CrowdStrike, working with Google and the Shadowserver Foundation, said it has taken down the Glassworm botnet, a self-propagating, credential-stealing worm that has targeted developers and spread through poisoned software packages since early 2025. The endpoint security giant’s Counter Adversary Operations team and partners hit all four Glassworm command-and-control channels simultaneously at 1400 UTC on Tuesday, “severing the operators from their infected machines and their ability to deliver new malicious payloads,” according to CrowdStrike’s blog. Google Threat Intelligence Group chief analyst John Hultquist confirmed his company’s involvement in a social media post. “As part of our disruption efforts, we are working with partners to bring more pain to attackers, especially when we see them abusing our products or targeting our users,” Hultquist wrote. A spokesperson declined to provide additional details to The Register about Google’s role in the takedown. The disruption comes as another self-replicating worm, Mini Shai-Hulud, rips through open source code and miscreants poison GitHub repositories and npm packages in similar supply-chain attacks also targeting developers’ environments. “Glassworm marked a significant shift in the threat landscape that should serve as a wake-up call for every organization that ships or consumes software,” CrowdStrike wrote. “Adversaries are no longer just targeting products, they're targeting the developers who build them.” First spotted by endpoint security shop Koi in October 2025, Glassworm used invisible Unicode-based code injection, blockchain-based C2 infrastructure, and Google Calendar as a backup command server to turn infected developers’ machines into criminal proxy nodes. This self-replicating worm initially targeted VS Code extensions on the OpenVSX marketplace before moving on to npm and Python packages, and later poisoned more than 300 GitHub repos using stolen credentials harvested in earlier Glassworm infections. This worm appeared about a month after another self-propagating malware strain, Shai Hulud, first wormed through npm packages including those maintained by CrowdStrike. Glassworm infected all platforms - including Windows, macOS, and Linux systems - stealing credentials and other sensitive information, and also spawning its own Node.js remote access tool called GlasswormRAT. C2 architecture designed to withstand takedowns Glassworm’s C2 infrastructure used four distinct channels to complicate takedown efforts. These included the Solana blockchain, with C2 server addresses encoded in the memo fields of blockchain transactions, ensuring the C2 couldn’t be taken offline through conventional means. It also used Google Calendar event titles as dead-drop locations for Base64-encoded C2 paths. The GlasswormRAT used a decentralized BitTorrent Distributed Hash Table (DHT) for configuration data stored against hardcoded public keys. And finally, Glassworm relied on traditional C2 servers, hosted on commercial VPS providers, as the final payload delivery mechanism. Disrupting all four channels “required precision and timing,” according to CrowdStrike. “Taking down only one channel would have left the others operational, allowing the operators to quickly reconstitute.” All Glassworm-infected machines now beacon to the benign CrowdStrike-operated IP address 164.92.88[.]210. The security shop urges organizations to review network logs and endpoint telemetry for connections to this address, which indicate a Glassworm infection. ®

More than half of businesses had an AI-related security incident or a scare in the past year — even as executives remain overwhelmingly confident in their ability to manage the risks of employees using AI tools, according to a study commissioned by identity and access management leader Okta. “For the purposes of this survey, an AI security issue is defined as an actual incident, i.e. a breach, data exposure, or system disruption, or a close call, meaning an issue was identified before it caused harm to the organization,” Harish Peri, SVP and GM for AI Security at Okta, told The Register. Of those respondents who reported a security problem, 26.7 percent described an actual incident — a breach, data exposure, or system disruption — while 31.2 percent identified a close call caught before it caused harm. Yet, overall, 58 percent of executives reported that their organization experienced an AI-related security problem in the past 12 months and the data is pointing to “shadow AI” use by employees as the culprit, Peri said. “The old adage in cybersecurity is that you can’t protect what you can’t see. Our research shows that 52 percent of knowledge workers admit to using unapproved AI tools,” Peri told us. “Security and compliance teams can’t govern the usage of AI tools they don’t know are being used. Organizations must implement an effective AI governance framework that prioritizes identity-centric controls, automated discovery, and secure sandboxes to test drive AI tools safely.” The AI Agents at Work 2026 report was commissioned by Okta and conducted by Apprize360 in March. It surveyed 292 executives and 492 knowledge workers across seven countries: