Google overhauled its Vulnerability Reward Program for Android and Chrome on May 1 in response to AI tools reshaping bug hunting. The maximum Pixel Titan M reward jumped to $1.5 million for a zero-click exploit with persistence. Chrome payouts dropped across categories. Google is rewarding 'actionable reports' with concrete exploits and suggested fixes rather than raw bug volume - a response to AI tools like Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.4-Cyber generating more vulnerability reports than security teams can triage. Google paid a record $17.1 million in 2025 (up 40% from 2024) and expects 2026 aggregate rewards to increase further despite per-bug cuts.
Anthropic launched Claude Security in public beta yesterday, an enterprise tool that scans code repositories for vulnerabilities, rates each finding's severity and confidence, and generates patch instructions that engineers can apply through Claude Code. The launch is direct response to Mythos and similar AI-driven offensive tools that have been compressing the time between vulnerability disclosure and active exploitation - LiteLLM was exploited 36 hours after disclosure last week, LMDeploy in 13 hours the week before. CrowdStrike, Microsoft Security, Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne, Trend, and Wiz are integrating Claude Opus 4.7 into their platforms.
Brian Krebs published an investigation showing that Huge Networks, a Brazilian DDoS protection firm, has been running the Mirai-based botnet behind a years-long DDoS campaign against other Brazilian ISPs. An exposed open directory revealed Portuguese-language Python attack scripts that relied on the personal SSH keys of Huge Networks CEO Erick Nascimento. The botnet ran on compromised TP-Link Archer AX21 routers and unmanaged DNS servers, attacking Brazilian IP prefixes for 10-60 seconds at a time. Nascimento says a January 2026 intrusion compromised his SSH keys; he denies running the attacks. ISPs say the attacks have been ongoing since December 2024.
Update on the Mini Shai-Hulud campaign covered April 30: The same supply-chain worm that hit four SAP npm packages on Wednesday spread to two more major packages on Thursday. PyTorch Lightning, an AI training framework with 31,100 GitHub stars and hundreds of thousands of daily downloads, had malicious versions 2.6.2 and 2.6.3 published on PyPI for 42 minutes before being quarantined. Intercom-client, the official Node.js SDK for Intercom (361,510 weekly downloads), was compromised at 14:41 UTC. Intercom traced its compromise to pyannote-audio pulling Lightning as a dependency - showing the worm propagating through stolen credentials from the SAP victims.
The FBI issued a public service announcement Wednesday warning that cyber-enabled cargo theft has surged 60% to $725 million in losses across the US and Canada in 2025. The pattern: criminals phish freight brokers and carriers via spoofed emails, install remote-monitoring software like ScreenConnect or Pulseway, then post fraudulent listings on freight load boards under the broker's identity. Real shippers respond, hand over high-value cargo, and the load is diverted to criminal-controlled drivers. The average theft is now $273,990 - a 36% jump from 2024. Cargo theft also funds drug trafficking and money laundering, not just direct resale.
Attackers compromised four official SAP npm packages on Wednesday and replaced them with versions that quietly steal developer credentials when installed. The packages - mbt, @cap-js/sqlite, @cap-js/postgres, and @cap-js/db-service - are SAP's open-source tools for cloud application development. Anyone who ran 'npm install' between 09:55 and 12:14 UTC on April 29 had their machine grab GitHub tokens, npm credentials, and AWS, Azure, and GCP secrets, then dump them into public GitHub repositories on the victim's own account. The same attackers (TeamPCP) hit Trivy, Checkmarx, and Bitwarden earlier this year. The malware skips Russian-language systems entirely.
A WordPress security researcher found a backdoor that's been quietly running on 70,000 websites for five years. The Quick Page/Post Redirect plugin had a hidden self-updater added in 2020 that pointed not to WordPress.org but to anadnet[.]com, an attacker-controlled domain. In March 2021 that updater silently delivered a tampered version of the plugin - replacing the real plugin with one that included a passive backdoor. The backdoor only triggers for visitors who aren't logged in (so site owners never see it firing) and was used to inject SEO spam into pages served to Google's crawler. WordPress.org pulled the plugin pending review.
North Korea's Famous Chollima group (also called Void Dokkaebi) is using Anthropic's Claude Opus to write malicious npm packages and slip them into developer environments. ReversingLabs found the group had registered a fake Florida LLC, set up a real-looking developer firm, and used Claude to add a package called @validate-sdk/v2 as a dependency to a legitimate-looking utility SDK. When developers installed the parent package, the dependency executed code that stole their cryptocurrency wallet credentials. The campaign progressed from simple JavaScript info-stealers (5KB) to full Node.js executables (85MB) bundling Claude-generated deception code.
Researchers found a serious bug in VECT 2.0, a new ransomware family making the rounds: the encryption routine corrupts any file larger than about 131 KB instead of encrypting it reversibly. Files smaller than the threshold encrypt and decrypt normally; everything bigger gets permanently destroyed. Operators don't seem to know yet, so victims who pay get a working decryption tool that recovers small files and tells them the large ones are 'corrupted' - which they are, because VECT broke them on the way in. The bug affects Windows, Linux, and VMware ESXi variants. Any large file on a VECT 2.0-hit system is irrecoverable regardless of whether the ransom is paid.
North Korea's BlueNoroff group has built a self-reinforcing deepfake pipeline that turns each victim into the lure for the next attack. Arctic Wolf documented the pattern: attackers send a Calendly invite that looks like a normal business meeting, then quietly swap the Google Meet link for a typo-squatted Zoom URL. When the target joins, a fake Zoom interface secretly records their webcam feed while a clipboard-injection attack drops malware. The captured footage is mixed with AI-generated lookalikes (built using ChatGPT for synthetic portraits) and recycled into the next attack. Arctic Wolf found 950 files in BlueNoroff's media server. 80% of identified targets are crypto executives.
TrustStrike Labs