ThreatsDay: AI Search Poisoning, AI Coding Tool Leaking Repos, One-Click Code Execution and 13 More Stories

Summary

This week's threats include the RemControl Android banking trojan, which uses AI-assisted development and abuses accessibility services for phishing. AI coding assistant Z.ai had to disable features after it was found leaking user code repositories to Alibaba Cloud. Additionally, CISA and the FBI issued a fact sheet warning critical infrastructure operators about the risks of granting third-party ICS integrators excessive access.

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ThreatsDay: AI Search Poisoning, AI Coding Tool Leaking Repos, One-Click Code Execution and 13 More Stories Ravie LakshmananSep 24, 2026Hacking News / Cybersecurity News This week, the dangerous stuff keeps arriving dressed as something boring. An update. A login box. A search answer. A coding tool. A link you have clicked a hundred times before. That is the thread running through the pile. Trusted paths get poisoned. Old bugs find new jobs. AI tools leak more than expected. Fake prompts look real enough. And some attacks barely need an exploit at all — just one weak setting or one person doing what the screen tells them. Nothing here looks especially dramatic. That is what makes it useful. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out. AI-Assisted Banking Trojan RemControl Android Banking Trojan Targets Western Europe, the Middle East, and Canada A previously undocumented Android banking trojan dubbed RemControl is targeting retail banking customers across Western Europe (Italy, France, Spain, Poland, Portugal), the Middle East, and Canada. The malware is distributed via fake Google Play Store pages impersonating the TVTap IPTV application. Users are directed to the web page through Meta ads. It was first observed in July 2026. "The malware abuses Android's Accessibility Service to inject phishing overlays over legitimate banking applications, stream the device screen in real time, log keystrokes, and provide the operator with full remote control over infected devices," Group-IB said. "C2 address is resolved dynamically through an encrypted Telegram dead-drop, making infrastructure rotation straightforward without recompiling the malware. Both the operator panel documentation and phishing overlays contain artifacts of AI-assisted development, including a complete AI assistant response left verbatim in a live phishing page served to banking victims." The presence of Russian-language code comments in multiple overlay HTML files indicates the involvement of a Russian speaker. Overlapping campaign naming conventions, delivery mechanisms, the use of Telegram dead-drop and affiliate tag similarities suggest a possible link to the Medusa UNKN affiliate botnet. AI Code Privacy Concern Z.ai Disables ZCode Features Chinese artificial intelligence company Z.ai has disabled several features of its ZCode coding assistant after a default setting was caught sending users' local code repositories to Alibaba Cloud servers in China without their consent, a couple of months after SpaceXAI's Grok Build coding CLI was found uploading entire Git repositories to a Google Cloud Storage bucket under its control. Although Z.ai has since disabled the workflow responsible for generating and uploading local repository snapshots in its ZCode client and opened up its codebase for public scrutiny, the development raises fresh concerns for enterprises over how AI tools handle sensitive source code. Critical Infrastructure Access Risk CISA and FBI Publish Factsheet for Critical Infrastructure Operators The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have published a fact sheet to "highlight considerations for critical infrastructure entities to reduce risk and minimize vulnerabilities when working with third-party industrial control system (ICS) integrators." The alert urges critical infrastructure owners and operators to maintain caution when granting third-party ICS integrators high levels of access or control over industrial processes and ensure the principle of least privilege (PoLP) is applied. "Not adopting principles such as PoLP could expose owners and operators to malicious cyber actors seeking to compromise critical infrastructure, possibly providing sensitive access to pathways that actors can exploit to cause disruptive and destructive effects to equipment and critical functions," the authoring agencies said. Super-App Surveillance Capabilities Russia's MAX App's Capabilities Detailed MAX is a state-backed Russian mobile "super-app" developed by VK (aka VKontakte) that combines instant messaging, e-commerce, banking, and public government services. A new forensic research published by a group of researchers from the University of Michigan, University of Calgary, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, has revealed the extent of its surveillance capabilities: "Playing the role of an active adversary, we found five distinct capabilities that allow MAX to act as a man-in-the-middle for all mini-app interactions: (1) MAX can capture screenshots of mini-app content without holding any special system permissions, and without alerting the user; (2) It holds full read and write access to all mini-app local storage, meaning no data a mini-app persists on-device is private from MAX; (3) It injects JavaScript into running mini-apps, enabling silent, undetectable modification of mini-app functions at run-time; (4) It mediates all mini-app network traffic, and in the Russian regional build specifically, routes this traffic through a GOST TLS proxy, raising acute concerns about state-level interception [18]; (5) Finally, it controls the authentication tokens and session context supplied to each mini-app, granting it the ability to silently impersonate any user to any service hosted within the super-app ecosystem. These findings uncover that MAX's super-app architecture can actively and silently undermine the security guarantees that users assume when interacting with each mini-app." Fake Giveaway Phishing Trap Fake Claude Max Giveaway Steals Users Google Account Credentials A fake Claude Max giveaway has used a spoofed Google sign-in window to steal users' login credentials by means of a browser-in-the-browser (BitB) attack. "There is no form to collect card details and no download," Malwarebytes said. "Instead, it offers a free upgrade and asks you to sign in with your Google account. Clicking the Google button doesn’t open a real Google sign-in window. Instead, the page draws a browser window inside the existing tab, complete with a padlock and a correctly spelled Google sign-in address. It can even be dragged around the page." EDR Evasion Technique EDR Evasion Using Process Parameter Poisoning In July 2026, researchers Max Hirschberger and Ogulcan Ugur detailed a technique called Process Parameter Poisoning to inject code in foreign processes without triggering traditional security mechanisms. Flashpoint has now released a proof-of-concept implemented in Rust to demonstrate the EDR evasion technique. "Process Parameter Poisoning is a novel endpoint detection and response (EDR) evasion technique that combines process parameter spoofing and thread execution hijacking to inject code into foreign processes without triggering standard security detection mechanisms," Flashpoint said. "Instead of calling memory-accessing APIs to allocate and write into a target process, the technique hides the malicious payload directly inside standard process initialization structures during the initial creation of a process. The result is a fundamental shift in defense evasion that effectively blinds traditional, API-hooking EDR agents during the initial stages of code execution." Faster Ubuntu Kernel Fixes Canonical to Shift to a Unified Release Schedule for Ubuntu Kernel CVE Fixes The "recent explosion" in the volume of CVEs, mainly driven by AI, has prompted Canonical to transition to a unified, 2-week release cycle that merges its four-week cycle for regular Stable Release Updates (SRUs) and its two-week cycle for security fixes. "These recurring 2 week cycles cascade: each cycle begins the week after the previous one starts. Because of this overlap, kernel releases will take place weekly," Canonical said. "The first week will focus on kernel package preparation. This is where we select what updates and patches land on each kernel depending on sp

Indicators of Compromise

• malware — RemControl

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