Supply Chain Backdoor, Triple CVSS 9.9 Active Exploits, and Anthropic's AI Defense — Feb 21 Threat Roundup

The threat landscape this cycle is loud. Cline CLI 2.3.0 was hijacked via a compromised npm publish token on Feb 17, silently installing OpenClaw on developer machines worldwide — a clean supply chain hit with no malicious payload observed yet, but the foothold is there. Meanwhile BeyondTrust's CVE-2026-1731 (CVSS 9.9) is being actively weaponized across six sectors in five countries: financial services, legal, healthcare, higher ed, wholesale, and high-tech. Unit 42 confirmed web shell deployment, C2 installs, lateral movement, and data exfiltration all in one campaign. Roundcube's CVE-2025-49113 (also CVSS 9.9) was diffed and weaponized within 48 hours of public disclosure — CISA added both Roundcube flaws to KEV today.

Anthropic is fighting back with Claude Code Security, now in limited research preview for Enterprise and Team customers. It scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests patches — directly countering the same AI-assisted attack automation threat actors are deploying. The timing is deliberate. Elsewhere, a ClickFix campaign is pushing MIMICRAT, a custom C++ RAT with SOCKS5 tunneling, Windows token impersonation, and 22 post-exploitation commands delivered via multi-stage PowerShell chains that bypass ETW and AMSI. A Ukrainian national got 5 years for running North Korea's IT worker fraud scheme — 40 US companies infiltrated, salaries funneled to the regime's weapons program.