state sponsored hacking2 articles
Anthropic's Claude Has Been Weaponised By State Hackers, Fraudsters, and Surveillance Vendors Alike
Anthropic has published a report revealing that its Claude AI models are being exploited by a wide range of malicious actors — including state-sponsored hackers, cybercriminals, and commercial spyware vendors — for purposes such as cyberattacks, mass surveillance, weapons development, and influence operations. The company introduced the term "Generative Threat Groups" (GTGs) to categorise these actors, highlighting cases involving Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and other operators using Claude in increasingly autonomous, multi-agent frameworks to conduct reconnaissance, credential harvesting, and data exfiltration at scale. Anthropic warned that AI has effectively erased the resource gap that once separated sophisticated state actors from individual operators, while expressing hope that sharing these findings will help governments and the industry develop stronger safeguards.
FBI Takes Down Chinese State Hacking Tools Used Against NASA, Senate, and DOE
The FBI has disrupted a botnet and seized two hacking platforms — QScan and QTRouter — used by a Chinese government-backed group called QTFY to infiltrate major US institutions, including NASA, the Department of Energy, the US Senate, and several other agencies, dating back to at least 2018. QTFY, operated through a private Chinese company called Nanjing Xinjiuwei, used the tools to build networks of compromised IoT devices that obscured the origin of their cyberattacks, exploiting critical vulnerabilities in products from Ivanti and Citrix. The seizure of three QTFY-linked domains has rendered both hacking services inoperable, marking the latest in a series of FBI actions targeting Chinese state-sponsored hacking operations.