Risky Bulletin: A Meta AI model also escaped a testing sandbox

0:03A meta-AI model also escaped a testing sandbox. A cyber attack disrupts ports in North Carolina. The Philippines will establish a cyber security agency. And a ransom cartel admin gets 16 years in prison. This is the Risky Bulletin, prepared by Katalin Kimpano and read by me, Claire Aird. Today is the 7th of August, and this podcast episode is brought to you by Permiso Security. In today's top story, the UK's AI Security Institute has admitted two AI models it was evaluating attempted to hack real-world organisations. The incident late last month involved Anthropics Mythos 5 and OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol.

0:49Mythos was behind most of the malicious behaviour which involved trying to social engineer the maintainers of an open source project. The model filed malicious pull requests, used multiple personas to pressure the developers into accepting the code, attempted prompt injection attacks and hit its traffic via Tor. The Institute admitted it intentionally left the models connected to the internet with safety filters disabled and without proper guardrails as part of its testing. Meantime, an AI model made by Meta has also escaped its test environment and hacked an unnamed company. The company said the incident occurred while its model was being tested by AI security vendor Irregular.

1:32Anthropic models also escaped the same company's sandbox environment last month. Meta's rogue model was identified as MuseSpark 1.1. In other news, a cyber attack has disrupted operations at three ports in North Carolina. The attack targeted the North Carolina Ports Authority. Disruptions were reported in Charlotte, Moorhead City and Wilmington. Port gates remained closed on Tuesday and cargo loading saw delays. A coordinated voice phishing and social engineering campaign is targeting US hedge funds and private equity firms. At least five companies have notified customers about attacks. According to Bloomberg, most of the targeted entities detected the attempts to breach their networks.

2:18Google tracks the hackers as UNC6671, which is linked to the now defunct Black File Extortion Group. The government of the Philippines will establish a National Cybersecurity Agency. A bill to form the National Cybersecurity Agency passed the parliament's lower house this week. It will be tasked with passing cybersecurity policies, coordinating national cyber defence and protecting critical infrastructure. The Chinese government is reviewing the security of Palo Alto Network products. The probe is being led by the country's cybersecurity agency, the Cyberspace Administration of China. Beijing is expected to label the company a cybersecurity risk and ban the sale of its products.

3:03The retaliatory move is expected after the US banned the import of several Chinese products in recent months. The US state of Indiana has created an Office of Cybersecurity. The new office will work under the state's Department of Homeland Security. It will be tasked with preparing the state for cybersecurity events and coordinating incident response. Indiana will be the third US state to have a dedicated cybersecurity office joining Arizona and New Jersey. U.S. Cyber Command is investigating an unusually high number of staff suicides over a month-long period. According to Bloomberg, as many as five Cyber Command staffers took their lives from early June to early July.

3:47Officials believe the deaths might be related to high workloads. The U.S. has sentenced a Belarusian man to 16 years in prison for creating and running the Ransom Cartel ransomware operation. Maxim Silnikau was a notorious cyber criminal who used the pseudonyms Langsky and JP Morgan. Prior to Ransom Cartel, he was also involved in the Angler Exploit Kit malvertising operation and an active user on the Direct Connection hacking forum. A Canadian man has pleaded guilty to hacking cloud storage provider Snowflake in 2024. Connor Riley-Mucha admitted to hacking the cloud provider and stealing the data of more than 150 of its customers.

4:31Together with other accomplices, he then tried to extort the customers, threatening to release their data online. He allegedly made$2.5 million through ransom payments. Security researchers have found a hidden backdoor in routers made by Chinese company ZBT Link. The routers reach out to a Chinese registered domain name every 35 seconds. If that domain presents the right code to the router, a reverse shell opens. More than 20 ZBT-Link models are affected. A day after security firm Volncheck disclosed the backdoor, ZBT-Link said the so-called backdoor was just a remote support feature. The company has since suspended the sale of all affected models.

5:16Russian disinformation groups have started targeting pro-EU and pro-Ukrainian political figures ahead of next year's French presidential election. Targets so far have included former Prime Ministers Gabriel Attal and Edouard Philippe. Most of the content is fabricated news stories about alleged corruption and fictitious political scandals. Cryptocurrency holders have lost more than$30 million this year to wrench attacks. The term refers to the use of threats of violence to make owners hand over their crypto to criminal groups. According to blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, 2026 is set to become the single worst year for wrench attacks on record.

6:00Criminal operations are using a software package called Fun Phone Farm to manage phone farms and cyber scam operations. The kit acts as a layer between phone racks, cloud service and the operators who interact with victims. Fun Phone Farm supports physical phones, cloud-hosted handsets and the AI agents that handle early conversations inside dating apps. And finally, security researchers have discovered a new proxy botnet that's being used to disguise the origin of cybercrime and state espionage operations. According to Security Scorecard, the new Canoworms botnet runs on more than 630 cloud servers.

6:40It's being used by North Korean and Chinese APT groups, as well as criminal organizations. And that is all for this podcast edition. Today's show was brought to you by Permiso Security. Buy them at permiso.io. Thanks to your company.

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