Shadow AI agents pose security risks in enterprises

Chinese state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors, specifically the Salt Typhoon group, are conducting a sustained campaign to gain long-term access to critical infrastructure networks worldwide. These actors exploit vulnerabilities in routers and other edge network devices used by telecommunications providers, ISPs, and other infrastructure operators. The campaign targets telecommunications, transportation, lodging, government, and military networks. The actors employ tactics to evade detection and maintain persistent access, posing a significant threat to national and economic security. The advisory provides actionable guidance to help organizations strengthen their defenses and protect critical systems. The campaign has targeted at least 600 organizations across 80 countries, including 200 in the U.S. The advisory details how state-backed threat actors, including Salt Typhoon, penetrate networks around the world and how defenders can protect their own environments. The advisory tracks this cluster of activity to multiple advanced persistent threats (APTs), though it partially overlaps with Salt Typhoon. The advisory notes that the actors have had considerable success exploiting publicly known vulnerabilities, including Ivanti Connect Secure, Ivanti Policy Secure, Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS, and Cisco IOS XE vulnerabilities. The advisory suspects that the APT actors may target other devices, including Fortinet firewalls, Juniper firewalls, Microsoft Exchange, Nokia routers and switches, Sierra Wireless devices, and Sonicwall firewalls. The actors use multiple tactics to maintain persistence, including modifying Access Control Lists (ACLs), opening standard and non-standard ports, enabling SSH servers, and creating tunnels over protocols. The actors target protocols and infrastructure involved in authentication, such as Terminal Access Controller Access Control System Plus (TACACS+), to facilitate lateral movement across network devices. The advisory provides extensive recommendations for mitigating these threats, including monitoring network device configuration changes, auditing network services and tunnels, and checking logs for integrity. The advisory highlights a critical shift from Chinese state-sponsored activity from being purely espionage to gaining long-term access for potential disruption. 45 previously unreported domains associated with Salt Typhoon and UNC4841 have been discovered, dating back to May 2020. The oldest domain identified is onlineeylity[.]com, registered on May 19, 2020. The domains were registered using Proton Mail email addresses and fake personas. The domains point to high-density and low-density IP addresses, with the earliest activity traced back to October 2021. The domains are linked to Chinese cyber espionage campaigns, with potential overlaps between Salt Typhoon and UNC4841.

Murky Panda, also known as Silk Typhoon, Genesis Panda, and Glacial Panda, three China-nexus cyber espionage groups, have escalated their activities targeting cloud and telecom sectors. Murky Panda exploits trusted cloud relationships and zero-day vulnerabilities to breach enterprise networks. Genesis Panda targets cloud service providers to expand access and establish persistence. Glacial Panda targets telecommunications organizations to exfiltrate call detail records and related communications telemetry. The groups leverage various TTPs, including exploiting internet-facing appliances, known vulnerabilities, and living-off-the-land techniques. Their operations are driven by intelligence gathering and maintaining stealth and persistence. Murky Panda has been observed exploiting the CVE-2025-0282 vulnerability in Ivanti Pulse Connect VPN, zero-day vulnerabilities in SaaS providers' cloud environments, and delegated administrative privileges (DAP) in Microsoft cloud solution providers to gain Global Administrator rights across all downstream tenants. The group uses compromised SOHO devices as proxy servers to blend malicious traffic with normal traffic and deploys web shells like Neo-reGeorg and China Chopper to establish persistence.

The Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group Static Tundra, also known as Berserk Bear, Blue Kraken, Castle, Crouching Yeti, Dragonfly, Ghost Blizzard, and Koala Team, has been actively exploiting a seven-year-old vulnerability in Cisco IOS and Cisco IOS XE software to gain persistent access to target networks. The attacks target organizations in telecommunications, higher education, and manufacturing sectors across North America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. The vulnerability, CVE-2018-0171, allows unauthenticated, remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or trigger a denial-of-service condition. The group, linked to the FSB's Center 16 unit, focuses on long-term intelligence gathering operations. The FBI and Cisco Talos have issued advisories warning about the ongoing exploitation of CVE-2018-0171 by Static Tundra. The FBI has observed FSB cyber actors exploiting SNMP and end-of-life networking devices running the unpatched vulnerability to target entities in the United States and globally. The attackers collect configuration files for thousands of networking devices and modify them to facilitate unauthorized access. They use custom tools like SYNful Knock to maintain persistence within victim networks. Static Tundra uses publicly-available scan data to identify systems of interest and sets up GRE tunnels to redirect traffic to attacker-controlled infrastructure. The group's activities are primarily focused on unpatched, end-of-life network devices to establish access on primary targets and facilitate secondary operations. The ongoing campaign highlights the importance of maintaining a current inventory of network infrastructure and prioritizing patching for end-of-life devices. The FBI has also warned about the group targeting US state, local, territorial, and tribal (SLTT) government organizations and aviation entities over the last decade. The U.S. Department of State is offering up to $10 million for information on three FSB officers involved in cyberattacks targeting U.S. critical infrastructure.

