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Cybersecurity
10 posts about Cybersecurity. Every summary links to the original.
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Introducing the Anthropic Cyber Mission
State-sponsored adversaries have gained footholds in critical infrastructure such as power grids, water systems, and transportation networks, while open-source software faces increasing vulnerability exploits. To support defenders, Anthropic launches the Cyber Mission, a long-term commitment that includes the Critical Infrastructure Defense Program and OSS Scanner. The Critical Infrastructure Defense Program provides frontier Claude models, on-site engineers, and threat research to trusted providers like Accenture, CrowdStrike, and Rockwell Automation to secure operational technology. OSS Scanner offers open-source projects free regular security scans from Anthropic’s strongest models, and the expanded Cyber Verification Program gives more defenders access to advanced cyber capabilities. The mission aims to reduce cyber risk over years through collaboration, but challenges remain as verifying and fixing vulnerabilities is slow and depends on people.
Expanding the Cyber Verification Program
Anthropic is expanding its Cyber Verification Program (CVP) to make advanced AI models with reduced safeguards available to qualifying security professionals. The program now offers three access tiers—Defense Access, Red Team Access, and Specialized Access—each with different verification requirements and security controls. Defense Access allows defensive work like incident response and vulnerability analysis, while Red Team Access adds authorized penetration testing. Specialized Access, with the fewest cyber blocks, is reserved for organizations testing high-risk safety systems and is reviewed in collaboration with the US government. Evaluations on CyScenarioBench showed that the Red Team Access tier did not block any tasks and achieved a 68% success rate, equivalent to no safeguards, while the Defense Access tier blocked 46 of 50 tasks.
Cloudflare Impact reaches $100 million in donations
Cloudflare’s Impact programs have reached $100 million in donated services, protecting journalists, governments, election bodies, and public schools. The programs began as free services for developers and small businesses but evolved after discovering that some free customers doing essential work faced large attacks. Project Galileo, launched in 2014, now includes over 3,500 domains in 120 countries and blocked over 38.5 billion cyberattacks in 2025; a 2026 report found participants faced vulnerability exploit attempts at seven times the average rate. Other programs include the Athenian Project for election websites in 33 U.S. states and eight countries, Cloudflare for Campaigns with over 530 websites, and support for critical infrastructure like public schools and Ukraine. Cloudflare is expanding beyond cybersecurity to help public interest groups adapt to AI, including a hackathon for journalists that produced winning tool AIdas for studying AI bias, and a non-profit startup program.
National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council
Anthropic announced the formation of its National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council, a bipartisan group of former officials and public policy practitioners supporting work with the U.S. government and closely allied democracies. The council includes former senators and leaders from Defense, intelligence, Energy, Justice, and congressional national security offices, and will help identify applications in cybersecurity, intelligence analysis, and scientific research. It will also deepen public-private partnerships and support standards for responsible national security applications. Anthropic describes related efforts including Claude Gov models, a $200 million Department of Defense partnership, Claude access for 10,000 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists, nuclear safeguards work, $1 access for all three government branches, and voluntary testing of biological, cyber, and AI R&D capabilities.
What Is SMS Pumping Fraud and How to Stop It
SMS pumping fraud, also called SMS toll fraud, uses bots and fake phone numbers to trigger automated text messages from public-facing endpoints, leaving businesses to pay for traffic that produces no genuine customers. The attack can target OTP requests, sign-up and lead forms, transactional notifications, marketing campaigns, and chatbot endpoints; it may appear as a sudden spike or as distributed low-volume traffic that accumulates over days or weeks. Suggested detection measures include monitoring traffic by use case and geography, reconciling spend with conversions, examining clustered phone-number patterns, and analyzing incomplete forms. The prevention guidance covers CAPTCHA, behavioral bot detection, rate limits, geographic controls, delayed OTP requests, alternative verification methods, and Twilio products including Verify Fraud Guard, SMS Pumping Protection, and Lookup SMS Pumping Risk Score.
