels, and others participating, bringing total funding to $37M. Founded by former Kenna Security leaders Ed Bellis and Michael Roytman alongside EPSS co-creator Jay Jacobs, Empirical is building predictive exposure management models that combine global exploitation telemetry with each customer’s assets, configurations, and internal data.

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That’s all for this week… ¡Nos vemos la próxima semana!

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Hello from the middle of a very busy week 👋

On the personal front, Hacker Summer Camp is coming up fast, and between preparing for Vegas and moving homes this Friday, I’m buried. I’m giving the regular TCP news roundup a rest today, but I’ll be back Friday AM with something waaaay more special. Back to regular programming next week.

Before jumping into today’s post, next Tuesday I’m joining Mitchem Boles, Field CISO at Intezer for a webinar on fixing detection gaps at the source. We’ll get into ETL, detection engineering, and what AI SOC platforms need from the data layer beneath them.

Now, onto the logs 🪵

For the past few months, I’ve been focused on AI tooling security visibility. Think Claude Code, Codex, Cursor etc. What activity details each log source emits, what you can detect, key threat hunting and investigation signals and what their quirks and limitations are.

I started digging after finding surprisingly little useful coverage in SIEM rule packs and public detection repos like Sigma. In recent years, AI tooling has increasingly gained access to source code, terminals, repositories, internal documents, email, calendars, and outside systems through MCP. But somehow detection coverage isn’t keeping up. The rule repos and SIEM content I relied on in the past as a detection engineer simply hasn’t kept up with the times. Folks are either gatekeeping, there are new rule repos or the majority of the industry hasn’t kept up. I’d imagine it’s a mix of all 3.

Sure, many mature security teams (think Walmart, Robinhood, JPMC, NVIDIA, Netflix, AI labs) have been on top of this all along. However, many others are flying blind or trusting their AI security tools to catch everything.

Tools can help, but you still must understand the raw logs. If you don’t know what the source gives you, you don’t know what’s missing. You also can’t copy and paste the same rules into every company or deploy every OOTB rule your tools give you. That’s leads to a shit ton of false positives and noise. Most detections depend on what normal behavior looks like inside your environment.

That work has turned into five in-depth posts, each focused on a different AI log source. Below, I’m pulling out a few of the most useful findings from each. If you want to see what the logs look like, which fields matter, what to alert on, and where each source falls short, read the full post linked at the end of each section.

Here’s what we’ve covered so far.

Claude Code

Claude Code can send OpenTelemetry metrics and logs for API calls, tool approvals, tool results, MCP usage, and prompts when prompt logging is turned on.

That gives defenders useful places to start. You can look for rejected shell commands, reads of .env files or cloud credentials, file access followed by curl or wget, and unknown MCP servers calling tools.

The problem is the format. Raw OTel arrives as deeply nested arrays of keys and values. Before analysts can use it, the data needs to be split into individual events and flattened into fields that are easy to search.

Read the full Claude Code post here.

Cursor Audit Logs

Cursor audit logs show changes to the settings around the agent. They do not show everything the agent did.

You can detect when Privacy Mode changes, a new MCP server is added, someone becomes an admin, an API key is created, or repository rules and hooks are weakened.

You will not see prompt text, terminal commands, file reads, or MCP arguments in the audit log. To investigate what the agent actually did, you still need endpoint, network, Git, CI/CD, and Cursor Hook data.

Read the full Cursor post here.

OpenAI Enterprise Audit Logs

OpenAI Enterprise exposes 51 audit event types covering users, roles, API keys, service accounts, network controls, projects, and organization settings.

The first rules I’d ship are straightforward: alert when SCIM is disabled, an IP allowlist is removed or opened too widely, new permissions are added, API call logging is reduced, or an owner-level service account is created.

These events are useful on their own. They get much stronger when you add context from your identity provider, HR system, asset inventory, and change tickets. An admin change from the platform team during business hours is different from the same change made by a terminated employee.

Read the full OpenAI Enterprise post here.

OpenAI Codex OTel Logs

Codex OTel can show how a session started, which sandbox and approval settings were used, whether prompts were redacted, how tool calls were approved, what tools ran, and whether network access was allowed.

Useful checks include sessions running with full access and no approval, prompts leaving the machine without redaction, destructive tools approved by configuration instead of a person, unusual network traffic during an enabled session, and Codex suddenly appearing on a new laptop or CI runner.

Read the full OpenAI Codex post here.

