CyberWire Daily

Patch Tuesday is a doozy. The Feds warn China-based AI companies are distilling U.S. AI models. A new ClickFix campaign goes straight for the browser. Smart TVs get nosy. Hackers gift themselves a $47 million bug bounty. An Ohio man gets 15 years in federal prison for cyberstalking and sextortion. Andy Hornegold, Chief Security Technologist from Intruder, discusses what makes up a reliable AI pentests and the benefits and risks that come with AI-enabled security. Putting AI at the head of the class.

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CyberWire Guest

Today we are joined by Andy Hornegold, Chief Security Technologist from Intruder, discussing what makes up a reliable AI pentests and the benefits and risks that come with AI-enabled security.

Selected Reading

Microsoft Patch Tuesday Fixes 966 Vulnerabilities, Including 2 Exploited 0-Days (Hackread)

Ivanti Patches Critical Flaws Across Enterprise Security Products (SecurityWeek)

Chrome 153 Patches Seventh Zero-Day of 2026 (SecurityWeek)

Adobe Patches Over 170 Vulnerabilities, Including Commerce Zero-Day (SecurityWeek)

ICS Patch Tuesday: Schneider Electric, Siemens Fix Critical Flaws (SecurityWeek)

CISA, NSA and FBI Warn Chinese AI Firms Are Targeting U.S. AI Models at Industrial Scale (HSToday)

Europe's push for space sovereignty. (N2K Networks)

History for European spaceflight: Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight (Isar Aerospace)

ClickFix moves into the browser: Cryptocurrency theft with Google-hosted C2 (Talos Intelligence)

LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby (The Verge)

'White hat' hackers take $47 million bounty after $320 million crypto theft (The Record)

Man gets 15 years for extorting women with AI-generated porn videos (Bleeping Computer)

Alpha School’s AI teaching model is expanding. Does it work? (Scientific American)

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Researchers build a self-propagating attack against WeChat. Threat actors move toward multi-agent AI frameworks. N-able issues an emergency patch for a maximum-severity bug under active exploitation. MikroTik patches multiple RouterOS vulnerabilities. China accesses restricted American technology through subsidiaries and overseas partners. An active phishing campaign abuses legitimate Google services to make malicious links appear trustworthy. Australians may soon be able to disable the algorithm. Monday business briefing. Jason Lancaster, Chief Investigations Officer at SpyCloud, discusses how AI is affecting shifting cybercrime from traditional investigations to agentic AI at scale. Electromagnetic eavesdropping gets personal.

Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app.

Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you’ll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn.

CyberWire Guest

Today we are joined by Jason Lancaster, Chief Investigations Officer at SpyCloud, discussing how AI is affecting shifting cybercrime from traditional investigations to agentic AI at scale.

Selected Reading

A.I. Models Built a Computer Worm That Could Rapidly Hack WeChat Accounts (The New York Times)

Hackers build AI frameworks for widescale credential theft (Bleeping Computer)

N-able Issues Emergency Hotfix for Maximum-Severity Unauthenticated RCE in N-central (Beyond Machines)

MikroTik Patches Critical Flaws Chained to Hack Routers (SecurityWeek)

How a Blacklisted Chinese Tech Giant Kept Buying America’s Best A.I. Chips (The New York Times)

Bypassing the Gatekeepers: How a Global Phishing Campaign Turns Google's Infrastructure into a Trust Proxy (KnowBe4)

‘Global reckoning for big tech’: Australia to force social media platforms to allow users to opt out of algorithms (The Guardian)

Socure raises $156 million and acquires agentic AI platform Fravity. (N2K Pro Business Briefing)

New attack eavesdrops on headphone audio from 30 meters away (CyberInsider)

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What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show.

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The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc.

In this Special Episode, Maria Varmazis and Dave Bittner are joined by friend of the show, Brandon Karpf, to unpack a new bipartisan congressional investigation into the lingering presence of Chinese state-owned telecommunications companies inside U.S. internet infrastructure.

The House Select Committee on China says China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom remain deeply embedded in American networks even after federal regulators denied or revoked their authority to provide certain telecommunications services over national security concerns. The investigation found that restrictions imposed by the FCC limited what the companies could sell, but did not necessarily remove their equipment, network connections, or commercial relationships from the U.S. internet ecosystem.

Links to stories:

Stranger Pings: Chinese Telecom Companies Infiltrate U.S. Infrastructure

The accurate timing data from spacecraft has become an invaluable tool for nearly every critical infrastructure sector and a greater target for malicious actors.

Host Maria Varmazis and ⁠Andy Davis⁠, Global Research Director at the NCC Group, discuss the importance of timing in space. The two look at how timing systems have continued to grow more important in everyday life and why attackers have begun to increasingly exploit these critical services.

Key sources:

GPS: A backbone for critical infrastructure.

Spoofing ships, jamming drones: how GPS manipulation confuses and compromises.

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Ismael Valenzuela, Vice President of Labs, Threat Research and Intelligence at Arctic Wolf, sits down with Dave to discuss their work tracking Anubis. Arctic Wolf Labs details a series of 2026 Anubis ransomware intrusions, revealing affiliates using stolen VPN credentials and exploiting CitrixBleed 2 to gain initial access.

Attackers then blended into legitimate IT activity by deploying RMM tools, using RDP and PsExec for lateral movement, stealing credentials, and establishing tunnels and proxies for persistence and exfiltration. The research highlights a repeatable attack chain defenders can disrupt before encryption, from suspicious remote access and unauthorized RMM deployment to credential theft, security-tool tampering, and ransomware execution.

The research and executive brief can be found here:

⁠From CitrixBleed 2 to Cloudflared: The Tools and Techniques Behind Anubis Ransomware Attacks