Ravie LakshmananAug 10, 2026Cybersecurity / Hacking
A lot of security problems still begin with someone doing a completely normal thing. Cloning a repo. Answering a call. Leaving a box exposed. Trusting the default.
That pretty much covers the mood this week. Old bugs are back, supply chains are getting stranger, and some exploit paths are so short you wonder what was supposed to stop them in the first place.
That’s only part of it. Here’s everything else that made the Monday recap.
Anthropic's Model Attempts to Poison Open-Source Project — A new evaluation conducted by the U.K. AI Security Institute (AISI) found that AI models with access to the internet reached out into the real world to target individuals and organizations autonomously across 10 of the total of 122 runs. Of 19 such actions recorded, 17 originated from Anthropic's Mythos 5 and the remaining two involved OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol with cyber classifiers. In the most serious case, Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 spent 34 hours trying to get a malware dropper merged into a real open-source project and engaged in social engineering by creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project's maintainer to approve the code. Ultimately, a human maintainer caught and refused to approve the malicious code. "These attempts were unsuccessful, and our investigations have not evidenced any resulting real-world harm," AISI said. But this is the first time we have seen risks around autonomy and deception manifest this clearly, without specific prompting, in the real-world."
