This "dream wish list for criminals" includes millions of Gmail, Facebook, banking logins, and more. The researcher who discovered it suspects they were collected using infostealing malware. A database containing 149 million account usernames and passwords--including 48 million for Gmail, 17 million for Facebook, and 420,000 for the cryptocurrency platform Binance --has been removed after a researcher reported the exposure to the hosting provider. The longtime security analyst who discovered the database, Jeremiah Fowler, could not find indications of who owned or operated it, so he worked to notify the host, which took down the trove because it violated a terms of service agreement. In addition to email and social media logins for a number of platforms, Fowler also observed credentials for government systems from multiple countries as well as consumer banking and credit card logins and media streaming platforms.

We present the first comprehensive evaluation of AI agents against human cybersecurity professionals in a live enterprise environment. We evaluate ten cybersecurity professionals alongside six existing AI agents and ARTEMIS, our new agent scaffold, on a large university network consisting of ~8,000 hosts across 12 subnets. ARTEMIS is a multi-agent framework featuring dynamic prompt generation, arbitrary sub-agents, and automatic vulnerability triaging. In our comparative study, ARTEMIS placed second overall, discovering 9 valid vulnerabilities with an 82% valid submission rate and outperforming 9 of 10 human participants. While existing scaffolds such as Codex and CyAgent underperformed relative to most human participants, ARTEMIS demonstrated technical sophistication and submission quality comparable to the strongest participants. We observe that AI agents offer advantages in systematic enumeration, parallel exploitation, and cost -- certain ARTEMIS variants cost $18/hour versus $60/hour for professional penetration testers. We also identify key capability gaps: AI agents exhibit higher false-positive rates and struggle with GUI-based tasks.

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Generative AI is reshaping offensive cybersecurity by enabling autonomous red team agents that can plan, execute, and adapt during penetration tests. However, existing approaches face trade-offs between generality and specialization, and practical deployments reveal challenges such as hallucinations, context limitations, and ethical concerns. In this work, we introduce a novel command & control (C2) architecture leveraging the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to coordinate distributed, adaptive reconnaissance agents covertly across networks. Notably, we find that our architecture not only improves goal-directed behavior of the system as whole, but also eliminates key host and network artifacts that can be used to detect and prevent command & control behavior altogether. We begin with a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art generative red teaming methods, from fine-tuned specialist models to modular or agentic frameworks, analyzing their automation capabilities against task-specific accuracy. We then detail how our MCP-based C2 can overcome current limitations by enabling asynchronous, parallel operations and real-time intelligence sharing without periodic beaconing. We furthermore explore advanced adversarial capabilities of this architecture, its detection-evasion techniques, and address dual-use ethical implications, proposing defensive measures and controlled evaluation in lab settings. Experimental comparisons with traditional C2 show drastic reductions in manual effort and detection footprint. We conclude with future directions for integrating autonomous exploitation, defensive LLM agents, predictive evasive maneuvers, and multi-agent swarms. The proposed MCP-enabled C2 framework demonstrates a significant step toward realistic, AI-driven red team operations that can simulate advanced persistent threats while informing the development of next-generation defensive systems.

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are increasingly capable of initiating financial transactions on behalf of users or other agents. This evolution introduces a fundamental challenge: verifying both the authenticity of an autonomous agent and the true intent behind its transactions in a decentralized, trustless environment. Traditional payment systems assume human authorization, but autonomous, agent-led payments remove that safeguard. This paper presents a blockchain-based framework that cryptographically authenticates and verifies the intent of every AI-initiated transaction. The proposed system leverages decentralized identity (DID) standards and verifiable credentials to establish agent identities, on-chain intent proofs to record user authorization, and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to preserve privacy while ensuring policy compliance. Additionally, secure execution environments (TEE-based attestations) guarantee the integrity of agent reasoning and execution. The hybrid on-chain/off-chain architecture provides an immutable audit trail linking user intent to payment outcome. Through qualitative analysis, the framework demonstrates strong resistance to impersonation, unauthorized transactions, and misalignment of intent. This work lays the foundation for secure, auditable, and intent-aware autonomous economic agents, enabling a future of verifiable trust and accountability in AI-driven financial ecosystems.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to automate or augment penetration testing, but their effectiveness and reliability across attack phases remain unclear. We present a comprehensive evaluation of multiple LLM-based agents, from single-agent to modular designs, across realistic penetration testing scenarios, measuring empirical performance and recurring failure patterns. We also isolate the impact of five core functional capabilities via targeted augmentations: Global Context Memory (GCM), Inter-Agent Messaging (IAM), Context-Conditioned Invocation (CCI), Adaptive Planning (AP), and Real-Time Monitoring (RTM). These interventions support, respectively: (i) context coherence and retention, (ii) inter-component coordination and state management, (iii) tool use accuracy and selective execution, (iv) multi-step strategic planning, error detection, and recovery, and (v) real-time dynamic responsiveness. Our results show that while some architectures natively exhibit subsets of these properties, targeted augmentations substantially improve modular agent performance, especially in complex, multi-step, and real-time penetration testing tasks.