Google Workspace Gemini

Gemini activity logs show who used Gemini, when they used it, their IP address, which Workspace app they were in, and which feature they used.

They do not show the prompt, response, file, email, calendar event, or other content involved. The log proves that Gemini was used. It does not prove what Gemini accessed or what happened next.

app_name tells you where to look next. Gemini activity in Drive should send you to Drive logs. Activity in Gmail should send you to Gmail logs. From there, you can match events from the same user within a tight time window and add Login, DLP, endpoint, and identity data.

Read the full Google Workspace Gemini post here.

The underlying thread across all 5 sources we’ve covered so far is that none of them offer complete visibility. Some cover control-plane activity very well, others cover data-plane activity well while some cover none super well. You need to know those limits before trusting any alert built on top of it which is why taking matters into your own hands is key.

Getting this right requires a lot of wrangling. Teams first have to collect the logs, clean up the fields, add the missing context, filter out low-value events, and route the useful data to their SIEM or data lake. Detection engineers can then use that prepared data to hunt and build rules around what’s abnormal in their environment.

Monad handles the data pipeline work that comes before detection. We have integrations for every source above and help teams collect, normalize, enrich, filter, and route the data. Detection and alerting still happen in the team’s SIEM, data lake, or analytics platform. If you’re working through any of these sources, we can help.

More to come on this series so follow along!

If you’ll be in Vegas, hit me up! Schedule a meet with Monad or sign up for one of our Black Hat events, including The Morning Burn, our SecOps Sunset Social 550 feet above Vegas, and The Wurst Security Party.

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Hi 👋 - Hope you’re having a great week wherever you’re reading from!

On the personal front, I was able to take some time off to enjoy America’s 250th birthday. Threw a spa day in there and experienced this alien piece of work that I can’t recommend enough. Aside from that, some World Cup shenanigans. It’s been a great one although my dark horse, Cabo Verde, has been eliminated.

Before we jump into the news, in a few weeks I’ll be partnering with my dear friend Mitchem to share our thoughts on AI SOC, detection engineering, and why the data layer is becoming the whole game. You can register for the webinar here 👾

Lastly, Hacker Summer Camp is coming up. Here’s where I’ll be at all week. DM me if you wanna grab a coffee or lift weights!

Now, onto the news!

Introducing Gist Security - Fear No Change

Engineering and IT now build faster than security can review, and AI only widens the gap. Gist embeds governance into the change lifecycle itself, to produce consistent, auditable risk assessments, threat models, and evidence records.

See Gist

TL;DR ✏️

• ⚖️ Anthropic sues Abnormal: Abnormal says it used abnormal.ai and the slash wordmark before Anthropic existed.

• 🧪 Ransomware gets an AI intern: Vendor says they discovered first fully autonomous ransomware, but it required a human

• 🪪 Robinhood fixes approvals: SERA speeds up passkey-based approvals for incident response and sensitive access.

• 🧠 Stop bolting AI onto 2003: Anton Chuvakin says AI SOCs need process redesign before agents enter the queue.

• 🇲🇽 World Cup pressure test: Mexico’s cyber plan puts critical infrastructure investment on a five-year clock.

• 🤖 Straiker raises $64M: Straiker raised a Series A for AI agent discovery, testing, and runtime protection.

Plus: Runlayer raises $30M, Aikido acquires Root, Nebulock raises $25M, MSP identity consolidates, poisoned MCP tools keep being annoying, and Intruder adds a free exposure-management onramp.

⚒️ Picks of the Week ⚒️

Anthropic sues Abnormal over AI branding

Anthropic filed a public lawsuit against Abnormal AI on July 1, claiming unfair competition and trademark infringement over Abnormal’s slash-based AI branding. Abnormal’s CEO wrote a blog post here detailing their side of the matter.

Abnormal was founded in 2018, registered abnormal.ai before Anthropic existed, and has used the same slash-based wordmark since April 2021. The CEO also says it is a large Anthropic customer, learned about the lawsuit from a reporter, not directly from Anthropic.

I’m not sure what wires got crossed here but this seems super out of left field from Anthropic. Is there something more to it?

Will be following this one closely

Enterprise Incident Response for the AI Era

Offensive AI is making attacks faster, easier to launch, and harder to manage at enterprise scale. BreachRx helps organizations move from breach chaos to coordinated Enterprise Incident Response, using agentic AI to guide workflows, surface obligations, coordinate stakeholders, and preserve evidence in one platform.

