\n security\n <\/p>\n
\n Human operator: don’t touch CIS orgs. AI agents: look a squirrel!\u00a0\n <\/p>\n
An unknown attacker used hundreds of AI agents to exploit two PaperCut MF\/NG bugs and break into at least 395 organizations. The victims were concentrated in the US education sector, and the intrusions moved fast. In one case, an American high school went from initial access to domain admin in seven minutes.<\/p>\n
These agents, powered by OpenAI\u2019s Codex harness and a DeepSeek model, also allowed the miscreant to attack organizations at scale, according to threat-intel firm GreyNoise, which traced the campaign\u2019s orchestration to 45.142.193.132 on August 31.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe adversary went from an empty workspace to first achieving RCE against a real victim in just under four hours, first domain admin in an additional two hours, and once the full campaign launched, compromised at least 11 organizations in 26 seconds,\u201d GreyNoise analysts said in a Wednesday report<\/a>.<\/p>\n The security provider attributes these intrusions to a \u201clikely Russian-speaking\u201d criminal who used AI to develop exploits against the pair of PaperCut vulnerabilities disclosed just days earlier.\u00a0<\/p>\n On August 28, the print management software provider issued emergency patches<\/a> for CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078, at the time warning that it was \u201caware of confirmed customer incidents and are treating this matter with the highest priority.\u201d The flaws affect PaperCut NG and MF, which are self-hosted Java web applications that by default run with SYSTEM-level privileges on Windows.<\/p>\n PaperCut\u2019s CEO later said<\/a> that the first reported compromise came in on August 27, and involved an education-sector firm.<\/p>\n On Thursday, PaperCut published<\/a> security maintenance releases, which replace the earlier emergency fixes.<\/p>\n By now, however, at least 440 instances hosted by 395 identified victim organizations in 48 countries have been compromised, according to GreyNoise. \u201cThere are other real victims that could not be attributed to a named organization,\u201d the threat signals team wrote.<\/p>\n The human attacker told the agents to avoid targeting entities in 28 countries with the top five being Russia, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Iran. Several Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries are on the list, which is why GreyNoise says the crim is likely Russian-speaking.\u00a0<\/p>\n