As the "agentic web" takes shape-billions of AI agents (often LLM-powered) autonomously transacting and collaborating-trust shifts from human oversight to protocol design. In 2025, several inter-agent protocols crystallized this shift, including Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A), Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), and Ethereum's ERC-8004 "Trustless Agents," yet their underlying trust assumptions remain under-examined. This paper presents a comparative study of trust models in inter-agent protocol design: Brief (self- or third-party verifiable claims), Claim (self-proclaimed capabilities and identity, e.g. AgentCard), Proof (cryptographic verification, including zero-knowledge proofs and trusted execution environment attestations), Stake (bonded collateral with slashing and insurance), Reputation (crowd feedback and graph-based trust signals), and Constraint (sandboxing and capability bounding). For each, we analyze assumptions, attack surfaces, and design trade-offs, with particular emphasis on LLM-specific fragilities-prompt injection, sycophancy/nudge-susceptibility, hallucination, deception, and misalignment-that render purely reputational or claim-only approaches brittle. Our findings indicate no single mechanism suffices. We argue for trustless-by-default architectures anchored in Proof and Stake to gate high-impact actions, augmented by Brief for identity and discovery and Reputation overlays for flexibility and social signals. We comparatively evaluate A2A, AP2, ERC-8004 and related historical variations in academic research under metrics spanning security, privacy, latency/cost, and social robustness (Sybil/collusion/whitewashing resistance). We conclude with hybrid trust model recommendations that mitigate reputation gaming and misinformed LLM behavior, and we distill actionable design guidelines for safer, interoperable, and scalable agent economies.

The rapid rise of AI agents presents urgent challenges in authentication, authorization, and identity management. Current agent-centric protocols (like MCP) highlight the demand for clarified best practices in authentication and authorization. Looking ahead, ambitions for highly autonomous agents raise complex long-term questions regarding scalable access control, agent-centric identities, AI workload differentiation, and delegated authority. This OpenID Foundation whitepaper is for stakeholders at the intersection of AI agents and access management. It outlines the resources already available for securing today's agents and presents a strategic agenda to address the foundational authentication, authorization, and identity problems pivotal for tomorrow's widespread autonomous systems.

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Credential stuffing attacks have caused significant harm to online users who frequently reuse passwords across multiple websites. While prior research has attempted to detect users with reused passwords or identify malicious login attempts, existing methods often compromise usability by restricting password creation or website access, and their reliance on complex account-sharing mechanisms hinders real-world deployment. To address these limitations, we propose PassREfinder-FL, a novel framework that predicts credential stuffing risks across websites. We introduce the concept of password reuse relations -- defined as the likelihood of users reusing passwords between websites -- and represent them as edges in a website graph. Using graph neural networks (GNNs), we perform a link prediction task to assess credential reuse risk between sites. Our approach scales to a large number of arbitrary websites by incorporating public website information and linking newly observed websites as nodes in the graph. To preserve user privacy, we extend PassREfinder-FL with a federated learning (FL) approach that eliminates the need to share user sensitive information across administrators. Evaluation on a real-world dataset of 360 million breached accounts from 22,378 websites shows that PassREfinder-FL achieves an F1-score of 0.9153 in the FL setting. We further validate that our FL-based GNN achieves a 4-11% performance improvement over other state-of-the-art GNN models through an ablation study. Finally, we demonstrate that the predicted results can be used to quantify password reuse likelihood as actionable risk scores.