CrowdStrike, Google, and the Shadowserver Foundation said they disrupted the Glassworm botnet, a global threat targeting developers and open-source software ecosystems through supply chain attacks. CrowdStrike said the coordinated takedown simultaneously disabled all four of the botnet’s C2 channels, preventing communications with infected systems and delivery of additional malware payloads.
You can find out more by reading CrowdStrike’s writeup here: https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/inside-crowdstrike-takedown-of-a-developer-targeting-botnet/
Liquibase VP Ryan McCurdy offers perspective:
“Glassworm is a reminder that ungoverned automation can quickly become a privileged attack path. Once attackers compromise developer tooling, poison repositories, or steal CI/CD credentials, the pipeline stops being background infrastructure and starts acting like a privileged identity. That is what makes these attacks so dangerous. The answer is not less automation. It is more standardized, governed automation, so the workflows developers and pipelines already rely on are consistent, controlled, and harder to abuse.”
Honestly, while this is to be celebrated, it’s also time for organizations to look at themselves and retool themselves so that automation is not an attack path. Otherwise bad things will happen.
UPDATE: There’s additional commentary starting with Ryan McCurdy, VP of Marketing, Liquibase:
“Glassworm is a reminder that ungoverned automation can quickly become a privileged attack path. Once attackers compromise developer tooling, poison repositories, or steal CI/CD credentials, the pipeline stops being background infrastructure and starts acting like a privileged identity. That is what makes these attacks so dangerous. The answer is not less automation. It is more standardized, governed automation, so the workflows developers and pipelines already rely on are consistent, controlled, and harder to abuse.”
Jacob Krell, Senior Director: Secure AI Solutions & Cybersecurity, Suzu Labs:
“When dismantling a single developer targeting botnet requires three organizations to simultaneously strike four independent command and control channels, that is a measure of how seriously adversaries have invested in compromising the people who build software. Glassworm’s operators layered Solana blockchain dead drops and BitTorrent alongside legitimate services like Google Calendar, building infrastructure designed to survive exactly this kind of operation. This coordination sets a model for how the security community should respond to entrenched supply chain threats. Precision and partnership delivered operational results without years of judicial process.
“Disruption buys defenders a window. It does not reverse more than a year of credential theft. Glassworm used credentials stolen in earlier infections to poison over 300 GitHub repositories, the same cascading pattern the industry has tracked across multiple supply chain campaigns this year. Any organization consuming open source software should be checking telemetry against the published indicators now, not waiting for a downstream compromise to surface the exposure.
“Glassworm did not operate in isolation. It ran alongside multiple supply chain campaigns targeting the same developer ecosystems over the same timeframe, including the Shai-Hulud worm and the Megalodon GitHub poisoning disclosed days ago. The volume and persistence of these operations make the case that developer environments and build pipelines require the same zero trust posture organizations have spent a decade applying to users and networks. Any organization that treats its build infrastructure as implicitly trusted is operating on assumptions that adversaries have already invalidated.”
Noelle Murata, Chief Operating Officer at Xcape, Inc.
“The coordinated takedown of the Glassworm botnet by CrowdStrike, Google, and Shadowserver highlights a massive paradigm shift: threat actors are aggressively targeting the software developer’s workstation as the ultimate enterprise entry point. By targeting IDE marketplaces, package registries, and GitHub repositories rather than traditional corporate networks, the operators behind Glassworm turned infected developer environments into automated launchpads for broader downstream supply chain contamination.
“What makes this campaign uniquely menacing is the extreme, multi-layered resilience of its command-and-control (C2) architecture. By hiding C2 infrastructure across the Solana blockchain, the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network, and public Google Calendar entries, the attackers built a decentralized dead-drop engine that could not be dismantled by traditional domain sinkholing or legal hosting takedowns. The fact that defenders had to execute a flawless, simultaneous strike across all four independent technical vectors proves that legacy, siloed perimeter defense is structurally obsolete when fighting a decentralized adversary.
“For enterprise risk leaders, the Glassworm disruption is a severe warning that developer environments must be treated as highly privileged, zero-trust zones. To defend against this evolving threat landscape, security executives must immediately enforce strict application control policies on developer IDE extensions, audit code pipelines for unauthorized package installs executing via post-install hooks, and continuously monitor for suspicious, outbound programmatic access to public infrastructure.
“Critical Takeaways
- “Targeting the pipeline creators: Adversaries are bypassing heavily defended enterprise production environments to compromise developers directly, leveraging their local code-signing access and platform credentials to seamlessly poison entire downstream software lifecycles.
- “The resilience of decentralized C2: Utilizing immutable blockchain ledger memo fields and decentralized peer-to-peer hash tables means attackers can permanently maintain connectivity to infected assets without relying on central, tear-down-vulnerable web domains.
- “Takedowns are a temporary shield: While disabling the current infrastructure disrupts immediate payload delivery, it does not erase the thousands of malicious, typosquatted npm/PyPI packages and poisoned source files that remain dormant across the broader public code ecosystem.
“When a botnet embeds its command architecture into public blockchains and peer-to-peer networks, traditional security boundaries cease to exist. You aren’t just fighting a group of hackers anymore; you are fighting a permanent, decentralized exploit of the internet’s own infrastructure.”
Hackers use agentic AI to target more than 200 organizations in 11 days
Posted in Commentary with tags CrowdStrike on November 3, 2026 by itnerdHacking group Vapor Panda used an agentic AI penetration-testing framework called ARTEX to target more than 200 organizations across at least 14 countries in just 11 days, according to new CrowdStrike research.
The campaign began October 17 and targeted government ministries, defense agencies, semiconductor manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, financial institutions and telecommunications providers.
CrowdStrike confirmed post-exploitation activity at nine organizations and said approximately 70% of targets were confirmed compromised or showed evidence supporting a successful intrusion.
The attackers combined ARTEX with DeepSeek and another commercial large language model to automate reconnaissance, exploit vulnerabilities, steal credentials and move laterally across networks.
CrowdStrike observed activity occurring as frequently as every 10 seconds, with the framework capable of exceeding 1,500 commands per hour compared with approximately 40 commands per hour during traditional human-operated intrusions. Human operators continued directing the AI agents, including instructing them to identify systems without endpoint security software.
John Strand, Owner, Black Hills Information Security
“This is the future. I strongly believe that within the next three months, the type of attack documented by CrowdStrike is going to become the new normal.
“OpenAI models and attack frameworks are readily available. What a lot of people don’t understand is that you can carry out these types of attacks with commodity hardware. You don’t need a massive data center. It might be slower, but it can still be done. And I think threat actors have absolutely started recognizing that.
“Everybody needs to be prepared. Reduce your external attack surface as much as possible, and use deception throughout your environment to establish tripwires. Give yourself a way to detect attackers when they get past your other defenses.”
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Ryan McCurdy, Vice President of Marketing, Liquibase
“The speed and scale at which attackers can now operate is unlike anything we’ve seen before.
“A single operator can direct AI agents to execute more than 1,500 commands an hour, targeting multiple organizations at once. That’s a very different threat environment than what most security teams were built to handle.
“Companies have spent years building security processes that depend on people reviewing activity, identifying risks, and intervening when something goes wrong. Those processes weren’t designed for machines operating at this speed.
“And the challenge isn’t limited to attackers. As companies give AI agents more responsibility across software development and IT operations, they need to rethink where and how controls are enforced.
“Human oversight will still be important, but it can’t be the only line of defense. Organizations need policies that are enforced automatically, before an agent can make a change that puts critical systems at risk.”
ㅤI don’t know how many times I will say this. But if you aren’t defending against AI, you are screwed.
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