the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Japan, France, and Germany. It also showed a disconnect between how leaders believe AI is being used within their organizations and what employees actually do. Whether it's coding assistants, browser extensions, or industry-specific utilities, the study said what unites all of the tools is their need for data and, in many cases, access to an organization’s internal systems. Peri said the survey found risky employee behavior when it came to interacting with AI models. Knowledge workers actively used unapproved AI tools, shared confidential company documents with those tools, handed over HR information to AI, and in 16 percent of cases, provided their login credentials. "These risky behaviors — whether intentional or not — increase the attack surface across an organization," Peri told The Register. Despite that, 90 percent of executives had confidence in their organization's visibility into AI tools, even as more than half of knowledge workers admitted to using AI tools without approval, with 24 percent adding that they do so regularly. Apart from the security issues, the survey found that AI agents and AI tools are gaining widespread adoption. Ninety-two percent of executives surveyed said autonomous AI agents are already in widespread or moderate use across their organizations, while nearly two-thirds of knowledge workers reported using an AI tool at least daily. Among those workers, 68 percent used AI agents, while 62 percent regularly used LLMs and AI-infused chatbots. The results of the survey vary by geography, too. The United States led all surveyed countries, with 67 percent - more than two-thirds - of workers reporting they use unsanctioned AI tools. Australia came in second, with 60 percent of workers saying they engaged in unapproved AI usage. In the United Kingdom, some 55 percent of workers ignore the rules, while roughly 50 percent of Canadian workers reported using unauthorized AI tools. Workers in France and Germany reported the lowest rates of unauthorized AI usage with each at around 30 percent. The gap between executive confidence and employee reality is widest in the UK, where 96 percent of executives expressed confidence in their AI visibility, while more than half of workers used unapproved tools. Peri said there’s no easy fix. “For most organizations, shadow AI emerges unintentionally and isn’t intended to be malicious,” he told The Register. “Shadow AI primarily causes headaches for leaders because they don’t have the proper visibility, governance, and security controls for tools the organization isn’t managing.” Okta’s survey recommends that organizations should assume shadow AI exists and make discovery a priority. They should make the secure use of AI the easiest path, and define an AI governance strategy now. Peri said strict AI bans may actually make the problem worse by pushing more usage underground. A more effective approach, he said, involves talking with employees to understand what they need and making approved tools easier to use than unsanctioned alternatives. ®

The FBI is warning unsuspecting lawyers that their firms continue to be an active target for members of a longstanding extortion crew. Silent Ransom Group has been operating since 2022, by the FBI’s reckoning, and its latest message [PDF] about the gang comes almost exactly a year after its last. The group is still targeting US law firms and their staff, and the criminals are pretending to be company IT staff. It also warned last year that the callback phishing specialists had started physically walking into the law firms’ offices when remote social engineering attempts go south. The FBI’s latest advisory reaffirms these findings, with fresh attacks reported in Spring 2026. Law firms should be locking up their USB ports because the extortion crew is still sending members to plug in their thumb drives into the computers, for when they can’t convince employees to surrender remote access. In these scenarios, they rock up to the victim they’ve tried to phish and socially engineer from behind a phone or computer screen, continue the facade of being a company IT rep, and then claim they need to image the person's device or create a backup file to assess the damage of their own phishing email. What they’re actually doing is copying important files onto said thumb drive, which SRG will later use to extort the law firm. The FBI didn’t say exactly how many of these in-person callouts SRG has made, but it was evidently enough to include in a fresh advisory on the group’s methods and tactics. According to the advisory, these attacks were first reported in Spring 2026. SRG in brief SRG’s target industries used to be broader than just legal. The hack-and-leak group has been known to target organizations operating in various industries, but the legal sector has remained a common theme since 2023. The FBI said in its advisory on the group last year that it believes SRG consistently targets US law firms “likely due to the highly sensitive nature of legal industry data.” When they’re not sending crooks into office blocks, SRG’s primary goal is to achieve their aims through callback phishing. Using