Researchers from Guardio Labs have demonstrated a new prompt injection technique called PromptFix. This exploit tricks generative AI (GenAI) models into executing malicious instructions embedded within fake CAPTCHA checks on web pages. The attack targets AI-driven browsers like Perplexity's Comet, which automate tasks such as shopping and email management. The exploit misleads AI models into interacting with phishing pages or fraudulent sites without user intervention, leading to potential data breaches and financial losses. The technique, dubbed Scamlexity, represents a new era of scams where AI convenience collides with invisible scam surfaces, making humans collateral damage. The exploit can trick AI models into purchasing items on fake websites, entering credentials on phishing pages, or downloading malicious payloads. The findings underscore the need for robust defenses in AI systems to anticipate, detect, and neutralize such attacks. Microsoft Edge is embedding agentic browsing features through a Copilot integration, and OpenAI is developing an agentic AI browser platform codenamed 'Aura'. Comet is quickly penetrating the mainstream consumer market. Agentic AI browsers were released with inadequate security safeguards against known and novel attacks. Guardio advises against assigning sensitive tasks to agentic AI browsers until their security matures. AI browser agents from major AI firms failed to reliably detect the signs of a phishing site. Comet often added items to a shopping cart, filled out credit-card details, and clicked the buy button on a fake Walmart site. AI browsers with access to email will read and act on prompts embedded in the messages. AI companies need stronger sanitation and guardrails against these attacks. Nearly all companies (96%) claim to want to expand their use of AI agents in the next year, but most are not prepared for the new risks posed by AI agents in a business environment. A fundamental issue is how to discern actions taken through a browser by a user versus those taken by an agent. AI agents need to be experts at not just getting things done, but at sussing out and blocking potential security threats to workers and company data. Companies should move from "trust, but verify" to "doubt, and double verify"—essentially hobbling automation until an AI agent has shown it can always complete a workflow properly. Defective AI operations continue to be a major problem, and security represents another layer on top of those issues. Companies should hold off on putting AI agents into any business process that requires reliability until AI-agent makers offer better visibility, control, and security. Companies that intend to push their use of AI into agent-based workflows should focus on a comprehensive strategy, including inventorying all AI services used by employees and creating an AI usage policy. Employees need to understand the basics of AI safety and what it means to give these bots information or privileges to do things on their behalf.

In late 2024, the threat group Storm-0501 compromised hybrid cloud environments across multiple sectors, including government, manufacturing, transportation, law enforcement, schools, and healthcare. The group exploited compromised credentials and overprivileged accounts to move between cloud and on-premise environments, aiming to generate revenue through a ransomware affiliate scheme. The campaign highlights the challenges organizations face in maintaining consistent security postures across multicloud environments. Over 75% of companies use two or more cloud providers, and many expose high-value assets to potential attacks due to inconsistent identity and access controls. The incident underscores the need for unified security platforms and consistent policies to disrupt attack chains and improve visibility across multicloud environments. In August 2025, Microsoft detailed a recent attack where Storm-0501 employed cloud-based ransomware tactics, exploiting cloud privilege escalation and visibility gaps. The attack targeted a large enterprise with multiple subsidiaries, each with separate but interconnected Microsoft Azure cloud tenants, demonstrating the group's evolving tactics and the need for robust security measures. Storm-0501 has been observed exploiting Entra ID to exfiltrate and delete Azure data in hybrid cloud attacks, using cloud-native capabilities to exfiltrate data, destroy backups, and demand ransom without deploying traditional malware.