AI-powered attack exploited PaperCut flaws to hack 395 organizations

A threat actor, likely Russian-speaking, used hundreds of AI agents to develop and launch a global exploitation campaign targeting vulnerable PaperCut NG/MF servers.

The agents were tasked with building, testing, and refining exploits for CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078, both security flaws affecting PaperCut Software and flagged as actively exploited earlier this month.

Attack and threat intelligence company GreyNoise says the campaign began on August 31, combining OpenAI’s Codex and DeepSeek models with commodity offensive tools.

The AI agents also generated target lists through the Netlas internet scanning and discovery platform.

GreyNoise data indicates that the operation compromised at least 440 PaperCut instances linked to 395 distinct organizations across 48 countries.

The attacker harvested credentials from 280 victims, obtained operating system or domain secrets from 147, and obtained administrator privileges at 12 organizations.

Most of the victims were in the education sector, accounting for roughly half of all breaches. The United States was the most targeted country, followed by the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Canada.

According to GreyNoise, the threat actor specified a list of countries to avoid, including Russia, China, Iran, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Brazil, and South Africa. However, the agents did not consistently follow these rules.

GreyNoise underlines that AI enables attackers to launch rapid attacks that leave defenders with very tight response margins.

“The 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,” GreyNoise notes.

“In one instance, the adversary went from initial access to full domain administrator in seven minutes against a high school in the United States.”

Attack timeline
Source: GreyNoise

The researchers observed three attack paths after exploiting the PaperCut flaws:

1. Dumping LSASS memory and registry secrets from domain-joined PaperCut servers, then passing recovered credential hashes to domain controllers (“pass-the-hash” attack).
2. Using the “noPac” attack against environments still vulnerable to CVE-2021-42278 and CVE-2021-42287.
3. Directly adding a newly created account to Domain Admins when PaperCut ran on a domain controller or under a domain administrator service account.

In all cases, the attackers used the DCSync post-exploitation technique to obtain a complete NTDS.DIT dump with domain credentials.

The attacker’s toolkit includes Ligolo-ng, Mimikatz, Certipy, BloodHound, Rubeus, Impacket, NetExec, and custom Rust credential-collection utilities.

GreyNoise could not determine the attacker’s campaign objective, but the access could be used for data theft or ransomware operations.

System administrators are advised to apply PaperCut’s emergency security updates addressing CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078 immediately, and follow the vendor’s recommendations in this bulletin.