SMS messages or emails, group members would single out employees at target companies, asking them to call a number while impersonating real IT staff. If the staffer fell for the scheme, they’d call up, and the SRG IT imposter would attempt to convince them to grant access to a remote desktop session, during which they would elevate their privileges and set about stealing data to use as extortion leverage. In some cases, SRG will run WinSCP or a disguised version of Rclone to scoop up files of interest. In others, they are known to share those documents using internal file-sharing platforms such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. Before the callback phishing methodology, the group would send emails claiming that a fake subscription had been authorized that would charge small sums to the target’s account each month. The email included a phone number to call in order to cancel the subscription, and once on the call, the crooks would convince the target to install remote access software, and rinse-repeat the data theft playbook. SRG is not known for using ransomware, but it operates a data leak site (DLS) just like any other extortion crew and charges victims to return the data they stole, threatening to leak it online if they refuse to pay. Recent alleged victims of the group have included law giant Jones Day, the legal eagles favored by US president Donald Trump during both his election campaigns. SRG listed Jones Day on its DLS, and the law firm confirmed a “cyber phishing incident” in April, but did not name SRG as the culprits. Your country needs you The FBI pleaded with the public to send it any evidence of SRG in action to aid future investigations. Of particular use would be phone numbers used to contact the crooks, copies of the phone call transcripts and phishing emails, cryptocurrency wallet information, and identifying information of the individuals who step foot in office buildings. As for how to prevent attacks from SRG or others adopting similar methods, the FBI recommended that organizations disallow connecting external drives to company-issued devices, especially those that store confidential or otherwise sensitive information. Verifying the credentials of each person walking into the building wouldn’t hurt, either. The usual advice applies for the group’s remote attacks: limiting access to sensitive data from less-secure networks and requiring phishing-resistant MFA for as many services as possible. The FBI also recommends blocking port 22 access, which would prevent encrypted remote access, and investing in robust staff training programs so they know not to let outsiders plug hardware into their machines. ®

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India's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) says defenders should endevor to patch or mitigate exploited n-day vulnerabilities within 12 hours as the cybercrime landscape continues its AI-ification. The organization's recommended half-day window applies only to bugs that affect internet-facing or "crown jewel" systems and are known to be exploited. In these cases, CERT-In told defenders to "patch, mitigate, or remove exposure within 12 hours where feasible." For other flaws, such as a standard critical vulnerability (CVSS 9.0 or higher) affecting an internal system, or a known exploited bug affecting an internal system, defenders can enjoy a much more leisurely 24-hour window. The revised suggestions come as part of a new guide released by CERT-In this week to help infosec pros better protect against AI-assisted cyberattacks. "AI-assisted cyber exploitation reduces the time required for adversaries to identify, weaponize, and exploit vulnerabilities, exposed services, weak identities, insecure APIs, and misconfigured systems," CERT-In's report reads. "As organizations become increasingly dependent on interconnected digital infrastructure, cloud ecosystems, software supply chains, operational technologies, and AI-enabled platforms, the potential impact of AI-enabled cyber threats continues to increase across sectors." CERT-In's report follows a trail of news stories in 2026 that all suggest AI is becoming an increasingly important part of cybersecurity for both attackers and defenders. The field of agentic AI has especially matured rapidly in the past year. Consumer-grade tools like OpenClaw have made it easier for non-technical users to experiment with autonomous tech, raising its profile and awareness of its capabilities. Agents are equipped with all the necessary permissions to make significant system changes, but as global intelligence agencies recently highlighted, their behavior can at times be unexpected, and they're also prone to mischief. Security pros are starting to see the potential for AI agents in their workflows, but for attackers, the technology represents an opportunity to hasten all parts of their process, from recon and exploitation to privilege escalation and data theft. CERT-In cited agentic AI as one of the core concerns behind the report's recommendations, and because of the disparate supply chains on which organizations are increasingly reliant, any vulnerability can lead to cascading damage