AI Sec Watch

OpenClaw had a vulnerability where its hook endpoint (`POST /hooks/agent`) accepted session keys (identifiers for conversation contexts) directly from user requests, allowing someone with a valid hook token to inject messages into any session they could guess or derive. This could poison conversations with malicious prompts that persist across multiple turns. The vulnerability affected versions 2.0.0-beta3 through 2026.2.11.

WordPress.com has added a built-in AI assistant that helps website owners make changes to their sites using natural language commands (instructions written in plain English rather than technical code). The assistant can modify layouts and styles, create or edit images using Google's Gemini AI models, rewrite content, and provide editing suggestions, though it only works with block themes (a modern WordPress design system) and is opt-in unless you use WordPress.com's AI website builder.

Alibaba has released Qwen3.5, a new AI model series that comes in both an open-weight version (downloadable and runnable on users' own computers) and a hosted version (running on Alibaba's servers), featuring improved performance, multimodal capabilities (ability to understand text, images, and video together), and support for AI agents (systems that can independently complete multi-step tasks with minimal human supervision). The release reflects intensifying competition in China's AI market, as multiple Chinese companies are racing to develop agent capabilities similar to those recently released by American AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

Infosys, a major Indian IT services company, has partnered with Anthropic to build AI agents (autonomous systems that can independently handle complex tasks) using Anthropic's Claude models integrated into Infosys's Topaz AI platform. These agents are designed to automate workflows in industries like banking and manufacturing, though the partnership comes amid concerns that AI tools will disrupt India's labor-intensive IT services sector. Infosys is already using Anthropic's Claude Code tool internally to write and test code, with AI services currently generating about $275 million in quarterly revenue for the company.

Cybersecurity researchers discovered a SmartLoader campaign where attackers created fake GitHub accounts and a trojanized Model Context Protocol server (a tool that connects AI assistants to external data and services) posing as an Oura Health tool to distribute StealC infostealer malware. The attackers spent months building credibility by creating fake contributors and repositories before submitting the malicious server to legitimate registries, targeting developers whose systems contain valuable data like API keys and cryptocurrency wallet credentials.

These three research papers describe side-channel attacks (exploiting indirect information leaks like timing or packet sizes rather than breaking encryption directly) against large language models. Attackers can monitor encrypted network traffic and infer sensitive information about user conversations, such as the topic of messages, specific queries, or even personal data, by analyzing patterns in response times, packet sizes, or token counts from the model's inference process.

The AI Impact Summit in India this week brings together tech leaders, politicians, and scientists to discuss how to guide AI development globally, but the event risks being overshadowed by political tensions and competing interests between Western powers and the Global South. India faces significant challenges in AI adoption, including that major AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude don't support most of India's languages, and AI data workers there earn less than £4,000 per year while Western AI companies are valued in the hundreds of billions, creating inequality in how AI benefits are distributed worldwide.

Ireland's Data Protection Commission has launched a formal investigation into X for using its Grok AI tool to generate non-consensual sexual images of real people, including children, and will examine whether the company violated GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation, EU rules protecting personal data) requirements. This investigation joins similar probes by UK and other authorities, with potential fines up to 4% of X's global revenue across all EU member states. The investigation focuses on whether X properly assessed risks and followed data protection principles before deploying Grok.

CISOs (chief information security officers, the top security executives at companies) report that their roles have become unmanageable because companies keep adding responsibilities without giving them more staff or budget. A survey found that 52% of CISOs say their scope is no longer fully manageable, and they now oversee everything from traditional security tasks to AI governance, third-party risk management, and disaster recovery, often with the same teams they had five years ago.