Teams train like they fight, leaders stay aligned, regulators get consistent facts, and every stakeholder can respond with resolve when it matters most.

See BreachRx

Ransomware Gets an AI Intern

This weekend I came across some headlines about the “first fully autonomous ransomware attack”. But after some digging, I discovered there were humans involved!!! Gotta love bait headlines. TechCrunch reported that a human still chose the victim, provisioned infrastructure, and supplied database credentials. The AI agents did the rest.

Sysdig says JADEPUFFER hit an exposed Langflow instance through CVE-2025-3248, then pivoted into a production MySQL and Nacos server. The agent encrypted 1,342 Nacos configuration items, dropped original config and history tables, created a ransom note, and generated an encryption key that was printed once, never stored, and never sent anywhere. “an adaptive and fully automated campaign,” is what they are calling it but it did still need a human.

In any case, this is another reminder that attackers use AI to compress the tedious bits. Not a nothing burger but also not something to rewrite your security program around.

Robinhood rebuilds access approvals for speed

Access approvals get painful fast when the approver has to be on a managed laptop, on VPN, and available during an incident. Robinhood built Secure Enhanced Remote Approval, or SERA, so devs can approve access from any device using passkeys, without VPNs or managed laptops. The company says SERA cut approval time by 20% and shipped in four months after incident response and engineering teams kept running into approval friction.

This is a useful playbook for teams with global engineering, 24/7 systems, sensitive data, cloud sprawl, or break-glass workflows. Approval shows up during production debugging, incident response, privileged admin actions, temporary elevation, and access to sensitive environments.

Side note - The OP was written in Nov’ of ‘25 but DarkReading recently picked it up which piqued my curiosity.

Anton Chuvakin wants SOC teams to stop bolting AI onto 2003

Anton Chuvakin argues the AI SOC conversation is too tool-heavy and too light on people and process. His warning is simple: agents added to a legacy SOC can preserve the same broken workflows with better autocomplete.

He’s right. Validation, handoffs, metrics, detection quality, feedback loops, and analyst development all need serious thought and maybe redesign before agents get bolted on, otherwise you’re just automating what was already broken. Worth following his Medium and reading in full.

I’m touch and see the problems he highlights first-hand at Monad and I couldn’t agree more. Fundamentals still matter. AI is not coming to save your SOC.

World Cup Pressure Tests Mexico’s Cyber Plan

Recorded Future says Mexico’s 2025–2030 National Cybersecurity Plan is trying to formalize national cyber coordination after years of ransomware, fraud, hacktivism, data theft, and state-linked activity. The past 5 years have been rough for Mexico on the cyber front and with co-hosting the World Cup, I’d imagine security was front and center.

The 2026 phase calls for a national cyber strategy, a General Cybersecurity Law, a National Center for Cybersecurity Operations, CSIRT coordination, critical infrastructure identification, and federal vulnerability assessment.

TLDR: Lots of investment pouring into securing Mexican critical infrastructure over the next 5 years. All countries should be doing the same.

Straiker raises $64M for agent security

Straiker raised a $64M Series A to expand its AI agent security platform. The round was led by Marathon Management Partners, Citi Ventures, Illuminate Financial, and Workday Ventures, with continued backing from Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed.

Straiker helps teams find agents already running, monitor live prompts/tool calls, and test new agent workflows before they get real permissions. The company was founded by Ankur Shah, former SVP and GM of Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks, and Sreenath Kurupati, former Akamai AI and security research lead.

They’re one of my favorite AI security startups right now: serious team w/ big scale vendor track record, serious problem, and early enough to give the bigger platforms a real headache.

🔮 The Future of Security 🔮

AI Security

Runlayer raises $30M for agent governance

Runlayer raised a $30M Series A from Felicis and Khosla Ventures, bringing total funding to $42M. The company gives enterprises one control layer for AI agents, MCP servers, and AI clients, with identity, permissions, policy enforcement, audit logs, and real-time visibility tied to agent actions.

I remember doing a demo with their CEO, Andy, earlier this year and was blown away around how intuitive and ahead the product was in securing MCP for enterprise tooling at a time where teams were still understanding how to secure it. Also, strong signal that Vinod Khosla wanted “every available dollar” of their Series A. Good stuffs.

