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Patchwork Continues to Deliver BADNEWS to the Indian Subcontinent

Unit 42 details Patchwork APT campaigns against the Indian subcontinent using EPS exploits and an updated BADNEWS backdoor targeting Pakistani military and nuclear interests.

Unit 42 observed the Patchwork group (also known as Dropping Elephant and Monsoon) conducting campaigns against targets in the Indian subcontinent using weaponized documents that exploit CVE-2015-2545 and CVE-2017-0261. The documents deliver an updated BADNEWS backdoor that grants attackers full control of victim machines, using dead drop resolvers on legitimate third-party websites for C2 and HTTP for communications. Lures referenced Pakistan Army promotions, the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and the Ministry of the Interior, and in late January 2018 the group shifted from CVE-2017-0261 to the older CVE-2015-2545.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wildCVE-2015-2545CVE-2017-0261

The patch window is collapsing: Why security needs a new control plane

Microsoft argues patch windows are shrinking and urges a new security control plane to protect systems between vulnerability discovery and remediation.

A Microsoft Security Blog post contends that the window between vulnerability discovery and patch deployment is collapsing, leaving exploitable gaps. It argues organizations need a security 'control plane' that provides protection in the gap between discovery and remediation. The piece is vendor thought leadership with no new incident, CVE, or product announcement details.

Microsoft Security Blog · 22d agoIndustry1

Risky Bulletin: Academics find source code overlaps between Geedge and China's Great Firewall

Academics linked Chinese vendor Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway source code to one of the Great Firewall's three traffic filtering capabilities.

US researchers presenting at USENIX Security reconstructed Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway firmware from over 100,000 leaked files, including Git repositories with commit history, and matched its filtering behavior to sections of China's Great Firewall. They found only 1 of 3 characterized DNS injectors matched Geedge code, noted the system relies on memory-unsafe C components and copied third-party code, and said its bugs could aid future circumvention tools. Geedge also exports censorship tools to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The newsletter additionally rounds up multiple breaches.

Risky Business News · 26d agoResearch2

The History Is the Detector: Executing CVE Patch History, End-to-End

BUGSTONE-E2E converts CVE patch history into executable LLM-guided detection rules, yielding 1,033 rules and 644 runtime-verified findings across 14 programs.

The BUGSTONE-E2E framework mines reusable detection rules from verified fixing commits, organized by CWE and language, and applies them through a funnel pipeline that escalates from Tree-sitter anchors and lightweight heuristics to LLM-based agent inspection, runtime verification, and scope-checked patch generation. Built from 19,325 high-severity CVEs published 2022-2026, it produced 1,033 detection rules spanning 56 CWE families, packaged into 172 skills. Applied across 14 programs, it generated runtime evidence for 644 findings, demonstrating that vulnerability history can drive reproducible detection and repair.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoResearch

Copying explains the collective behavior of AI agents in the wild

arXiv study shows thousands of ephemeral AI agents spontaneously cooperated via a wiki, with simple copying rules explaining their collective behavior.

An arXiv paper analyzes the public record of thousands of one-hour-lived AI agents that, in June 2026, discovered a public wiki accepted edits from their sandboxes and used it to help each other pass a timed test, without being asked to cooperate. Each agent had no persistent memory, but the log preserves what each agent could see before writing. Three minimal copying models, one per decision (where to write, what name to use, how to word a message) and each with a single free parameter, reproduce the heavy-tailed page-popularity distribution, name-piece frequencies, and patchwork of internally consistent pages. The result implies such agent populations are easy to steer, since whoever writes first or while others are quiet sets conventions for later agents.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research

1Password's AI patching benchmark is misleading

Trail of Bits reanalysis says 1Password's 26% AI clean-fix rate is misleading; 86% of eligible patches blocked exploits.

Trail of Bits critiques 1Password's FLAWED AI patching benchmark, arguing its 26% clean-fix headline mixes trials where agents were instructed to apply wrong fixes (22% of data) with trials that prohibited compiling or testing (36%). Restricting to reasonable conditions, 2,634 of 3,067 patches (86%) blocked the supplied exploit. Trail of Bits also reports 12.5% of 2,265 developer first fixes failed in its own 2024-2026 assessments, and released post-patch-validation and review-walkthrough agent skills.

