Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

One particularly concerning trend in the recent evolution of phishing is the rise of QR code-based attacks. It doesn't rely on new malware or sophisticated exploits. Instead, it takes advantage of something much simpler: the trust users place in QR codes every day. Over the last few months, QR codes have become one of the most popular tactics for steering users toward malicious sites on mobile devices or in browser environments, where the visibility of many security tools is very limited.

In February 2026, Socket.dev published research on a multi-stage npm supply chain worm operating under the internal flag SANDWORM_MODE. The campaign spanned 19 malicious packages in total across two unique publisher aliases and demonstrated a new class of supply chain attacks that targeted AI-augmented development workflows.

On July 14, 2026, attackers compromised release processes connected to the AsyncAPI open- source project and published malicious versions of four widely used npm packages with a combined reach of approximately 2.9 million weekly downloads.

Ask any security leader how many APIs their organization runs, and you’ll usually get a confident number. Ask them how many AI agents are operating in their environment right now, what those agents are deciding to do, and which APIs they’re calling to do it, and the confidence tends to disappear.

TeamPCP is a financially motivated ransomware group tied to software supply chain compromise, credential theft, extortion, and abuse of developer infrastructure. The group is also tracked through aliases including ShellForce, PCPcat, TeamPCP, DeadCatx3, Altered Spider, and PersyPCP. The group has also claimed ownership of CipherForce, which it describes as its private locker.

In a controlled enterprise lab, we tested how far an agentic attack stack could go by harnessing a frontier model with an agent platform, MCP-enabled tooling, operational context, and enough autonomy to execute a complete attack path.

In early July 2026, researchers at Sysdig published an analysis of what they assess to be the first documented case of agentic ransomware. The threat actor, which Sysdig calls JADEPUFFER, launched an extortion attack driven end to end by a large language model (LLM) rather than a conventional human-operated toolkit.