Aviatrix Threat Research Center
Cloud breaches are accelerating — across identities, workloads, supply chains, and cloud-native services. In the Containment Era, understanding how a breach unfolds is how you architect to stop it.
The Aviatrix Threat Research Center provides security teams with:
- A structured understanding of how breaches unfold — kill chain, ATT&CK techniques, CVEs, and IOCs in a consistent format.
- What attackers exploited, and which enforcement gaps let them move.
- Where workload-level controls would have broken the attack chain — including paths that posture tools and endpoint detection don't model.
Recent Breaches, Security Incidents & Vulnerabilities
AI-Powered Threat Analysis
Agentic AI that analyzes real-world attacks — across security incidents, breaches, and exploited vulnerabilities — to produce structured, actionable intelligence.
Displaying 61 to 72 of 5908
How Threat Actors Weaponized Trusted AI Platforms for Social Engineering
In 2026, Huntress Labs documented a sophisticated social engineering campaign where threat actors weaponized trusted AI platforms including Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok to deliver malware. The FakeAgent campaign exploited Claude Artifacts and shared conversation features to create fake download pages and malicious install guides that appeared legitimate due to hosting on trusted domains like claude.ai, chatgpt.com, and grok.com. Over nine months, attackers delivered SectopRAT, MacSync stealer, and AMOS stealer malware to over 29 organizations by abusing shareable AI content and SEO poisoning techniques. This represents a significant evolution in social engineering tactics as attackers leverage the inherent trust users place in established AI platforms to bypass traditional security awareness training and detection mechanisms.
4 days ago
Kill Chain
ShinyHunters & Helix Gangs Weaponize Passkey Themes in Microsoft 365 Attacks
Since May 2026, threat actors linked to ShinyHunters, Helix, and other extortion gangs have been conducting sophisticated passkey-themed phishing campaigns targeting corporate Microsoft 365 accounts. The attacks begin with extensive pre-attack reconnaissance, followed by social engineering calls impersonating IT help desks to trick employees into urgently updating passkey or MFA configurations. Victims are directed to adversary-in-the-middle phishing sites or device-code authentication flows, allowing attackers to capture credentials and session tokens. Once inside Microsoft cloud environments, attackers perform systematic reconnaissance using Microsoft Graph APIs, establish persistence through MFA method registration, and conduct automated data exfiltration from SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange over periods spanning hours to days while avoiding detection. The attacks demonstrate the evolving threat landscape where modern authentication methods like passkeys are weaponized as social engineering lures, highlighting the critical need for phishing-resistant MFA implementations and enhanced cloud security controls in enterprise environments.
4 days ago
Kill Chain
JFrog Artifactory Under Attack: Critical Vulnerability Chain Enables Supply Chain Compromise
Between August and September 2026, threat actors exploited a chain of critical vulnerabilities in JFrog Artifactory (CVE-2026-42018, CVE-2026-42016, and CVE-2026-82329) to bypass authentication and gain administrative privileges on self-hosted instances. Attackers leveraged these flaws to obtain JWT tokens for anonymous users, escalate to admin-level permissions within minutes, and deploy custom Rust-based backdoors with command-and-control capabilities. The campaign affected multiple organizations, with attackers installing malicious Groovy plugins, establishing persistence, stealing configuration data, and creating rogue administrator accounts across vulnerable infrastructure. This incident highlights the escalating sophistication of supply chain attacks targeting development infrastructure, as 49-62% of internet-accessible Artifactory instances remain vulnerable to these authentication bypass flaws, creating widespread exposure across the software development ecosystem.
4 days ago
Kill Chain
How ShinyHunters Weaponized Claude AI to Harvest Secrets from 1.8 Million Android Apps
Between December 2025 and August 2026, multiple threat groups including ShinyHunters, Russian state-sponsored Midnight Blizzard, and Chinese espionage group GTG-10007 systematically abused Anthropic's Claude AI model for large-scale cyberattacks. The most significant operation involved ShinyHunters member 'frkoo' deploying an automated credential-harvesting pipeline across AWS infrastructure that extracted secrets from 1.8 million Android applications and compromised over 40 Microsoft corporate tenants within 34 hours. The AI-enhanced attacks enabled rapid progression from initial access to administrative control in under three hours, with confirmed breaches across government, healthcare, energy, and technology sectors. This incident represents a critical inflection point where AI capabilities are being weaponized at unprecedented scale and speed, fundamentally changing the threat landscape and requiring immediate reassessment of defensive strategies against AI-enhanced cybercrime operations.