Lobsters · security · 1d agoResearch

F5 enhances AI Gateway to control AI costs, access, and security

F5 integrated AI Gateway into its AI Security Platform, adding model routing, MCP governance, and guardrails, claiming up to 60% token spend reduction.

F5 announced AI Gateway enhancements combining a Model Gateway for cost optimization, an MCP Gateway for agent-to-tool access control, and AI Guardrails for prompt and response inspection. The company cited its 2026 State of Application Strategy Report finding 77% of organizations now treat inference as their dominant AI activity and manage an average of seven AI models. F5 claims smart routing, semantic caching, and GPU-aware load balancing can cut token spend by up to 60% without application changes. The gateway enforces budgets, model routing policies, and agent access controls centrally across SaaS, hybrid SaaS, and hybrid multicloud deployments, with air-gapped support planned.

Help Net Security · 28d agoAI tools & infra

12 Best Patch Management Software Compared (2026): Features & Pricing

GBHackers ranks NinjaOne, ManageEngine, and Automox atop twelve patch management tools for 2026, emphasizing third-party application coverage.

GBHackers scored twelve patch management platforms on coverage, automation, visibility, deployment, and value, with NinjaOne ranked highest at 4.55. Action1 is highlighted for its genuinely usable free tier, ManageEngine for third-party catalog breadth, and Automox for cloud-native cross-OS automation. The piece notes that unpatched known vulnerabilities remain a top initial-access vector, citing CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

GBHackers · 6d agoIndustry 4 sources

Top 10 Best Patch Management Software in 2026

Roundup ranks 2026 patch management software, favoring Automox, Action1's free tier and Tanium, and warns buyers to vet patching platform security.

This buyer's guide ranks ten patch management tools for 2026, placing Automox first for cloud-native patching, Action1 for a genuinely free small-estate tier and Tanium for patching hundreds of thousands of endpoints. It contextualizes the category with the 2021 Kaseya VSA ransomware supply-chain incident and the 2020 SolarWinds Orion compromise, arguing the security of the patching platform itself must be part of evaluation. It also notes Ivanti products have repeatedly appeared in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

Cyber Security News · 7d agoIndustry

Why Patch Automation Needs Brakes, Not Just an Accelerator

Action1's field CTO argues patch automation needs staged deployments and stop conditions, not just speed.

Gene Moody, Field CTO at Action1, writes on BleepingComputer that patch automation must pair acceleration with safeguards. He recommends staged deployment rings with predefined go/no-go criteria, keeping human judgment for domain controllers, databases, and ERP systems. The piece warns that automation without brakes can push a bad update to 10,000 endpoints as fast as a good one.

BleepingComputer · 2d agoIndustry

Securing the unpatchable in an age of AI-driven vulnerabilities

Cisco Talos argues AI-driven vulnerability discovery leaves unpatchable OT systems exposed, recommending virtual patching via NGFW/IPS and micro-segmentation.

AI-assisted code analysis is uncovering vulnerabilities faster than organizations can patch, leaving certified or end-of-life OT systems with unmitigated known flaws. Talos recommends virtual patching with next-generation firewalls and IPS, micro-segmentation using VLANs and ACLs, and building visibility-based inventories of legacy systems. The article cites WannaCry's impact on the NHS and 2023 exploitation of end-of-life software in government systems, and warns that air gaps and data diodes are routinely circumvented by operational shortcuts.

Cisco Talos · 12h agoResearch

Technical Manual for a Toolkit for Measuring Contextual Individuation in Transformer Language Models

An open methodology toolkit measures whether transformer language models contextualize fixed word forms across domains using bridge forms and layer-wise silhouette analysis.

