Agents Gone Wild: An AI-Orchestrated Global Campaign Against PaperCut NG/MF

GreyNoise observes adversary activity through our Global Observation Grid (GOG), a network of sensors that draws attacker scanning and exploitation onto infrastructure we control. This lets us study adversary infrastructure, tooling, and tradecraft directly, without waiting for a victim investigation. GreyNoise has been tracking malicious use of 45.142.193.132 since early July 2026 due to its use for attacks against internet facing technologies and devices from Palo Alto, Ubiquiti, Citrix, SonicWall, and Proxmox VE.

On 31 August 2026, a likely Russian-speaking malicious cyber actor (MCA) used 45.142.193.132 and artificial intelligence (AI) to develop, test, and use exploits for PaperCut NG/MF (CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078). PaperCut is print management software that enables organizations to track, charge, and manage printing, copying, and scanning jobs for organizations. PaperCut offers cloud and self-hosted versions. PaperCut NG and MF are self-hosted Java web applications that by default run with SYSTEM-level privileges on Windows and are usually domain-joined and integrated with Active Directory. As part of the adversary’s exploit development and testing, they built and attacked a lab environment that included the vulnerable PaperCut software and an Active Directory server. In parallel workflows, the adversary built target lists using an internet scanning service Netlas.io using an identified API key.