on interconnected systems. Beyond agentic AI, the launches of frontier models such as Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5, two certified cyber workhorses, threaten to empower attackers further with capabilities to uncover and exploit critical vulnerabilities at pace. A 12-hour window: Is it feasible? Any cybersecurity practitioner will attest to the onerous nature of the patching process, and how it's not as easy as clicking "Update," which is why a 12-hour patch window might seem initially unrealistic to some. Urgent warnings and demands for immediate patching are routinely delivered alongside critical vulnerability disclosures, but these fail to account for the downtime required to apply patches, or the testing required to prove that by applying them, everything else won't break. Microsoft has had its fair share of these cases, for example, and many readers will have borne the brunt. CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog is another prominent resource that sets patching deadlines, albeit only for federal agencies, but these are typically set at two to three weeks, or a number of days for the most serious vulnerabilities. The cybersecurity pros who spoke to The Register, weighing in on the CERT-In recommendations, agreed that 12 hours is far too short a window to properly test and deploy a patch, although they said the organization was on to something with its approach. Dray Agha, senior manager of security operations at Huntress, said that CERT-In’s recommendation to "patch, mitigate, or remove exposure within 12 hours where feasible" was solid advice, largely because of the caveat that it doesn’t necessitate a full patch within that time. "By explicitly encouraging temporary mitigations, such as isolation, access restriction, or disablement until a patch is ready, this turns the patching deadline into a highly feasible and necessary containment strategy," Agha told The Register. "And this corroborates the guidance we dispense at Huntress for critical threats: we often advise our community to deploy temporary mitigations to 'get them out of trouble' as soon as humanly possible, and then come up with a more coordinated strategy for patching that respects the business's need to function in its enterprises." Agha added that AI-assisted cyberattacks are seen every day in the wild, compressing the time taken to exploit vulnerabilities, meaning defenders must adapt to this new reality. In the pre-AI days, a 12-hour window to mitigate or patch a known exploited vulnerability was seen as excessively tight, but increased availability of advanced tooling and automation is reshaping the demands of vulnerability management. "Defenders must fundamentally reshape their operations to focus on quicker mitigations – prior to AI, at Huntress, we have seen vulnerabilities exploited within a handful of hours, let alone a full 12 hours," said Agha. He said the 12-hour guideline is less about an arbitrary clock, more about "forcing a necessary readjustment in how organizations drive their security approaches to be beyond compliance and move to a continuous defensive posture. "And this will involve the enterprise functions of the business being a part of the security posture – not just IT, thank you very much – as the consequences of AI-driven exploitation mean faster, higher impact cascading negatives on a targeted business; much better to proactively defend than reactively recover." ®

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A security researcher found a foolproof way to guarantee tech conferences accept his speaker submissions: hack their systems. CVE-2026-41241 is a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in pretalx, a popular open source tool that conference organizers use to manage speaker submissions and schedules, that could allow attackers to effectively take over an organizer's session. Any user controlling searchable fields – including submission titles, speaker display names, and user names or email addresses – could inject arbitrary HTML or JavaScript. When an organizer's search query matched the malicious record, the payload would execute in the organizer interface. "Once triggered, the injected script executed in the context of the pretalx organiser interface and could read the page's [Cross-Site Request Forgery] CSRF token, submit authenticated requests on the victim's behalf (including requests modifying data due to access to the CSRF token), or exfiltrate data visible to the victim," according to pretalx's security advisory. Project maintainers patched the flaw in April, and it has been fixed in pretalx 2026.1.0. Elad Meged, founding engineer and security researcher at AI penetration-testing and offensive-security startup Novee, found and disclosed the flaw when he was preparing conference speaker submissions. He noticed the exact same call for proposals (CFP) submission form appearing underneath all of these different hacker conferences and academic symposiums' logos. 