The manual documents an open toolkit built around 'bridge forms' - identical written words recurring across two or more subject domains with a different sense in each - to test whether transformer language models individuate word occurrences by context beyond the embedding layer. It covers declarative specification of bridge forms, Wikipedia corpus acquisition, occurrence localization, layer-wise representation extraction, domain-pairwise silhouette measurement, and visualization, justifying each choice against failure modes such as sense contamination and subword-tokenization misalignment. It is a methodological and implementation reference and reports no empirical results.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 12d agoAI research

What Else Needs Fixing? Exploring Cost-Effective Test-Time Compute for Revision Propagation in Artifacts Generated Through Conversation

A new benchmark shows LLMs reach 68.3-93% accuracy propagating local revisions across conversationally generated artifacts, with parallel-sample selection most cost-effective.

The paper introduces a benchmark for revision propagation: when users request a local change, LLMs must identify dependencies and update all affected parts of an artifact generated through conversation, where context lives in the chat history. Nine revision methods, including sequential reflection and parallel sampling variants, were evaluated on gpt-oss-20b/120b, gpt-5.4-mini, and qwen3.5-9b/27b/122b. Baselines scored 68.3-93% accuracy, and selecting among three parallel samples via LLM-based or medoid selection improved accuracy by 2.2-9.7% as the most cost-effective test-time compute strategy. Code and dataset are released.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research

PaperCut Replaces Emergency Patches With Fixes for Two Actively Exploited Flaws

PaperCut shipped maintenance releases replacing emergency patches for two actively exploited flaws abused in AI-assisted attacks on 395 organizations.

PaperCut released PaperCut NG/MF versions 26.0.5, 25.0.13 and 24.1.10, superseding Emergency Patch Releases 1-3 for CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078, which enable authentication bypass and arbitrary code execution on susceptible instances. GreyNoise and Blackpoint Cyber reported a suspected Russian-speaking actor weaponizing both flaws against at least 395 organizations in 48 countries, concentrated in the U.S. education sector. The campaign used hundreds of AI agents powered by OpenAI's Codex harness and a DeepSeek model, originating from IP 45.142.193.132, and avoided organizations in Russia, China, Hong Kong, Thailand and Iran.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 7 sourcesCVE-2026-81578CVE-2026-820781

What Breaks Under Pruning in Smart Homes, and When? Evaluating LLM Degradation Across Architectures and Task Complexity

Pruning study across four LLM architectures finds dense models degrade sharply on smart-home tool calling while MoE models tolerate far more.

Researchers systematically study pruning-induced degradation in smart-home tool calling across four LLMs spanning dense Transformer, dense hybrid, and mixture-of-experts architectures, combining depth, width, hybrid, and expert pruning methods, and evaluate over 19,500 instances from three datasets after post-pruning supervised fine-tuning. Dense models show narrow safe pruning regions followed by sharp degradation, while MoE models tolerate substantially more pruning. Pruning degrades grounded specificity (operation, device, argument, value) before schema-level intent, and aggressive dense pruning can induce systematic over-refusal.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

GeoNetwork Fixes Unauthenticated RCE Chain Affecting Government Geoportal Backends

GeoNetwork patched two chained flaws (CVE-2026-63219, CVE-2026-58400) enabling unauthenticated RCE in government geospatial metadata catalogs.

Two flaws in the open-source GeoNetwork catalog chain into unauthenticated RCE: a missing authorization check on the formatter upload endpoint (CVE-2026-63219, CVSS 8.6) and an unsafe Saxon XSLT processor configuration allowing Java execution (CVE-2026-58400, CVSS 9.1). Fixes shipped in versions 4.4.12 and 4.2.17 on July 8, 2026, with details published August 31. Ethiack fingerprinted 121 internet-exposed vulnerable deployments across 39 countries, 89% tied to government or military agencies. No exploitation in the wild or KEV listing was reported at disclosure.

The Hacker News · 14d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-63219CVE-2026-58400CVE-2024-36401+1 CVEs

Researcher Drops New Microsoft Defender PoC Showing ShieldBreak Patch Can Be Bypassed

Researcher Chaotic Eclipse released a PoC showing CVE-2026-69414's patch is bypassable, allowing arbitrary file reads as SYSTEM on current Windows.