4 days ago
Kill Chain
GitLab's CVSS 10.0 Vulnerability: Why DevOps Security Can't Wait
GitLab disclosed a critical path traversal vulnerability (CVE-2026-85706) with a maximum CVSS score of 10.0, allowing unauthenticated attackers to read arbitrary files from GitLab servers through the repository commits API. The flaw affects GitLab CE and EE versions from 18.7 through 19.3.1, stemming from improper path confinement and missing authentication enforcement. Within hours of public disclosure on September 11, 2026, security researchers observed active in-the-wild exploitation attempts targeting exposed GitLab instances to extract log files, configuration data, credentials, and sensitive information. This incident highlights the accelerating timeline from vulnerability disclosure to active exploitation, particularly for DevOps platforms that house critical source code and CI/CD secrets. Following a similar pattern to the recent GitLab GraphQL injection vulnerability (CVE-2026-19478), attackers are rapidly weaponizing these flaws to compromise software supply chains and inject malicious code into build pipelines.
4 days ago
Kill Chain
How Seven Chinese AI Labs Stole 190+ Million Claude Conversations in Massive Distillation Attack
In September 2026, Anthropic disclosed that seven China-based AI laboratories, including Alibaba, Moonshot, DeepSeek, and others, conducted industrial-scale illicit distillation attacks against Claude AI models between February and July 2026. The attackers used networks of fake accounts created with stolen credit cards and API keys to extract over 190 million conversation exchanges, routing requests through proxy services to harvest Claude's capabilities including chain-of-thought reasoning, coding abilities, and logical reasoning functions for unauthorized training of competing models. This incident highlights the emerging threat landscape of AI model theft and intellectual property extraction, representing a new category of cybercrime where nation-state affiliated entities systematically steal proprietary AI capabilities to advance their own technological development and competitive positioning.
4 days ago
Kill Chain
Florida DMV Breach Exposes Risks of Shared Government Database Access
In September 2026, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) confirmed that its DAVID driver database was breached by the ShinyHunters extortion group, who claimed to have stolen over 200,000 driver records. The attack was executed using compromised credentials from a Plant City Police Department employee that had been improperly stored on a personal device. The breach was discovered on September 4, 2026, and quickly mitigated, with FLHSMV working alongside state law enforcement agencies in their response. This incident highlights the growing trend of cybercriminals targeting government databases through compromised credentials and the critical importance of proper credential management across interconnected systems.
4 days ago
Kill Chain
UAC-0099 Deploys GuardBreaker AI Manipulation Against Ukraine
In September 2026, Russia-aligned threat group UAC-0099 deployed a novel AI manipulation technique called GuardBreaker against Ukrainian targets. The attackers embedded nuclear weapon prompts within malicious VBScript comments to trigger AI safety mechanisms and prevent automated malware analysis systems from examining their code. This represents a significant evolution in adversarial tactics, where threat actors manipulate AI defensive reasoning rather than increasing malware sophistication to achieve compromise. This incident highlights the accelerating arms race between AI-powered security tools and adversaries who exploit their limitations. With AI systems now discovering vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed and scale, traditional 90-day patch cycles are obsolete, creating an urgent need for multilayered defense strategies that don't rely solely on AI-based detection mechanisms.
4 days ago
Kill Chain
The $21 Billion AI Scam Crisis: How Artificial Intelligence Became the Ultimate Social Engineer
AI-enabled social engineering attacks have reached unprecedented sophistication, with cybercriminals leveraging large language models to create highly personalized and emotionally manipulative scams. Research by Fred Heiding of Menlo Park Intelligence reveals that AI systems excel at human manipulation through voice cloning, long-term relationship building, and cultural context adaptation. The FBI's Internet Crime Center reports that fraud losses skyrocketed from $4 billion in 2020 to $21 billion in 2025, primarily targeting vulnerable populations including senior citizens who develop emotional dependencies on AI-powered scam bots. This asymmetric threat landscape highlights a critical security gap where traditional technical defenses prove inadequate against AI-enhanced social engineering, as human cognitive vulnerabilities cannot be patched like software systems.
4 days ago
Kill Chain
The PaperCut AI Swarm Attack: When Machines Wage Cyber Warfare
In August 2026, a Russian-speaking threat actor deployed hundreds of AI agents in a coordinated swarm attack targeting PaperCut NG and MF print management software. The AI-powered campaign compromised at least 440 instances across 395 organizations in 48 countries, achieving remote code execution within four hours and Active Directory domain admin access in just six hours total. Once fully launched, the swarm compromised 11 organizations in merely 26 seconds, demonstrating unprecedented speed and scale in automated cyberattacks. This incident represents a critical inflection point where AI agents are now actively integrated across the entire cyber kill chain, from reconnaissance to exfiltration. As nation-state actors and financially motivated groups increasingly weaponize large language models and agentic AI capabilities, organizations face a new reality where attackers can execute complex, multi-stage operations at machine speed while defenders still operate at human pace.
