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Cyber AI Chronicle
By Simon Ganiere · 28th Dec 2025
Welcome back!
Security researchers have uncovered a critical flaw in one of AI development's most widely-used frameworks, with LangChain Core's 'LangGrinch' vulnerability exposing applications to secret theft and prompt injection attacks. The timing couldn't be worse, as this disclosure arrives amid warnings that AI-powered cyberattacks are accelerating at an unprecedented pace.
What makes this particularly concerning is how the vulnerability exploits the trust relationship between AI frameworks and their outputs, turning routine operations like response streaming into potential attack vectors. Could this signal a broader pattern where AI development tools themselves become the weakest link in our security chain?
In today's AI recap:
Critical 'LangGrinch' Bug Hits LangChain Core
What you need to know: A critical vulnerability dubbed 'LangGrinch' (CVE-2025-68664) was disclosed in LangChain Core, allowing attackers to steal secrets and inject prompts through a serialization flaw.
Why is it relevant?:
The attack's subtlety is its biggest threat; it can be triggered through prompt injection that manipulates LLM response fields, which are later serialized and deserialized during normal operations like streaming.
The flaw stems from the framework improperly handling a reserved
'lc'key in user-controlled data, treating it as a trusted internal object and enabling secret extraction from environment variables, a risk amplified by a previously insecure default setting.This isn't just a Python issue, as a parallel flaw (CVE-2025-68665) was also found in LangChain.js, highlighting a cross-platform pattern in how AI frameworks handle serialized data.
Bottom line: This vulnerability underscores the critical intersection of traditional application security and AI development, where trusted internal framework mechanics become attack surfaces. It serves as a stark reminder that all LLM outputs must be treated as untrusted, user-controlled input.
The AI WannaCry
What you need to know: A former Israeli intelligence officer and current security CEO warns that a massive, AI-driven cyberattack on the scale of WannaCry is inevitable. Her warning comes as Mandiant's recent analysis shows the average time-to-exploit for vulnerabilities has, for the first time, dropped to negative one day.
Why is it relevant?:
The negative time-to-exploit means attackers are now weaponizing bugs a day before vendors can even issue a patch, fundamentally changing the defensive timeline.
AI is the key accelerator, with an estimated 78 percent of vulnerabilities being weaponized more rapidly and efficiently using large language models.
A rising concern is that less-skilled attackers can now use these AI tools, potentially causing widespread collateral damage without fully understanding the impact of their actions.
Bottom line: AI is rapidly becoming both the primary tool for attackers and the essential shield for defenders. The security focus must shift from simple remediation to proactive, AI-driven mitigation to stay ahead of these accelerated threats.
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The Chatbot Jailbreak
What you need to know: Security researchers discovered multiple flaws in Eurostar's public AI chatbot that allowed them to bypass safety guardrails and inject malicious content. The findings, detailed in a blog post, expose a critical design flaw in how the system validates user messages.
Why is it relevant?:
The core weakness stemmed from the chatbot's architecture, which only verified the latest message in a conversation, allowing previous messages in the chat history to be altered and fed directly to the AI model.
This vulnerability enabled attackers to use prompt injection to leak the chatbot's system prompts and inject HTML, creating a pathway for phishing attacks or cross-site scripting (XSS).
The disclosure process was highly problematic, as Eurostar initially lost the report and later accused the researchers of blackmail, highlighting ongoing challenges in responsible vulnerability reporting.
Bottom line: This incident shows that classic web and API security fundamentals are non-negotiable, even when building on modern AI platforms. It serves as a clear warning that rushing to deploy customer-facing AI without rigorous security validation can easily expose an organization to old-school attacks.
The AI Scam Crackdown
What you need to know: The U.S. SEC is cracking down on a complex crypto scheme that defrauded investors of over $14 million by using deepfake videos and AI-generated investment tips to build trust and lure victims.
Why is it relevant?:
The scammers created a multi-layered deception using WhatsApp "investment clubs" run by fake financial experts, who used AI-generated recommendations and manipulated screenshots of fake profits to build confidence with their targets.
The operation's infrastructure was entirely fictitious, including the crypto trading platforms and the "Security Token Offerings" (STOs) they promoted, as detailed in the complaint.
After luring investors in, the fraudsters charged additional advance fees for withdrawals that were never processed, ultimately funneling the stolen $14 million to overseas bank accounts and crypto wallets in Southeast Asia.
Bottom line: This case serves as a stark blueprint for how threat actors combine generative AI with classic social engineering to create highly convincing, scalable fraud operations. Security teams must now adapt their detection and response strategies to counter AI-powered deception that blurs the line between legitimate and fraudulent communications.
The All-Access Agent
What you need to know: The next wave of generative AI assistants and agents requires deep, OS-level access to your data and applications to perform tasks on your behalf. This unprecedented access creates a new class of security and privacy threats that circumvents traditional application-level security.
Why is it relevant?:
To be truly useful, agents need to control your device's operating system, creating a vast new attack surface. Researchers at the Ada Lovelace Institute warn this trend may pose a “profound threat” to cybersecurity, as it moves data processing from sandboxed apps to the core of the system.
This deep integration makes systems vulnerable to advanced prompt-injection attacks. For example, malicious instructions hidden in an innocuous-looking PDF can trick an agent into finding and exfiltrating sensitive data from your private files.
Even well-secured applications like Signal are at risk when the underlying OS is compromised. Signal’s president, Meredith Whittaker, has called the rise of OS-level agents an “existential threat” to application-level privacy, as agents can access data before it's encrypted or after it's decrypted.
Bottom line: The convenience of truly autonomous AI agents comes with the high price of a dramatically expanded and more intimate attack surface. Security teams must now evolve their threat models to account for attacks that execute with full user permissions from inside the operating system.
The Shortlist
ServiceNow will acquire cybersecurity firm Armis in a $7.75 billion deal, aiming to integrate Armis's real-time asset intelligence into its platform for AI-native, proactive security and vulnerability response.
Purdue University published a new real-world benchmark for deepfake detection, evaluating commercial tools on 'messy' incident content from social media to better reflect performance under production conditions.
Arcanum released a new open-source, interactive taxonomy for prompt injection, providing a comprehensive classification system for attack intents, techniques, and evasions to aid AI security testing. Collapse
AI Influence Level
Level 4 - Al Created, Human Basic Idea / The whole newsletter is generated via a n8n workflow based on publicly available RSS feeds. Human-in-the-loop to review the selected articles and subjects.
Reference: AI Influence Level from Daniel Miessler
Till next time!
Project Overwatch is a cutting-edge newsletter at the intersection of cybersecurity, AI, technology, and resilience, designed to navigate the complexities of our rapidly evolving digital landscape. It delivers insightful analysis and actionable intelligence, empowering you to stay ahead in a world where staying informed is not just an option, but a necessity.