News

Cloudflare has a new feature—available to free users as well—that uses AI to generate random pages to feed to AI web crawlers:

Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler’s computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from the standard block-and-defend strategy used by most website protection services. Cloudflare says blocking bots sometimes backfires because it alerts the crawler’s operators that they’ve been detected.

“When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them,” writes Cloudflare. “But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources.”

The company says the content served to bots is deliberately irrelevant to the website being crawled, but it is carefully sourced or generated using real scientific facts—­such as neutral information about biology, physics, or mathematics—­to avoid spreading misinformation (whether this approach effectively prevents misinformation, however, remains unproven).

It’s basically an AI-generated honeypot. And AI scraping is a growing problem:

The scale of AI crawling on the web appears substantial, according to Cloudflare’s data that lines up with anecdotal reports we’ve heard from sources. The company says that AI crawlers generate more than 50 billion requests to their network daily, amounting to nearly 1 percent of all web traffic they process. Many of these crawlers collect website data to train large language models without permission from site owners….

Presumably the crawlers will now have to up both their scraping stealth and their ability to filter out AI-generated content like this. Which means the honeypots will have to get better at detecting scrapers and more stealthy in their fake content. This arms race is likely to go back and forth, wasting a lot of energy in the process.

McAfee researchers have identified a new wave of Android malware campaigns leveraging .NET MAUI to steal sensitive user information through fake apps

Cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging Atlantis AIO, which automates credential stuffing attacks across more than 140 platforms

NIST has urged more research and emphasis on developing mitigations for attacks on AI and ML systems

Sygnia has uncovered Weaver Ant, a Chinese threat actor that spied on telecommunications networks for years

Kela researchers detect a 200%+ increase in dark web chatter about malicious AI tools

Wiz Security finds four critical RCE vulnerabilities in the Ingress NGINX Controller for Kubernetes

Citizen Lab has a new report on Paragon’s spyware:

Key Findings:

• Introducing Paragon Solutions. Paragon Solutions was founded in Israel in 2019 and sells spyware called Graphite. The company differentiates itself by claiming it has safeguards to prevent the kinds of spyware abuses that NSO Group and other vendors are notorious for.
• Infrastructure Analysis of Paragon Spyware. Based on a tip from a collaborator, we mapped out server infrastructure that we attribute to Paragon’s Graphite spyware tool. We identified a subset of suspected Paragon deployments, including in Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore.
• Identifying a Possible Canadian Paragon Customer. Our investigation surfaced potential links between Paragon Solutions and the Canadian Ontario Provincial Police, and found evidence of a growing ecosystem of spyware capability among Ontario-based police services.
• Helping WhatsApp Catch a Zero-Click. We shared our analysis of Paragon’s infrastructure with Meta, who told us that the details were pivotal to their ongoing investigation into Paragon. WhatsApp discovered and mitigated an active Paragon zero-click exploit, and later notified over 90 individuals who it believed were targeted, including civil society members in Italy.
• Android Forensic Analysis: Italian Cluster. We forensically analyzed multiple Android phones belonging to Paragon targets in Italy (an acknowledged Paragon user) who were notified by WhatsApp. We found clear indications that spyware had been loaded into WhatsApp, as well as other apps on their devices.
• A Related Case of iPhone Spyware in Italy. We analyzed the iPhone of an individual who worked closely with confirmed Android Paragon targets. This person received an Apple threat notification in November 2024, but no WhatsApp notification. Our analysis showed an attempt to infect the device with novel spyware in June 2024. We shared details with Apple, who confirmed they had patched the attack in iOS 18.
• Other Surveillance Tech Deployed Against The Same Italian Cluster. We also note 2024 warnings sent by Meta to several individuals in the same organizational cluster, including a Paragon victim, suggesting the need for further scrutiny into other surveillance technology deployed against these individuals.

VanHelsingRaaS, a new ransomware-as-a-service program, infected three victims within two weeks of release, demanding ransoms of $500,000

Ukraine’s national railway company has suffered a “large-scale” cyber-attack, disrupting online services and operations