The Justice Department and the FBI seize seven domains running the scanning and spear-phishing tools a Chinese contractor sold, a day after the advisory naming it
The Justice Department and the FBI said they had seized seven domains — c0cc[.]cc, 98aiblog[.]com, 98aicai[.]com, 98aicode[.]com, outlook3650[.]com, youtubecard[.]com and linkedinns[.]net — used to operate tools run by Integrity Technology Group, the Beijing-based company named in the joint advisory the board carries at October 8. MicroScan is described as a Python-based web tool for reconnaissance and vulnerability scanning carrying “over 1,300 penetration testing scripts” and in use “as early as 2017,” reached by Integrity Tech through c0cc[.]cc; FishHub handled spear-phishing and follow-on payload delivery and, the department says, gave the company's clients “unauthorized remote access to the victim network,” with twenty Taiwanese universities named as confirmed victims of FishHub-related activity; Sparrow is named as the application that controlled the botnet. The target list includes a South Carolina power company, a multinational non-governmental organisation, airports in Japan and Poland, Taiwanese natural gas and power companies, and two Taiwanese universities. Help Net Security adds the dating the seizure announcement did not carry in The Hacker News's account: the Taiwanese energy targets scanned between April and December 2022, the two universities scanned in August 2022 and March 2023 and then breached, and FishHub still being run as of March 2026. FBI Assistant Director Brett Leatherman said the tools “provided China-linked threat actors with capabilities used to conduct widespread vulnerability scanning” and that in seizing them “we make it harder for the PRC to target American networks and infrastructure.” Help Net Security additionally quotes US Attorney Troy Rivetti on “these seizures, our second disruption of Integrity Tech's massive operations in as many years,” and Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg that “The United States will not allow China or its proxies to operate against United States interests.” An FBI affidavit showed one scanning tool was still reachable as recently as September 9, 2026. Neither department statement as reported names AI or a language model; The Hacker News reports that the UK NCSC, a party to the joint advisory, describes the actors as “uniquely using AI tools, such as automated scanning” alongside large-scale botnets. Reported counts of the devices in the associated botnet differ between the two outlets, so no device figure is quoted here.
Google says a PRC-nexus actor runs open-weight models on victim compute to escape API monitoring, and that AI models and prompts are now extortion targets
The same report says GTIG observed suspected UNC6508 activity “compromising cloud environments to deploy local LLM infrastructure”: “By using a local, open-weight model deployed in compromised infrastructure, UNC6508 is able to avoid commercial AI API monitoring, while co-opting victim compute resources,” against academic, medical and military research institutions in North America. Mandiant separately investigated “multiple data theft extortion operations in which threat actors stole proprietary AI data, including models, skills, prompts, source code, and related research,” affecting technology, healthcare and media and entertainment companies in North America and Europe. Google also says it now sees coordinated distillation campaigns against its own models “on a regular basis, some exceeding 100 million prompts.”
FBI, NSA and Cyber National Mission Force say a China-linked group has been integrating AI into its operations
A joint advisory attributes the group it tracks as QTFY to Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Co. and describes malicious distributed platforms used against defense industrial base, communications, government, higher education, energy, information technology and water and wastewater targets. The advisory states the actors “have also been observed heavily researching and integrating AI into their processes over the last two years.”
Israeli firm Dream reports China-linked operators ran a near-autonomous AI-agent intrusion of Taiwan's government
Israeli cybersecurity firm Dream reported that suspected China-linked operators used open-source AI-agent frameworks — it names Hermes and OpenClaw — to run a largely autonomous intrusion of Taiwanese government systems, compromising at least 85 accounts, taking more than 2,500 personnel records (a roughly 160 MB, ~1,400-file archive), and probing a nuclear-safety agency, the government email system and at least seven energy-sector companies. Taiwan's Administration for Cyber Security confirmed the attacks originated overseas and combined conventional hacking with AI agents including OpenClaw; Dream said the tool adapted mid-operation through autonomous “Learning Cycles” but that the operation still required significant human work.
Hunt.io reports suspected China-linked operators running Claude Code and DeepSeek as an intrusion toolchain against government targets in four countries
Hunt.io analysed an exposed open directory containing 2,431 files, including operator logs of LLM sessions, and described a split-model workflow in which Claude Code acted as the execution engine for agentic tool use, bash execution and session persistence while DeepSeek-v4-pro handled attack logic, script generation and decision-making. Hunt.io reported exploitation against an Afghan government application, a Thai government administrative system via SQL injection, and two Taiwanese critical-infrastructure organisations, with reconnaissance against US government entities and financial firms in Europe, Australia and Asia.