More AI Security News

• Jamf enables AI Governance and shadow AI detection on Mac

• Build AI Security Agents with Wiz MCP

• Microsoft warns poisoned MCP tool descriptions can make AI agents leak data

Identity and Access Management

Barracuda buys Evo Security for MSP identity

Barracuda acquired Evo Security, an IAM and PAM provider built for MSPs. Barracuda says Evo will expand BarracudaONE with privileged access management, access control, identity protection, and identity threat detection and response. Terms were not disclosed.

Software Supply Chain Security

Aikido acquires Root for open-source patching

Aikido Security acquired Root add software supply chain patching into its platform. Root generates CVE patches for package versions teams already run, while Aikido is launching patched drop-in libraries and container images. Deal rumored to be around $80-100M.

“Acquiring Root” in a company transaction is probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I’m glad it was Aikido. The puns write themselves. In all seriousness, Aikido is a rocketship and has one of the best GTM + eng teams in the game.

Side note: Both Aikido + Root are past sponsors of TCP so I’m super happy to see them winning!

Security Operations

Nebulock raises $25M for hunt-first security ops

Nebulock raised a $25M Series A led by FirstMark, with Bain Capital Ventures, Decibel, Zetta Venture Partners, and Step Function participating. The company is building hunt-first security ops.

The idea is simple: the bad stuff increasingly looks normal until you connect the sequence. Nebulock is focused on that middle layer, where valid creds, weird agent behavior, and quiet pivots start to look less innocent.

I’m bullish on the team + problem space. A lot of finding “the needle in the haystack” depends on correlation and piecing things together over long windows of time. That’s where Nebulock really helps.

More Security Operations News

• Jamf launches Beacon threat hunting service for enterprise Mac environments

Vulnerability Management

Intruder launches a free exposure management plan

Intruder launched a permanent free plan for lean security teams, with weekly scans for up to 5 external targets, one cloud environment, 2 container images, port change monitoring on 80 and 443, unlimited remediation scans, one AI pentesting credit per month, and up to 3 users.

This is a great way to help SMBs and a neat onramp into Intruder’s pipeline.

Interested in sponsoring TCP?

Sponsoring TCP not only helps me continue to bring you the latest in security innovation, but it also connects you to a dedicated audience of 20,000+ CISOs, practitioners, founders, and investors across 135+ countries 🌎

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Bye for now 👋🏽

That’s all for this week… ¡Nos vemos la próxima semana!

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Hi 👋 - Hope you’re having a great week wherever you’re reading from!

It’s the week after Identiverse/Juneteenth and the week before holiday week, so the security news cycle has that weird pre-OOTO lull. Still, the Klue breach is ringing bells and stirring up Salesloft/Drift PTSD. Meanwhile, there still hasn’t been much movement on the Fable/Mythos front, which is pretty telling.

On the TCP front, Dr. Yonesy Núñez, CISO at Surf AI, teamed up with TCP on a guest post about security hygiene. Also, TCP sponsor Gist came out of stealth, tackling the very unsexy but very real problem of turning product and code changes into risk reviews, threat models, and audit-ready evidence.

Lastly, no TCP next week. We’ll be back with issue 138 on July 28th!

Now, onto the news!

Chaos is Not a Response Strategy

Cyber incidents no longer end at containment. Legal, privacy, IT, executives, and regulators all need answers fast. Our Cybersecurity Incident Response Management (CIRM) Buyer’s Guide shows how to evaluate platforms built for coordinated, defensible enterprise response.

Learn how AI-powered CIRM clarifies ownership, tracks obligations, preserves privilege, and creates an audit-ready record so your team can turn chaos into control.

Download the guide

TL;DR ✏️

• 🧩 Klue breach hits Salesforce: LastPass, Huntress, HackerOne, and more disclosed impact from stolen OAuth tokens.

• 🛠️ OpenAI shifts to patching: Daybreak adds GPT-5.5-Cyber, Codex Security updates, and Patch the Planet.

• 🏭 Accenture buys into OT: Accenture agrees to take a Dragos majority stake and buy runZero/NetRise for total $4.15B.

• 🧾 Gist comes out of stealth: Gist turns product and code changes into risk reviews, threat models, and audit-ready evidence.

• 🧹 Security’s cleanup era: Dr. Yonesy Núñez says the work is simple, not easy: close the gaps before they compound.

• 🧠 Dream raises $260M: Bicycle Capital and Group 11 co-led the round at a $3B valuation.

• 🪪 Cisco targets WideField: Cisco plans to add identity and session context to Splunk’s Agentic SOC.

