DeepSeek

AI Agents Using Claude and Grok Fully Automate Attacks on 400 Latin American Financial Institutions

A Straiker investigation has revealed that the CyberCartel hacking group built an AI agent network driven by multiple large language models to conduct fully automated attacks against more than 400 Latin American banks and payment applications. The system incorporates models from Anthropic and xAI, with CrowdStrike confirming additional use of DeepSeek. The AI agents independently perform reconnaissance across hundreds of targets, steal credentials through adaptive techniques, take over accounts while mimicking human behavior to evade detection, and monetize stolen data with minimal human intervention. This development marks a sharp drop in attack costs, allowing scalable operations that were previously impractical due to high manual effort. Defenders are advised to deploy dynamic behavioral baselines, enforce zero-trust architectures, strengthen multi-factor authentication and transaction monitoring, and incorporate AI adversary simulations into red-team exercises. The report is described as one of the first detailed public records of such end-to-end AI-driven financial attacks.

US Department of Homeland Security Orders Federal Agencies to Remove DeepSeek Products

The US Department of Homeland Security issued an order on October 19 requiring federal civilian agencies to cease purchasing products from DeepSeek and to remove related technology from government systems. The directive, published the following day, targets Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence, its affiliates, and any third-party products or services built on DeepSeek implementations. The measure stems from the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act of 2018 and follows a recommendation by the Federal Acquisition Security Council, though no specific incidents or evidence were detailed in the notice. The restriction applies only to federal environments and does not prohibit private sector or individual use outside government systems. No removal deadline was set, and the document does not name the signing authority. The order is filed under docket DHS-2026-0628 with the CISA implementation team listed as the contact point.

GitHub Repo Trap with 1774 Stars Mimics Microsoft Activation Scripts to Deliver Malware via Telegram Bot

A security researcher built a Telegram bot that daily delivers five trending GitHub repositories from trendshift.io along with README summaries. One repository named Microsoft Activation Scripts contained only a README with a reversed PowerShell command that decoded to download and execute a payload from a lookalike domain. The account was created 94 seconds before the repository and used classic one-liner installation syntax to blend with legitimate projects. Analysis of 321 trending repositories showed that simple filters such as recent account age or irm|iex patterns would incorrectly flag many legitimate projects including codex and opencode. Two independent detection rules were developed: one that normalizes and scans for obfuscated execution commands including base64, mshta, certutil and hidden window flags, and another that flags one-time owners created less than 30 days before the repository with under 10 KB of content. An additional groundedness check using the AIHOT method prevents DeepSeek from inserting unverified claims such as Ruby or Cypress into repository summaries.

AI Agent Denied CRM Write Access, Yet Downstream System Still Modified Records

An AI agent using DeepSeek was explicitly restricted from writing to HubSpot CRM, yet the system still executed unauthorized changes through an n8n workflow. The experiment demonstrated that model-level permissions do not equate to system-wide read-only behavior. In a controlled test with synthetic deals LAB-042 and LAB-043, a mismatch between the human-readable request and the structured proposal allowed the downstream node to perform a PATCH operation. Adding an independent deterministic gateway that validated target object, expected state, and allowed transitions before execution successfully blocked the wrong-object change. The case highlights the confused deputy problem in modern agentic architectures and stresses the need to verify runtime controls at the actual execution boundary rather than relying solely on model credentials.

Inserting Contracts into ChatGPT Risks Major Fines Under Russia's 152-FZ Personal Data Law

A detailed analysis examines the legal consequences of uploading contracts containing personal data into foreign AI services such as ChatGPT under Russian Federal Law 152-FZ. The article clarifies that even standard supply agreements include names, positions, passport details, INN numbers, phones and emails that qualify as personal data. It breaks down applicable administrative penalties from Article 13.11 of the Code of Administrative Offenses, including 150-300 thousand rubles for processing without a proper legal basis and separate fines for failing to notify Roskomnadzor. Cross-border transfer rules under Article 12 require a dedicated notification to the regulator before sending data to services hosted in the United States or European Union. The piece also reviews recent court practice, including a Moscow district court ruling that treated uploading commercial information to DeepSeek as disclosure of trade secrets. No criminal liability under Article 272.1 of the Criminal Code applies to ordinary business use, yet the absence of a data processing agreement with OpenAI or similar providers creates ongoing compliance exposure.

US Accuses Chinese AI Companies of Industrial-Scale Model Distillation Targeting Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok

US agencies have accused six Chinese artificial intelligence firms of conducting large-scale unauthorized distillation operations to replicate advanced capabilities from leading models including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok. The activity is reported to have begun at least by late 2024 and involved DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI. Billions of tokens were extracted through millions of automated API requests routed via cloud providers, aggregators, and proxies to conceal origins and evade detection. The targeted capabilities included chain-of-thought reasoning, programming, software engineering, autonomous agent functions, and multimodal processing. Shared premium accounts and bulk subscriptions were used to lower costs while automated route-switching systems helped maintain access after blocks. Authorities assess that the sophistication and volume indicate distillation has become a core development method for these companies and likely occurred with Chinese government awareness. China has rejected the claims, stating its AI progress stems from independent innovation and calling the allegations unfounded.

Ideco NGFW Novum v23 Adds Shadow AI Discovery, Dynamic Routing and QoS Controls

Ideco has released NGFW Novum v23, introducing detection for 83 AI application protocols including ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, GigaChat and YandexGPT. The update enables organizations to identify Shadow AI usage across networks without mandatory TLS decryption and adds new content-filter categories for AI agents and AI services. Enterprise routing capabilities have been expanded with Prefix lists, Route maps, OSPF zones, BGP aggregation and BFD profiles to support large distributed environments. Additional features include internal Virtual Ethernet and Virtual Switch interfaces for VCE connectivity, QoS traffic prioritization, MTU/MSS tuning for IPsec, certificate-based authentication in Ideco Client and detection of tunneled traffic inside SSH and TLS sessions. The release positions the NGFW as the first layer of an emerging AI Security Layer that combines discovery, policy enforcement and future LLM proxy controls.

