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Tracy
Tracy
Aug 14 2026
38With the current speed of Artificial Intelligence (AI) development known to speed up and improve enterprises’ productivity, Kaspersky researcher underscored the dangers of “blind trust” and lack of verification on AI, and how cyberattackers exploit these gaps with no vulnerability but with just trust.
“AI has advanced at a tremendous pace over the past few years. In its early stages, AI took the form of tools that could generate, summarise, and draft content. The next phase brought copilots, embedding AI directly into workflows to assist, suggest and guide users as they worked. Fast forward to now, we have entered the era of AI agents, which can plan, use tools, call APIs, and act autonomously. While humans remain present to verify each stage of an AI-driven development, we see more and more incidents where verification is often overlooked to maximise productivity, and when speed outpaces verification, that speed can also amplify risks,” warns Sojun Ryu, security researcher at Kaspersky's GReAT (Global Research and Analysis Team).
How cybercriminals exploit blind trust in AI agents
Recently, Kaspersky GReAT researchers found 92,000 malicious attacks in 2026 disguised as AI services. Almost half (49%) of them were disguised as ChatGPT applications, while Claude and Gemini each represented 18%.
These legitimate applications are essential for working with AI agents, and they form the starting point of the development environment. However, attackers exploit that trust by distributing fake versions specifically designed to target those users.
In addition, researchers identified over 15,000 malware samples disguised as agentic AI software. They were classified as trojans, spyware, exploits, downloaderers, droppers, and backdoors - all containing actual malicious functionality. This means that simply running one of these disguised applications could allow attackers to steal internal information and establish command-and-control access.
Ryu also detailed the dangers that overshadow AI use and developments: open-source packages.
“The truth is that developers need open source. AI needs open source. And attackers understand this very well, which is why software supply chain attacks targeting open-source packages remain one of the most significant threats. Across multiple open-source ecosystems—especially npm and PyPI—major compromises spread in rapid succession. Since the middle of last year, we have seen at least ten large-scale attack campaigns, and the pace continues to rise. From attacks on highly popular packages such as Axios to self-propagating worms such as Shai-Hulud, these campaigns are beginning to shake the foundations of the open-source ecosystem,” adds Ryu,
The March 2026 supply chain attack involving Axios highlighted how cybercriminals are increasingly targeting trusted software components to reach a large number of victims. Axios, one of the world's most widely used JavaScript libraries, is downloaded more than 100 million times every week and is used by over 170,000 software packages. After compromising the lead maintainer's computer, the attacker gained access to the project's npm account and published malicious versions of the library.
Although the compromised packages were available for only about three hours, they were downloaded by hundreds of devices during that time. The incident demonstrates how a single compromise in a trusted open-source project can quickly spread across the software supply chain, reinforcing the importance of verifying software components and monitoring for suspicious changes.
“According to our survey last year, 31% of enterprise businesses had been impacted by a supply chain attack. This reflects how deeply open-source software is embedded in enterprise development environments. We should expect open-source ecosystems to remain a major target for attackers because it’s their door to crack into the intelligence inside the enterprises,” he adds.
How to reduce blind trust without sacrificing productivity
With productivity driving not only operational efficiency but also companies' profitability, Ryu listed practical ways on how to keep enterprise productivity without sacrificing security. He underscored the need to define clear trusted development zones between external content and internal development assets. That should harden not only the IDE (Integrated Development Environment), but also extensions, workspaces, and agent permissions.
He also highlighted the need to control the paths through which software enters the environment and maintain visibility into every activity. The objective from which is not to add more approval prompts, but rather, to make the secure path the easiest and most efficient path.
Kaspersky, for its part, is also contributing to building a secure development environment and workflow for developers and IT security professionals alike. In particular, Kaspersky GreAT monitors all the open-source software mentioned earlier and provides a feed that flags any vulnerable or malicious components.
Kaspersky’s elite team of researchers also audited GitHub Actions workflows using Kaspersky Container Security capability to ensure a secure build path and discovered that over 250,000 potential misconfigurations in continuous‑integration/continuous‑delivery (CI/CD) processes, underscoring the widespread adoption of insecure configuration practices.
“As a security researcher, I strongly believe that we should shift security not only toward earlier stages of software development, but also from protecting deployed systems to securing the environments where software is created. Because when trust is verified before execution, organisations move faster, not slower. Most importantly, security fails when we prioritise speed, money, and delivery over protection and visibility,” he adds.