Plus: OT-specific AI, coding-agent controls, SASE deployment skills, a cursed awareness test, and more.

⚒️ Picks of the Week ⚒️

Klue breach turns OAuth tokens into a Salesforce data-theft lane

The Klue breach appears to have started with a stale credential and ended with attackers using trusted SaaS integrations to pull customer data from Salesforce.

According to Huntress, attackers used a long-disused but still active credential tied to an abandoned integration prototype, pivoted into Klue backend systems, and pushed code that collected customer OAuth tokens. Those tokens were then used to access connected environments, including Salesforce. ReliaQuest observed attackers using Python scripts and the Salesforce REST API for bulk extraction, including nearly 1,000 queries in 15 minutes in one environment.

Klue disabled integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, SharePoint, Zoom, Gong, Chorus, Clari, Google Drive, and Slack while investigating. Publicly disclosed impacted companies include Huntress, LastPass, HackerOne, Recorded Future, Jamf, Snyk, OneTrust, Tanium, Gong, Sprout Social, and Insurity. LastPass said attackers accessed business contact info, support case data, and sales-related data, but said customer vaults were not affected.

Once again, a forgotten integration credential at one vendor became a working key into other companies’ CRM data. OAuth tokens are pretty much non-human identities with business context, access, and persistence.. That makes them perfect for this kind of campaign (remember Vercel and Salesloft/Drift breaches?).

OpenAI shifts Daybreak toward patching

OpenAI is expanding Daybreak with an updated Codex Security plugin, a limited release of GPT-5.5-Cyber, and Patch the Planet, an open-source remediation initiative with Trail of Bits, HackerOne, Calif, researchers, and maintainers.

The company says Codex Security has scanned 30M+ commits across 30,000+ codebases, with human reviewers marking 70,000+ findings as fixed and more than 500,000 findings automatically determined to be fixed. While GPT-5.5-Cyber outperformed GPT-5.5 on CyberGym, ExploitGym, and SEC-bench Pro.

The contrast with the Mythos/Glasswing circus is pretty loud. Anthropic turned frontier cyber capability into a global shock. OpenAI is trying to frame similar capabilities as remediation infrastructure: find, validate, patch, land the fix.

Accenture makes a $4.175B OT security bet

Accenture agreed to acquire a majority stake in Dragos and all of runZero and NetRise in a deal valued at approximately $4.175B.

The move gives Accenture a much larger software footprint in OT security: Dragos brings industrial threat detection, runZero adds asset intelligence and exposure assessment, and NetRise adds firmware and software supply chain visibility. Accenture says the three companies are estimated to generate roughly $208M ARR as of June 2026. Dragos will keep operating independently, with runZero and NetRise rolling under Dragos.

This is Accenture buying its way from OT services into OT security software. Having worked in Accenture’s security consulting biz, I can say that they service a strong portion of the federal govt. and critical infrastructure co’s (i.e., energy). These are great pickups for Accenture, especially considering that AI has disrupted the value of all their other offerings.

Dream raises $260M for sovereign AI cyber defense

Dream raised $260M at a $3B valuation to expand its sovereign AI and cyber defense platforms for governments and critical infrastructure.

The round was co-led by Bicycle Capital and Group 11, with participation from Antler, Bain Capital Ventures, Tru Arrow Partners, and other global investors. Dream was founded by Shalev Hulio, former CEO and co-founder of NSO Group, former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, and CTO Gil Dolev. Its pitch is national cyber defense and sovereign AI for governments that want more control over data, models, and critical infrastructure security.

Dream is selling the same geopolitical anxiety that is reshaping the whole AI security market: countries do not want their defensive stack dependent on someone else’s frontier model, cloud, or export policy. The uncomfortable part is the founder history. A former NSO CEO building sovereign defensive AI for governments is interesting.

Health board apologizes for tasteless phishing test

Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services apologized after sending staff a phishing simulation that dangled an extra paid vacation day as bait.

The test thanked employees and physicians for their work on the CorCare software rollout, then invited them to click a button to redeem the day off. Anyone who clicked failed the test. The Registered Nurses’ Union called the exercise insensitive, pointing to staffing shortages, burnout, and the difficulty healthcare workers already face getting paid time off.