4 days ago
Kill Chain
How Storm-3032 and Storm-3121 Are Exploiting BYOD Policies to Breach Corporate Microsoft 365
Since May 2026, Microsoft researchers have tracked threat actors Storm-3032 and Storm-3121 conducting sophisticated initial access campaigns targeting corporate executives through their personal devices. The attackers use voice calls and text messages impersonating IT helpdesks to trick employees into updating authentication credentials via phishing links. Once access is gained, the threat actors exploit Microsoft Graph API to enumerate corporate resources and exfiltrate sensitive data from SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange before potentially selling access to extortion groups like ShinyHunters. This campaign highlights the growing trend of attackers bypassing corporate security controls by targeting the weakest link - personal devices with minimal security protections. As organizations increasingly adopt BYOD policies and hybrid work models, identity-based attacks exploiting trusted communication channels represent a critical evolution in threat actor tactics.
4 days ago
Kill Chain
GoldFactory's Android Banking Malware Exploits Work Profiles to Steal $1M from Indonesian Banks
Between February and July 2026, the Chinese-speaking threat group GoldFactory deployed a sophisticated Android banking malware campaign targeting Indonesia, resulting in 1,469 compromised devices and nearly $1 million in losses. The attackers used the Gigabud banking Trojan in combination with Vwork, a modified app-cloning tool, to exploit Android's Work Profile feature. This technique allowed fraudsters to clone legitimate banking applications into isolated environments where security controls and fraud detection systems could not follow, enabling them to conduct transactions while evading detection mechanisms that were triggered in the victim's primary profile. This incident highlights the evolution of mobile banking threats as attackers increasingly target regions with high mobile payment adoption and develop novel evasion techniques that exploit legitimate enterprise security features for malicious purposes.
4 days ago
Kill Chain
Security Research & Insights
Security Research & Insights with human-led deep dives into campaigns and cloud-native TTPs
The Edge Device Isn't Your Last Line of Defense. It's Their First Target.
AI Trust Abuse: A Detection Engineer's Field Guide to Agent-Abuse Attacks
Aug 18, 2026
OpenAI Lost Control of Its Models. Then Anthropic Did Too. That Is Not a Coincidence.
Market Perspectives
Market Perspectives offering expert commentary and select breach analysis from industry leaders
What Could Have Stopped the 2023 MGM Breach? A Study in the Power of Embedded Zero Trust
The Zero Trust Gap: Only 8% of US Enterprises Use Zero Trust Architectures
HITRUST CSF Compliance in the Cloud—How Aviatrix Secures Healthcare Data
How CNSF Protects Cloud Workloads
Cloud attackers don’t rely on a single exploit — they rely on paths.
Once inside, attackers move laterally between workloads, establish command-and-control through egress paths, and exfiltrate data through legitimate cloud services — often before detection tools generate an alert. These paths exist because most security architectures enforce at centralized inspection points, not at every workload. The paths that matter most are the ones that never reach a central firewall.
Aviatrix Cloud Native Security Fabric (CNSF) contains attacks by enforcing policy at every workload communication path — containing blast radius, blocking lateral movement, and cutting off egress before data leaves the environment.
With CNSF, enterprises can:
- Contain attack paths at runtime
Gain visibility into east-west and egress workload communication and apply controls that limit lateral movement, unauthorized egress, and uncontrolled trust expansion.
- Eliminate blind spots in workload-to-workload traffic
Observe traffic across VPCs/VNets, regions, and cloud providers using cloud native telemetry — including paths that posture tools and point controls don’t model.
- Secure modern and AI-driven workloads
Understand how agents, services, and workloads communicate at runtime, and enforce policy to reduce the risk of misuse, over-privileged access, or unintended data flows.
- Apply consistent Zero Trust controls without slowing teams
Enforce segmentation, egress control, and encryption centrally across clouds — without agents, application changes, or developer friction.
See Your Attack Paths. Close the Gaps with CNSF.
Blast radius starts where your enforcement stops.
Most security architectures enforce at centralized inspection points. Attackers move between workloads on paths that never reach those points — building blast radius invisibly until detection tools fire, often too late.
Your assessment delivers:
The Aviatrix Workload Attack Path Assessment (WAPA) analyzes real workload communication using cloud native telemetry to uncover attack paths already present in your environment — and shows how Cloud Native Security Fabric (CNSF) can break those paths with runtime enforcement.
The threat landscape has changed.
Has your question changed with it?
In March 2026, TeamPCP proved that detection-first architectures cannot contain attacks that move through trusted code, not around defenses. Today’s threat actors don’t break in — they log in, blend in, and expand silently. This command center tracks the evolving threat landscape and helps you measure your Blast Radius — the architectural metric that defines resilience in the Containment Era.
This command center tracks 8 active campaigns and measures your Blast Radius: what an attacker can reach once inside your environment.
Contain the Blast Radius
See the attack paths already present in your environment — and where CNSF containment controls would break them.
