Cybersecurity

Your AI reads the small print, and that’s a problem. This week in episode 433 of “Smashing Security” we dig into LegalPwn – malicious instructions tucked into code comments and disclaimers that sweet-talks AI into rubber-stamping dangerous payloads (or even pretending they’re a harmless calculator).

Meanwhile, new research from Anthropic reveals that hackers have already used AI gents to break into networks, steal passwords, sift through stolen data, and even write custom ransom notes. In other words, one hacker with an AI helper can work like an entire team of cybercriminals.

All this and much more is discussed in the latest edition of the award-winning “Smashing Security” podcast with computer security veteran Graham Cluley, joined this week by Mark Stockley.

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two new malicious packages on the npm registry that make use of smart contracts for the Ethereum blockchain to carry out malicious actions on compromised systems, signaling the trend of threat actors constantly on the lookout for new ways to distribute malware and fly under the radar.
“The two npm packages abused smart contracts to conceal malicious

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) says that the elderly are more at risk from falling victim to online fraud and internet scammers than ever before.

Read more in my article on the Fortra blog.

Threat actors are attempting to leverage a newly released artificial intelligence (AI) offensive security tool called HexStrike AI to exploit recently disclosed security flaws.
HexStrike AI, according to its website, is pitched as an AI‑driven security platform to automate reconnaissance and vulnerability discovery with an aim to accelerate authorized red teaming operations, bug bounty hunting,

In January 2025, cybersecurity experts at Wiz Research found that Chinese AI specialist DeepSeek had suffered a data leak, putting more than 1 million sensitive log streams at risk.
According to the Wiz Research team, they identified a publicly accessible ClickHouse database belonging to DeepSeek. This allowed “full control over database operations, including the ability to access

Google has shipped security updates to address 120 security flaws in its Android operating system as part of its monthly fixes for September 2025, including two issues that it said have been exploited in targeted attacks.
The vulnerabilities are listed below –

CVE-2025-38352 (CVSS score: 7.4) – A privilege escalation flaw in the Linux Kernel component 
CVE-2025-48543 (CVSS score: N/A) – A

An Iran-nexus group has been linked to a “coordinated” and “multi-wave” spear-phishing campaign targeting the embassies and consulates in Europe and other regions across the world.
The activity has been attributed by Israeli cybersecurity company Dream to Iranian-aligned operators connected to broader offensive cyber activity undertaken by a group known as Homeland Justice.
“Emails were sent to

Cloudflare on Tuesday said it automatically mitigated a record-setting volumetric distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps).
“Over the past few weeks, we’ve autonomously blocked hundreds of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, with the largest reaching peaks of 5.1 Bpps and 11.5 Tbps,” the web infrastructure and security company said in a post on X. “

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a high-severity security flaw impacting TP-Link TL-WA855RE Wi-Fi Ranger Extender products to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.
The vulnerability, CVE-2020-24363 (CVSS score: 8.8), concerns a case of missing authentication that could be abused to obtain

Salesloft on Tuesday announced that it’s taking Drift temporarily offline “in the very near future,” as multiple companies have been ensnared in a far-reaching supply chain attack spree targeting the marketing software-as-a-service product, resulting in the mass theft of authentication tokens.
“This will provide the fastest path forward to comprehensively review the application and build