Trend Micro Research, News and Perspectives

The first quarter of 2026 has reinforced a hard truth: U.S. government agencies and educational institutions are operating in the most hostile cyber threat environment ever recorded.

Threat actors leveraged Anthropic’s Claude Code npm release packaging error to distribute Vidar, GhostSocks, and PureLog Stealer. This blog details immediate steps organizations can take and best practices to prevent further risk.

A packaging error in Anthropic’s Claude Code npm release briefly exposed internal source code. This entry examines how threat actors rapidly weaponized the resulting attention, pivoting an existing AI-themed campaign to spread Vidar and GhostSocks.

TrendAI reviews the White House National Cyber Strategy, outlining six pillars to strengthen U.S. cybersecurity—from deterrence and regulation to federal modernization, critical infrastructure protection, AI leadership, and workforce development.

A supply chain attack hit Axios when attackers used stolen npm credentials to publish malicious versions containing a phantom dependency. This triggered a cross-platform RAT during installation and replaced its files with clean decoys, making detection challenging.

This blog looks at how AI‑driven vibecoding speeds up software development while increasing security risk by outpacing traditional review and ownership. It explains why security needs to move earlier and be built into modern development workflows.

TrendAI™ Research explored agentic AI cybercrime and EV infrastructure security through two research sessions at RSAC 2026.

Moving beyond their LiteLLM campaign, TeamPCP weaponizes the Telnyx Python SDK with stealthy WAV‑based payloads to steal credentials across Linux, macOS, and Windows.

TeamPCP orchestrated one of the most sophisticated multi-ecosystem supply chain campaigns publicly documented to date that cascaded through developer tooling and compromised LiteLLM, exposing how AI proxy services that concentrate API keys and cloud credentials become high-value collateral when supply chain attacks compromise upstream dependencies.

This blog discusses the steganography, cloud abuse, and email-based backdoors used against the Ukrainian defense supply chain in the latest Pawn Storm campaign that TrendAI™ Research observed and analyzed.

Litellm PyPI breach explained: malicious versions steal cloud credentials, SSH keys, and Kubernetes secrets. Learn impact and urgent mitigation steps.

We look into a stealthy multi‑stage attack campaign that delivers PureLog Stealer entirely in memory using encrypted, fileless techniques.

Not every cloud breach starts with malware or a zero-day. In this incident, attackers discovered an exposed Spring Boot Actuator endpoint, harvested credentials from leaked configuration data, then used the OAuth2 Resource Owner Password Credentials (ROPC) flow to authenticate without MFA.

Learn how east-west traffic visibility helps detect and stop lateral movement attacks inside electric grid infrastructure and critical OT networks.

Learn how TrendAI™ and our researchers contributed threat intelligence and analysis to support INTERPOL against cybercrime.

Learn how TrendAI and NVIDIA OpenShell help secure autonomous AI agents and build trusted enterprise AI systems with stronger visibility and control.

Warlock continues to enhance its attack chain with new tactics to improve persistence, lateral movement, and defense evasion using an expanded toolset: TightVNC Yuze, and a persistent BYOVD technique leveraging the NSec driver.

Our analysis of an active KongTuke campaign deploying modeloRAT — malware capable of reconnaissance, command execution, and persistent access — through compromised WordPress sites and fake CAPTCHA lures shows that the group still operates this delivery chain in parallel with the newer CrashFix technique.

Learn about OpenClaw (a sovereign agent) and how this can be viable for enterprises.

At [un]prompted 2026, TrendAI™ demonstrated how documents can be used to exploit AI-driven KYC pipelines and introduced FENRIR, an automated system for discovering AI vulnerabilities at scale.