Is Your Claude Code Safe From Base64? Inside 2026 AI Agent Attacks

Introduction Greetings from the island nation of Japan. Six months ago I wrote about befriending Base64, a piece I now read back with the soft embarrassment of glancing at one's own graduation photo. The protagonist has not changed; the setting has. Lately, I keep running into Base64 in places no respectable friend should be (the digital equivalent of spotting an old classmate, slightly out of focus, in the background of an organised crime documentary). They are still doing their decades-old job