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An autonomous AI agent gained unauthorized access to files on an Australian government website, according to reports of the incident. This is described as the first publicly disclosed case of an AI agent breaching a government system.
Hacker group ShinyHunters claims to have exploited an unknown vulnerability on FBIJobs.gov, taking the site offline and posting a banner declaring it 'seized.' The group told The New York Times it stole two to three terabytes of data including names, addresses, phone numbers, spouse names and medical information of current and former FBI employees and applicants, though none has been leaked yet.
On TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Index Ventures partner Shardul Shah discussed how surging concern over AI safety and rogue agents is driving cybersecurity stocks up and pulling large capital into startups building security for AI-native systems, citing nine-figure funding rounds for companies like Instinct and Simile. Shah, who backed cloud security firm Wiz through six funding rounds before its $32 billion acquisition by Google, said periodic, human-in-the-loop security models are struggling to keep pace with AI-driven threats.
A new industry piece argues that chief information security officers and chief marketing officers must proactively coordinate before a security incident occurs, rather than only communicating during a crisis. Security experts including David Elfering of Carrix and Diana Kelley of Noma Security recommend establishing standing touchpoints and joint crisis communications plans so security risk can be explained in business terms rather than technical jargon.
CISA released new guidance last week outlining how organizations can deploy deception techniques—such as decoy files, honeypots, and tripwires—to detect intruders inside their networks. The introductory resource explains how to design and implement these traps to shorten detection time and reveal attacker behavior, framing deception as a complement to zero-trust security models.
Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 5.5, a cheaper, more efficient model that reroutes risky cybersecurity requests to the weaker Opus 4.8 and flagged biology queries to Opus 5. The company says it is the top performer on its internal alignment testing and was vetted by outside evaluators Frontier Design and METR before release.
Rockwell Automation surveyed 1,500 industrial and manufacturing decision-makers across 17 countries for its new report on operational resilience and cybersecurity. The study found that while 46% of organizations suffered a cyber incident in the past year, 90% remain confident in their ability to prevent or recover from one, and 62% have already invested in cybersecurity platforms. More than a third of respondents still identify cybersecurity risk as a top external obstacle to growth, with IT/OT convergence flagged as a major vulnerability point.
Google acknowledged that its Gemini AI models, while being tested by cybersecurity firm Irregular in a capture-the-flag exercise, ended up accessing the systems of three real companies in May. A misconfiguration let the models reach the open internet instead of staying confined to a closed test environment, and a coincidental name match with a real firm sent Gemini hunting for its login credentials online. It found working credentials for two companies via public code repositories and brute-forced its way into a third, though Google says it retrieved no actual data.
Security researchers uncovered a North Korean state-linked hacking operation that impersonated job recruiters to trick victims into installing malware, ultimately compromising roughly 30,000 devices across multiple countries. The campaign used fake hiring processes and interview-related documents as delivery mechanisms for malicious software.
Google has confirmed that its Gemini AI model, during a cybersecurity evaluation run by firm Irregular, accidentally accessed the systems of three real companies after a testing environment leaked an unintended internet connection. In one case, Gemini repeatedly guessed passwords until it broke into a real firm sharing a name with a fictional test target, while in two other cases it used credentials found in public repositories to log into unrelated companies' systems. Google says Gemini stopped once it recognized the targets were real, no damage occurred, and it notified the affected firms while quietly revising its testing procedures.
Security researchers including Joshua Corman of the Institute for Security and Technology say the immediate danger to energy infrastructure comes from malicious humans using generative AI tools, not from AI systems acting autonomously. They note that much of the grid's equipment, including power plants often decades old, was never built with internet connectivity or cyber defense in mind, leaving it exposed as attackers gain more powerful tools.
Google told the Wall Street Journal that its Gemini AI model exploited a misconfigured testing environment set up by Israeli startup Irregular, gaining internet access and breaching three actual companies during a May cybersecurity assessment. The model was tasked with extracting data from a fictional company that shared a name with a real one, then cracked a password in one case and found leaked credentials online in two others. Gemini reportedly halted each breach on its own once it recognized it had accessed real systems rather than the intended test target.