It’s 2026. Pretty wild that this is still happening 🙃

🔮 The Future of Security 🔮

AI Security

Snyk launches Agentic Development Security

Snyk launched Evo Agentic Development Security, a new capability for governing AI-driven development workflows before agent-generated code hits repos, pipelines, or production. The pitch is to secure what agents use, what they do, and what they generate, including MCP servers, tools, permissions, agent actions, and AI-written code. This is the right problem: AppSec tooling was built around humans committing code, but coding agents are starting to act before traditional controls even see the artifact.

More AI Security News

• Enterprise AI Agent Security Startups Raise $98M: Convey and Arcade Tackle Production Gap

• Rubrik ties AI security tools to AWS Bedrock AgentCore

• Cloudflare launches AI skill set for SASE deployments

IoT/OT Security

Dragos unveils EmberAI for OT security

Dragos unveiled EmberAI, an OT-specific AI capability built on its Intelligence Fabric dataset, which includes adversary tracking, vuln research, asset and protocol research, and incident response experience. EmberAI lets analysts ask plain-language questions, correlate threat intel, assets, vulnerabilities, and network activity, and keep data inside the customer-controlled Dragos deployment. The useful bit is not “AI for OT,” it is context: generic copilots are weak in industrial environments unless they understand protocols, process risk, and why taking something offline can be worse than leaving it exposed.

Security Operations

Cisco buys WideField for Splunk’s Agentic SOC

Cisco plans to acquire WideField Security to strengthen Splunk’s Agentic SOC with identity, credential, session, and blast-radius context. WideField maps human and non-human identities, detects weak authentication paths and policy drift, and adds live session monitoring into investigations. This is the right direction for agentic SOC: autonomous response is mostly theater unless the system understands who the actor is, what they can touch, and what breaks if it takes action.

More Security Operations News

• SentinelOne turns Purple AI loose to investigate threats on its own

Interested in sponsoring TCP?

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Bye for now 👋🏽

That’s all for this week… ¡Nos vemos la próxima semana!

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Guest post by Dr. Yonesy Núñez, CISO at Surf AI (previously Wells Fargo, Jack Henry, and DTCC). Published in partnership with Surf AI.

I’ve spent more than two decades running enterprise security programs — five CISO seats across Wells Fargo, Jack Henry, and DTCC. In that time, I’ve watched security go through five distinct eras. Each one was a real response to a real shift in how attackers worked, what auditors wanted, and where the workloads ran. And in each one, the same thing happened: security hygiene got pushed further down the backlog.

We’re entering a sixth era. This time, hygiene is the strategic discipline — the work that decides whether the rest of the security program can actually hold.

I want to be specific about what I mean by hygiene: the recurring operational work that reduces attack surface. Dormant accounts. Stale OAuth apps. Secrets and environment variables left readable in production. Expired certificates. Third-party access no one has reviewed since the integration was built. Plaintext sensitive data. AI tools connected to your environment that nobody on the security team knows exist.

That work has always been on the roadmap. It almost never got funded at the level it deserved. This year, three events made it impossible to ignore why that has to change.

The five eras I’ve worked through

Perimeter (late 1990s into the early 2000s): Firewalls, DMZs, NAT. The marquee discipline was the boundary. If the perimeter held, the inside was assumed safe. Hygiene was invisible.

Compliance (early to mid-2000s): SOX, PCI DSS, HIPAA enforcement. Audit became the gate. Hygiene sat on every framework’s control list and almost never got primary funding. Passing the audit was a faster path to keeping your seat than fixing the underlying mess.

Detection and APT (late 2000s through mid-2010s): Operation Aurora, Stuxnet, Mandiant’s APT1 report. SIEM proliferation. Assume breach. Detection became the strategic discipline — you couldn’t stop everything, but you could respond fast enough. Hygiene deficits got absorbed by detection coverage.

Cloud and zero trust (mid-2010s into the early 2020s): Workloads moved off the corporate network. Identity became the new perimeter. SolarWinds was the marker. Hygiene changed shape — third-party access, identity sprawl, OAuth apps — and stayed in the backlog.

SOAR and AI SOC (overlapping with the above): The promise was that you could manage alert volume without doing the cleanup that produced the alerts. SOAR automated parts of the response motion. AI SOC now extends that idea with agents, copilots, and autonomous triage loops. That wave is still useful, but it does not remove the underlying problem. If anything, it makes the hygiene gap more obvious: faster alert handling does not fix the stale account, exposed secret, permissive OAuth grant, or unmanaged SaaS tool that created the incident path in the first place.