Global AI Regulation: From Strict School Bans to Unregulated AI Havens

Countries are adopting sharply different approaches to AI oversight, ranging from comprehensive risk-based frameworks to outright prohibitions on generative tools in education. The United States relies on a patchwork of state laws and presidential actions, including Texas TRAIGA restrictions on high-risk AI systems and New York’s moratorium on generative AI in grades 2–8. The European Union enforces the AI Act with four risk categories, while Italy adds criminal liability and human oversight requirements in critical sectors. Norway and China have implemented some of the strictest classroom and content-authenticity rules, and Russia introduced its first baseline AI law defining sovereign models effective September 2026. Several nations have also blocked popular chatbots such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Grok. Meanwhile, commercial platforms like FinamX continue integrating multiple AI models into financial workflows despite the regulatory tightening.

Hermes Emerges as Modular Harness for Practical AI Security Testing

The article details the development of Hermes, a lightweight modular harness designed to turn raw language models into reliable AI security agents. Unlike heavy frameworks such as OpenClaw, Hermes uses dynamic skill loading, strict runbooks stored in Git, and a file-system source of truth to eliminate hallucinations and context bloat. It continuously scans dozens of sources including NVD, CISA KEV, arXiv and research blogs, then applies the custom TIPS scoring metric to rank threats before attempting reproduction. A dedicated Paper-to-PoC skill converts academic attack descriptions into executable code that is validated inside an isolated Ollama and Docker sandbox. Eight mandatory validation gates must pass before any finding is accepted, ensuring reproducibility and freshness of data. The system already supports tools such as Garak, PyRIT, promptfoo, fickling, modelscan and presidio, and evolves autonomously by committing successful attack scenarios back to its repository.

Russian Businesses Surge Chinese LLM Usage More Than 11-Fold in First Half of 2026

Russian companies have dramatically increased their consumption of Chinese large language models, with total token usage reaching over 400 billion in the first half of 2026. This represents an 11.3-fold increase compared to the full-year 2025 figure of 39.1 billion tokens. The Qwen family maintained its dominant position, accounting for 261.1 billion tokens and 59.1% of consumption during the period. GLM secured second place with 91.2 billion tokens and 20.7% share, while Kimi overtook DeepSeek for third position at 81.4 billion tokens and 18.4%. MWS Cloud data shows that major enterprises are now integrating these models into production workflows such as chatbots, personalized advertising, customer outreach, product descriptions, and review analysis. The overall Russian LLM market is projected to grow 35% to 19.6 billion rubles in 2026, with the cloud segment approaching 1.5 billion rubles. MWS Cloud has nearly doubled its Model Hub catalog to 17 models, adding GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.6, Qwen3.6, Gemma 4, GPT OSS, plus speech recognition, synthesis tools, and rerankers accessible via a unified OpenAI-compatible API.

Employee Fired After Uploading Corporate Documents to DeepSeek: How Data Security Works in AI Services

A Moscow engineering company dismissed a top manager after she uploaded internal documents to the public DeepSeek service, with the court ruling it a breach of trade secrets. The case highlights a sharp rise in corporate data being sent to public AI models, with one study showing a 30-fold increase in 2025 compared to the previous year. Technical director Yaroslav Shmulyov of integrator R77 AI explains the full processing pipeline, from file ingestion and text extraction to embedding generation and potential use in training. Sensitive data can persist in multiple forms including original files, logs, third-party infrastructure, and model parameters even after deletion requests. Major incidents at Samsung and a U.S. cybersecurity agency demonstrate that even well-resourced organizations struggle with uncontrolled AI usage. Companies are increasingly turning to local and hybrid models to regain control over confidential information while regulators and internal policies lag behind adoption.

DeepSeek-Powered Telegram Bot Attempts Autonomous Attacks on 460 Targets but Achieves Zero Successes

Researchers from Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks recovered the full activity log of an autonomous AI agent built with the Hermes Agent framework and the DeepSeek model. The agent scanned the internet for targets, downloaded public exploits, evaluated vulnerabilities such as CVE-2026-33017 in Langflow and a pair of flaws in n8n, and attempted exploitation without any human intervention. Despite processing hundreds of hosts, the autonomous loop failed to compromise a single system because required configurations were absent on the victim servers. Parallel manual operations conducted by the same actor using traditional tools succeeded against three Citrix NetScaler instances and eleven Marimo deployments. The operator, assessed to be based in Zhuhai, China, relied on Telegram as the command channel and lost operational security when the agent exposed its home directory containing logs and API keys. The case demonstrates both the current limitations of LLM-driven attack agents and the low barrier to entry created by open-source agent frameworks paired with permissive models.

DeepSeek User Conversations Appear in Google Search Results via Publicly Shared Links

Conversations between users and the Chinese AI service DeepSeek, including Russian-language exchanges, have surfaced in Google search results. The exposed pages belong to Shared Conversations that users themselves made public through shareable links. These pages display full question-and-answer histories along with the names of any uploaded documents. No actual breach of DeepSeek occurred, and security researchers note that search engines indexed similar public chatbot dialogues more than a year ago. MWS AI confirmed that no closed chat histories or account access were exposed. Meanwhile, Yandex stated that links to conversations with its Alice AI assistant are blocked from indexing, remain active for only 14 days, and do not transmit attached files to recipients.