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AgentBaiting: How Fake AI Skills Deliver Malware at Scale

Island security researchers uncovered the FakeGit campaign, which used roughly 7,600 malicious GitHub repositories—over 800 posing as AI Skills or MCP servers—to deliver SmartLoader malware that installs the StealC information stealer. The campaign introduces a technique called AgentBaiting, in which AI agents such as Claude Code, Gemini, and ChatGPT autonomously discover the attacker repositories, treat the malicious README as legitimate documentation, and pass installation instructions to users; the operation recorded over 14 million downloads.

supply-chain · tool-abuse · malware-delivery · agentbaiting
mcp · ai-agents · ai-skills · llm · copilot

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AWS Kiro: Arbitrary Code Execution via Indirect Prompt Injection

AWS Kiro, an agentic coding IDE, was vulnerable to arbitrary command execution via indirect prompt injection: hidden text on a web page (or a comment in a source file) processed by the agent could make Kiro use its no-approval fsWrite tool to rewrite ~/.kiro/settings/mcp.json (or allowlist all Bash commands in .vscode/settings.json), causing it to launch attacker-specified MCP servers/commands and achieve RCE on the developer's machine, bypassing the human 'allow' approval boundary. Discovered by Intezer with Kodem Security and independently by Embrace The Red (Johann Rehberger); AWS has patched the issue. Details →

Modern Malware — Spyware Skills, Hijacked Base URLs, and 1,230+ Leaking API Keys in AI Instruction Files

Mitiga Labs details malware hidden in AI agent instruction files — Cursor rules, Anthropic Skills, Claude Hooks, AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md context files, MCP server configs, and .pyc droppers — that AI agents follow with near-zero validation. The research found prompt-exfiltration tradecraft caught in the wild, attacker-controlled ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL overrides routing Claude traffic through MITM proxies, permission-bypass defaults, and over 1,230 hardcoded API keys and JWT tokens across tens of services. Mitiga also released a free scanner, Skillgate, built during the investigation. Details →

GhostApproval: AI Coding Assistant Trust Boundary Flaw

Wiz researchers disclosed GhostApproval (CVE-2026-12958 and related), a symlink-following vulnerability pattern (CWE-61 plus CWE-451 UI misrepresentation) affecting six top AI coding assistants: Amazon Q Developer, Anthropic Claude Code, Augment, Cursor, Google Antigravity, and Windsurf. A malicious repository disguises a symlink as an innocuous config file so that when the agent 'sets up the workspace' it writes an attacker SSH key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys — sometimes before any confirmation dialog — while the human-in-the-loop approval prompt conceals the true target, enabling remote code execution. AWS, Cursor, and Google fixed the issue; two vendors went silent and one called it outside its threat model. Details →

NadMesh Botnet Analysis: A Product-Grade Threat for the AI Service Era

NadMesh is a Go-based botnet observed in early July 2026 by QiAnXin's XLab that autonomously scans for and exploits exposed AI services — ComfyUI, Ollama, n8n, Open WebUI, Langflow, and Gradio — using a Shodan harvester (ai_harvest.py) to prioritize AI infrastructure and the MCP ecosystem. It folds scanning, 20+ RCE exploitation vectors (Redis, Docker, MCP, Kubernetes), credential/AI-service intelligence harvesting, polymorphic builds, and redundant persistence into a single productized platform; the operator's dashboard claims 3,811 unique AWS keys plus model inventories tagged as cloud services. Details →

CVE-2026-42271 - Red Hat Customer Portal

CVE-2026-42271 is an Important-severity (CVSS 8.8) flaw in LiteLLM, an AI gateway/proxy for LLM APIs, where two MCP-server preview endpoints accepted full server configurations including command-execution parameters without adequate role checks. An authenticated user with even low-privilege internal-user keys could send a crafted configuration to achieve arbitrary OS command execution on the proxy host; Red Hat notes known public exploits and the CVE is tracked in CISA's KEV catalog, with fixes shipped in LiteLLM v1.83.7-stable and Red Hat OpenShift AI / Ansible Automation Platform errata. Details →

The Cursor deeplink vulnerability that turns a “review this PR” click into remote code execution

Adversa AI researcher Rony Utevsky details a Cursor IDE vulnerability (dubbed DeepJack) where a crafted `cursor://` deeplink installs an attacker-controlled MCP server that runs arbitrary, unsandboxed commands under the victim's account after one click and one confirmation. The install dialog renders the command in a single-line field so a malicious tail is pushed off-screen, and double-URL encoding disguises the `mcp/install` URI as a routine `pr-review` link. Cursor acknowledged the root cause but closed the reports as duplicates, and build 3.9.8 reportedly remains vulnerable. Details →

Unauthorized Publication of a Malicious npm Package affecting CI

Jscrambler disclosed that a threat actor used compromised npm publishing credentials to publish a malicious version of its 'jscrambler' npm package (versions 8.14, 8.16, 8.17, 8.20), which ran an infostealer during the preinstall hook and was downloaded around 1,479 times in a two-hour window. Per Socket's analysis, the malware harvested developer credentials, cloud secrets, crypto wallets, browser data, and notably AI coding tool and MCP configurations (Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, Zed), using ChaCha20-Poly1305 obfuscation to resist analysis. Jscrambler revoked credentials and released a safe version 8.22. Details →
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