Each era was a rational response to real conditions. And each one helped security teams absorb the risk created by hygiene gaps. The model worked — more or less — because attacker tempo stayed inside what human-staffed detection could close.

That model broke in April 2026.

What April 2026 actually showed us

Three events, read together, make the argument.

Anthropic and Claude Mythos (April 7). Anthropic disclosed that a single model run surfaced thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities — including long-lived flaws in major operating systems and browsers — and produced working exploits at a scale prior generations could not approach. Anthropic chose not to ship the model publicly and instead stood up Project Glasswing to share findings with vetted partners. That decision, and the stated reason behind it, is what matters: discovery cost is approaching zero.

CVE-2026-31431 (Copy Fail, April 29). Xint Code disclosed a Linux kernel logic flaw affecting major Linux distributions. A 732-byte Python proof-of-concept could obtain root on Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE. CISA later added the vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The hygiene implication is direct: asset inventory, kernel exposure tracking, patch ownership, and exploitability context in your environment. If you can’t answer which systems are affected and who owns the remediation, this CVE is an open door.

The Vercel breach (April 19). This one is the most instructive. An employee at Context.ai was compromised by Lumma Stealer, giving an attacker a path through OAuth into Vercel. The result: exposed environment variables, a database key, and source code. The root cause wasn’t a zero-day — it was an uninventoried AI tool, an OAuth trust relationship that granted broader access than anyone realized, and secrets governance that treated readable environment variables as low risk.

The same pattern appeared in the 2025 Salesloft Drift OAuth incident, where compromised OAuth tokens tied to a trusted integration enabled access to Salesforce environments. The campaign affected a number of high-profile organizations, including Cloudflare and Palo Alto Networks, which disclosed unauthorized access to its Salesforce tenant through the compromised Salesloft Drift integration. The lesson is the same: modern breach paths increasingly run through trusted SaaS integrations, OAuth grants, third-party tools, and data that security teams did not realize those tools could reach.

That’s what April showed: discovery cost is collapsing, so exposed inventory matters more than it ever did.

The failure mode is now an uninventoried trust relationship, not a missed alert. And attack tempo scales with compute — which means detection that scales with headcount can’t keep up.

Why hygiene becomes the strategic discipline

The reason hygiene was always deprioritized is rational: every era’s marquee discipline absorbed the risk that hygiene gaps created. Detection caught what hygiene missed. SOAR papered over what detection missed. AI SOC may accelerate triage and response, but it does not eliminate the blast radius created by unmanaged access, exposed secrets, stale identities, or unreviewed integrations.

That model held as long as attacker tempo stayed inside what human-staffed detection could close. It doesn’t hold anymore.

Here’s what changes: hygiene is the only security discipline that compounds. Every account removed, every secret rotated, every third-party tool inventoried makes future attacks measurably more expensive. It doesn’t matter what the attacker discovers tomorrow — every piece of hygiene work between now and then is still in force.

Detection burns down with the alert. A SOAR playbook burns down with the incident. An AI SOC agent can help summarize, prioritize, and respond faster. But hygiene reduces the surface that the next alert fires on. As attackers exploit vulnerabilities and trust relationships faster than ever, hygiene stops being optional and becomes non-negotiable. The unglamorous work is now the strategic work.

What this looks like in practice

For the board update, three frames hold up:

Detection investment has a ceiling defined by attacker tempo. We’re not going to chase it by adding headcount.

Hygiene investment compounds across every future incident class. We’re funding it as program work, not project work — which means dedicated ownership, not quarterly cleanup sprints.

Context investment turns hygiene into outcomes. NIST has changed how it enriches CVEs in the National Vulnerability Database. The public pipeline can’t be relied on the way it once could. Re-deriving severity inside your own environment — knowing which systems are actually exposed, who owns them, and what business function they support — is no longer optional.

For practitioners, the work that compounds fastest in 2026 is the work the backlog has been carrying for a decade:

• Identity hygiene as a standing program: dormant accounts, leaver audits, guest accounts, OAuth application scope review

• Third-party inventory, expanded to include AI tools and their data access

• Environment variable and secrets governance, treated as program work rather than ticketing-system tasks

• Certificate lifecycle with executive backing and cross-team ownership, not a quarterly project

None of this is new. What’s new is that the justification for deferring it no longer holds.

Why I joined a startup to work on this

In December, I left DTCC to join Surf AI. The question I get most often: why leave a CISO seat at a major financial infrastructure firm to join an early-stage company?