'One codebase serving them all' While the events are unique, with different parent companies and organizers, "underneath, it is one codebase serving them all," Meged said in research published on Wednesday and shared in advance with The Register. Meged then used the flaw to auto-apply for 40 conferences - and got accepted to present his proposed talk, "Securing Modern Web Apps," at every single one of them. While Meged did submit real entries, he did not submit a live exploit payload into the conference systems. The Novee team validated all of their findings on a local instance. They didn't do any testing on pretalx.com or a third-party-hosted instance. "The goal was to validate the vulnerable workflow in the exact real-world setup while avoiding unnecessary harm," Meged told The Register. "So, we used realistic, normal-looking talk submissions and then validated exploitability through controlled, version-specific testing." Some of the events that use pretalx-based CFP infrastructure include OffensiveCon, TROOPERS, FOSDEM, HEXACON, and Recon, he told us, stressing that this does not mean any of these conferences were actively exploited or compromised. For any conferences that used pretalx for talk submissions, but weren't accepting submissions at the time, Meged followed up with them via responsible disclosure. And yes, Meged admits that he could have had more fun with the talk title, but he wanted to make it "intentionally boring and plausible," to blend in with other proposals. "I agree something outrageous would have been funnier, but it would also have been less responsible," he said. Human led, AI agent assist Meged described the research as "human-led vulnerability research, agent-assisted at internet scale." Once they understood the type of vulnerability, any "capable web security researcher" could reproduce the exploit, he said, adding "this would not require nation-state-level skill." Scaling the attack, reliably reproducing it, and adjusting the attack chain to each real-world pretalx deployment, however, benefited from an agentic AI assist – and this wasn't "a one-off script or a prank CFP submission," he told us. "Different pretalx versions, deployment choices, and enabled features can change the behavior," Meged said. "Something that works on one instance may fail on another or require a different validation path." Plus, some conferences use hosted infrastructure, while others run their own self-hosted instances. So the security shop built an agentic fingerprinting and validation system to scan the internet for public-facing, vulnerable systems, learn as much as possible about the version and configuration, and find the best way to exploit them. 'This type of work does not scale manually' "This type of work does not scale manually," Meged said. "A human can find the core idea, understand the primitive, and make the responsible disclosure decisions. But mapping internet-wide exposure, fingerprinting many deployments, comparing versions, modeling behavior, adjusting validation logic, and organizing disclosure steps is exactly where AI agents become useful. The agents helped with discovery, fingerprinting, version comparison, environment modeling, controlled validation, note-taking, and disclosure workflow management." After finding and fingerprinting public pretalx deployments, and identifying version-specific behavior, the agents selected the best non-destructive validation path for each one. While there's no indication that attackers found and exploited the security issue before Novee's team, it's serious in that it could have granted organizer-level access to the conference call-for-proposal and scheduling system - these typically contain speaker identities, submissions, acceptance decisions, and private communications between conference organizers and speakers. Gaining access to this type of information could have allowed for targeted phishing or other trust-based attacks impersonating a well-known industry event. "With organizer-level access, an attacker could potentially read or modify submissions, interfere with the review process, impersonate conference staff, alter CFP data, or communicate with speakers and submitters from a trusted conference context," Meged said. "The most realistic abuse case is targeted phishing or lateral movement through trust. If a speaker, sponsor, reviewer, or attendee receives a link or request from what appears to be a legitimate conference system, they are much more likely to trust it," he added. "So the story is not just: Someone could get a fake talk accepted. The bigger risk is that a trusted conference platform could become a launchpad for attacks against the entire event ecosystem." Tobias Kunze, a developer who created pretalx, told The Register that Meged reported 11 security findings on April 14, he assessed all of these and classed one as a serious vulnerability and five as non-vulnerability bugs – but with fixes – and five more as non-critical or intended behavior. "Contact with Elad was very positive and professional," Kunze told us. "We discussed the severity and impact of his findings, and it was as good a report as a small open source project like pretalx can hope to receive." ®

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The malware pairs remote access capabilities with ready-made campaign tools, lowering the barrier for full device compromise