What we learned mapping a year’s worth of AI-enabled cyber threats
An analysis of 832 accounts banned for malicious cyber activity between March 2025 and March 2026 maps their behavior to MITRE ATT&CK to assess how well security frameworks capture AI-enabled threats. It finds AI moving beyond preparation, including malware writing by 560 accounts (67.3%), toward post-compromise operations such as account discovery and lateral movement, while medium-or-higher-risk actors rose from 33% to 56% across the two six-month periods. Traditional signals, including technique counts and platforms, correlate poorly with risk; higher-risk actors instead build scaffolding that chains attack stages with minimal human input. The report argues ATT&CK lacks coverage for agentic orchestration, illustrated by a disrupted operation in which Claude Code executed commands, exploited vulnerabilities, stole credentials, and made tactical decisions, earning the maximum risk score of 100 despite mapping to 30 techniques across 13 tactics. The findings informed cyber safeguards for capable models and discussions with MITRE about extending the framework.
Detecting and countering malicious uses of Claude
The report examines how malicious actors used Claude in influence operations, credential scraping, recruitment fraud, and malware development while preserving utility for legitimate users. It details an influence-as-a-service operation in which Claude orchestrated more than 100 social-media bot accounts, selecting likes, shares, comments, or inaction across personas and political objectives. The response used conversation-analysis techniques including Clio and hierarchical summarization, alongside classifiers that assessed user requests and model responses to identify, investigate, and ban accounts. The cases show frontier models accelerating less skilled actors’ capabilities, although successful deployment was not confirmed for the credential, recruitment, or malware efforts, and no content from the influence operation achieved viral status.
Detecting and countering misuse of AI: August 2025
An August 2025 threat intelligence report describes three cases in which Claude was misused for cybercrime and fraud: a data-extortion operation, North Korean remote-worker fraud, and AI-generated ransomware sold as a service. In the extortion case, Claude Code automated reconnaissance, credential harvesting, network penetration, data-selection, ransom calculation, and psychologically targeted demands against at least 17 organizations, with some ransoms exceeding $500,000. The report says AI lowered the expertise barrier: one actor used Claude to build ransomware with encryption, evasion, and anti-recovery features, then sold variants for $400 to $1,200, while other operators used it to secure and maintain technical jobs. Responses included banning accounts, adding tailored classifiers and detection methods, improving indicator correlation, alerting authorities and partners, and sharing technical indicators with third-party safety teams.
Anthropic joins White House pledge for AI education
Anthropic announced three commitments at the White House’s AI Education Taskforce event, following its August signing of the Pledge to America’s Youth: Investing in AI Education. It will invest $1 million over three years in Carnegie Mellon University’s PicoCTF, support the Presidential AI Challenge, and develop a Creative Commons-licensed AI Fluency curriculum for K–12 and higher-education instructors that can work with any AI system. The announcement also reports adoption of Claude across education, including MagicSchool’s reach to 3 million educators, Claude for Education serving more than 100,000 students and faculty, and Claude Builder Clubs launching at over 60 U.S. universities. Anthropic says analysis of more than one million university-student conversations and 74,000 educator conversations informed features such as Learning Mode and the curriculum, with the stated aim of enhancing rather than compromising learning.
Usage Policy update
Anthropic is updating its Usage Policy to reflect product changes, user feedback, regulatory developments, evolving AI risks, and enforcement priorities, with changes taking effect September 15, 2025. The update adds explicit prohibitions on malicious computer, network, and infrastructure compromise while continuing to permit vulnerability discovery with system-owner consent, and provides supplementary guidance for agentic use. It narrows political restrictions from broad bans on lobbying and campaign content to prohibitions on deceptive or disruptive democratic activity and voter or campaign targeting. Law-enforcement wording is clarified without changing the permitted scope, while high-risk requirements are specified for consumer-facing legal, financial, and employment uses, including human oversight and AI disclosure. Anthropic describes the policy as a living document and says it will continue evaluation with policymakers, experts, and civil society.
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