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AgentBaiting: How Fake AI Skills Deliver Malware at Scale

The FakeGit campaign, detailed by Island security researcher Oleg Zaytsev, uses roughly 7,600 malicious GitHub repositories—over 800 posing as AI Skills or MCP servers—to deliver SmartLoader malware, which establishes persistence and installs the StealC information stealer. Researchers coined the technique 'AgentBaiting,' where AI agents like Claude Code, Gemini, and ChatGPT autonomously discover the attacker repositories, treat the malicious READMEs as legitimate documentation, and hand installation instructions to users; the operation recorded over 14 million downloads and peaked in April 2026.

supply-chain · tool-abuse · malware-distribution · agent-baiting
mcp · ai-agents · llm · github

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NVD - CVE-2026-42271

CVE-2026-42271 is an OS command injection flaw (CWE-78, CVSS 8.8) in LiteLLM, a proxy server / AI Gateway for LLM APIs. Two endpoints used to preview an MCP server before saving accept a full server configuration including command execution parameters, letting an authenticated user — even one with low-privilege internal-user keys — send a crafted config to run arbitrary commands on the proxy host with the proxy process's privileges. Red Hat rates it Important, it affects OpenShift AI and Ansible Automation Platform, is fixed in LiteLLM v1.83.7-stable, and CISA lists it with known public exploits. 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 →

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 →

The Balkanization of Execution-Security Research for AI Coding Agents: Isolation, Access Control, and Time-of-Check-to-Time-of-Use Vulnerabilities

A systematization-of-knowledge paper by Mohammadreza Rashidi organizes 39 works (2023-2026) on execution security for AI coding agents into 17 categories covering sandbox isolation, capability/access control, policy enforcement, TOCTOU races, and MCP threats, and verifies four disclosed, patched CVEs affecting production agent harnesses. It surfaces five cross-cutting gaps, including denylist policy failure rates of 69-98% and benign out-of-scope agent actions occurring at rates up to 17.1% under realistic prompting. Details →
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