grep -rl "credential-theft" ./articles
Proofpoint has tied a China-aligned group to credential phishing against US AI policy researchers. The approach opens as an ordinary conversation with no link in it, and only once the target replies does a URL arrive — ending at a fake sign-in window rendered inside the real browser, which collects the password, the MFA code and the session cookie.
Socket.dev found VS Code themes on the Marketplace and Open VSX carrying obfuscated loaders. One used a publisher identity imitating Microsoft. The payload was compressed onto one line and encoded with invisible Unicode, then written to a temporary script and run with no window shown. Microsoft removed them, which does not uninstall anything.
ANSSI's incident report on the DGFiP, published on 29 September, describes several dozen agent passwords stolen from machines the agency does not manage, sensitive portals with no multi-factor authentication, and a messaging tool scraped on three days in June and July. Nobody noticed until the attacker posted about it on a forum on 12 August.
A 7GB infostealer dump from 5,871 machines across 162 countries held 44,791 unique JSON web tokens, 555 of them for AI services. A replayed token logs an attacker in without logging in — no password, no second factor. The MFA worked. It was never in the path.
Arctic Wolf has published what attackers do after exploiting the two PaperCut zero-days against schools and universities: create an account, dump the SAM hives, and grep the PaperCut config for the strings password, secret, ldap, bind and token. The print server is domain-joined and nobody's threat model has it on the list.
Marcus Hutchins at Expel picked apart SynkLoader, pushed through Microsoft Teams by attackers posing as the IT help desk and hosted on Azure so the download looks legitimate. Its PhishLocker module paints a convincing Windows 11 lock screen to harvest the password. It is a borderless full-screen app, and Alt+Tab exposes it.
A March 2026 Interlock intrusion used Volatility3 — a legitimate incident-response tool — to pull domain credentials, NTLM hashes and account information out of memory. The rest of the chain was a ClickFix lure and PowerShell.
Manifold Security found that an authenticated non-admin user of Odysseus could execute OS commands with the process's own privileges. What that account reached is the story: API keys to spend, a mailbox to send from, and SSH keys to the machines Odysseus manages.
Mitiga found prompt-exfiltration tradecraft in the wild — malicious natural-language instructions in .cursorrules and CLAUDE.md that make the agent collect prompts, tokens and environment variables and send them onward. Also: 1,230+ hardcoded API keys sitting in AI instruction files.
Volexity says a threat actor it tracks as UTA0533 is harvesting credentials from compromised SonicWall appliances, and researchers note INC Ransomware has picked up its pace since the start of August.