THIS WEEK IN CYBER MONDAY 🔒

Nov 17-24, 2025 | Weekly Highlights

🤖 STORY 1: AI Just Ran Its Own Hacking Campaign

Chinese state hackers used Anthropic's Claude AI to autonomously handle 80-90% of a cyber espionage operation.

What actually happened:

• Claude Code (Anthropic's AI coding tool) was tricked into running reconnaissance, finding vulnerabilities, writing exploits, moving laterally through networks, and stealing data

• Targeted about 30 organizations: tech companies, banks, government agencies, chemical manufacturers

• A single operator using this setup could replace a 10-person hacking team

The catch: Claude hallucinated constantly. It claimed to find credentials that didn't work and "critical discoveries" that were just public info. Only a handful of the 30 targets got breached.

Why this matters: The barrier to entry for sophisticated cyberattacks just dropped. What used to require a skilled team can now be done by fewer people with AI doing the grunt work. This is the first real-world case of AI orchestrating most of an intrusion chain.

Your reality check: AI-powered attacks are now a documented capability, not a future threat. If you're responsible for security, your threat model just changed.

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🚨STORY 2: Fortinet Had TWO Zero-Days Exploited in One Week

Fortinet's FortiWeb firewalls got hit with two actively exploited zero-days within 7 days of each other.

The bugs:

• CVE-2025-64446 (CVSS 9.1) - Path traversal bug that let attackers create admin accounts without any login

• CVE-2025-58034 (CVSS 6.9) - Command injection bug that let authenticated attackers run code on the system

Timeline that matters:

• Early October: Attackers start exploiting CVE-2025-64446

• Late October: Fortinet silently patches it (no announcement)

• November 14: Security researchers catch on and force Fortinet to acknowledge it

• November 18: Second zero-day (CVE-2025-58034) disclosed via CISA KEV, also being exploited

• November 21: CISA deadline for federal agencies to patch CVE-2025-64446

• November 25: CISA deadline for CVE-2025-58034

The numbers: Around 2,000 detections of active exploitation attempts so far.

If you use FortiWeb: Patch immediately. These aren't theoretical—attackers are using them right now. This is the 21st Fortinet vulnerability on CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list.

☁️ STORY 3: Cloudflare Took Down 20% of the Internet (By Accident)

On November 18, Cloudflare had a 6-hour global outage that wasn't a cyberattack—it was a database permissions change gone wrong.

What broke:

• Someone changed database permissions during routine maintenance

• This caused a Bot Management feature file to double in size

• The oversized file crashed systems across Cloudflare's entire global network

• Resulted in mass 500 errors for anyone using Cloudflare services

Who got hit:

• X (Twitter)

• ChatGPT

• Spotify

• Canva

• Discord

• Zoom

• Coinbase

• Even McDonald's self-service kiosks

The scale: Cloudflare CEO called it their "worst core traffic outage since 2019." Some estimates say 1 in 5 webpages were affected.

The real story: This wasn't a security breach. No data was stolen. But it exposed how much of the internet relies on a single infrastructure provider. When Cloudflare hiccups, millions of sites go down.

What you should ask: Does your business have a backup plan if your CDN provider goes down? If not, this is your wake-up call.

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💻 STORY 4: Google Proved Rust is Worth the Hype

Google released data showing Rust dramatically reduced security bugs in Android.

The numbers:

• Memory safety bugs dropped from 80% (2019) to under 20% (2024)

• Rust code has ~1,000x fewer memory bugs per line than C/C++

• Rust code rolls back 4x less often than C++

• Code reviews are faster

• For the first time, more new Android code is written in Rust than C/C++

Why memory safety matters: Most catastrophic security breaches come from memory safety bugs. They're easy to exploit remotely and hard to defend against.

The bigger win: Rust isn't just safer—it's also faster to ship. Turns out secure code doesn't have to slow you down.

For developers: The industry is shifting. Companies that were skeptical are now believers.

For everyone else: Your devices are getting more secure by default. That's rare good news.

🎯 STORY 5: US Government Launched a Strike Force Against Asian Scam Compounds

The Department of Justice created a new task force targeting billion-dollar fraud operations in Southeast Asia.

The setup: Criminal organizations in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos run massive "scam compounds"—think forced labor meets crypto fraud at industrial scale.

What the strike force is doing:

• Created an interagency task force (DOJ, FBI, Secret Service)

• Freezing bank accounts and blocking money transfers

• Seizing infrastructure (including Starlink terminals used by scammers)

• Going after "pig butchering" and crypto investment scams

The scale: These operations have stolen billions from victims worldwide.

How it works: Scammers message you on LinkedIn, WhatsApp, or dating apps. Build trust over weeks. Eventually pitch you on a "guaranteed" crypto investment. You wire money. They disappear.

If you get messages from strangers about crypto investments: Block and report. These aren't random scammers—they're part of organized crime networks with quotas and managers.

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THE TAKEAWAY

This week's themes:

• AI is now actively used in real attacks (not just discussed at conferences)

• Zero-days are being found and exploited faster than vendors can respond

• Infrastructure concentration creates massive single points of failure

• Memory-safe languages actually work at scale

• Government enforcement is getting more creative with sanctions and infrastructure seizures

Stay sharp. 🛡️

Questions? Feedback? Hit reply. Need security help? Talk to your IT team (not us).