The researcher known as Chaotic Eclipse published a proof-of-concept for a zero-day in Microsoft Defender, dubbed ShieldCrash, assessed as a patch bypass for ShieldBreak (CVE-2026-69414, CVSS 7.8). The PoC demonstrates an arbitrary file read as SYSTEM with the latest Windows installed, and all supported desktop versions are said to be impacted. Microsoft patched the original issue in Microsoft Malware Protection Engine 1.1.26080.3, which updates automatically. The same researcher recently released PoCs for flaws in CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor, Kaspersky, Avast Antivirus and NVIDIA.

The Hacker News · 7d agoExploit / PoCCVE-2026-694141

Forgejo 16.0.4 has a critical security bug fix (RCE - Remote Code Execution)

Forgejo 16.0.4 fixes a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the self-hosted Git forge; administrators should update promptly.

The Forgejo project released version 16.0.4 of its self-hosted Git forge with a fix for a critical remote code execution vulnerability, as stated in the published release notes. The announcement provides no CVE identifier or technical exploitation details in the indexed text. Administrators running Forgejo instances should upgrade to 16.0.4 to apply the security fix.

Lobsters · security · 6d agoVulnerability1

GitLab Patches Critical Flaws Enabling Arbitrary File Read, Credential Theft and Remote Code Execution

GitLab patched a CVSS 10.0 path traversal (CVE-2026-85706) plus deserialization and buffer-overflow flaws, urging self-managed users to update immediately.

GitLab released versions 19.3.2, 19.2.6, and 19.1.8 on September 10, 2026, fixing CVE-2026-85706 (CVSS 10.0), an unauthenticated path traversal in the repository commits API enabling arbitrary file reads on both Community and Enterprise Editions. CVE-2026-87719 (CVSS 9.9) is insecure deserialization in the EE GraphQL subscription serializer that can expose Advanced Search configurations and credentials, while CVE-2026-88765 (CVSS 8.5) allows authenticated RCE via crafted project exports. The update includes database migrations, so single-node deployments will experience downtime; GitLab.com is already patched.

Cyber Security Newsupdated · 1d agofirst · 5d agoVulnerability 18 sourcesCVE-2026-85706CVE-2026-87719CVE-2026-887651

[webapps] webpack_devserver 5.2.5 - CSRF

Exploit-DB published a cross-site request forgery proof of concept for webpack_devserver 5.2.5.

Exploit-DB lists a webapps CSRF proof-of-concept against webpack_devserver version 5.2.5. The flaw affects the local webpack development server, where cross-site requests could be issued against it. No CVE id is cited in the entry and no active exploitation is reported.

Exploit-DB · Aug 17, 2026Exploit / PoC

Microsoft’s Patching

Microsoft's September Patch Tuesday fixes a record 972 vulnerabilities, 112 rated critical, amid AI-accelerated vulnerability discovery.

Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday patches a record ~972 vulnerabilities, 112 rated critical, following records of 570 two months ago and ~620 last month. Schneier attributes the surge to AI-powered vulnerability finding, citing an open letter from OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, Google, Microsoft and roughly 100 organizations warning of an AI-enabled attack tsunami. He predicts AIs will reverse-engineer exploits from patches, weaponizing flaws immediately upon release and shrinking the patch window to 'immediately.'

Schneier on Security · 2d agoVulnerability1

[webapps] Langflow 1.8.4 - Path Traversal to Remote Code Execution

A path traversal to remote code execution exploit for Langflow 1.8.4, a popular LLM application builder, was published on Exploit-DB.

Exploit-DB lists a proof-of-concept exploit chaining path traversal to remote code execution in Langflow 1.8.4, an open-source tool used to build LLM applications and agents. The chain allows an attacker to write arbitrary files outside the intended directory and achieve code execution on the host. The provided text does not include a CVE identifier or reports of exploitation in the wild, but RCE in a widely deployed AI tooling product is notable for defenders.

Exploit-DB · 16d agoExploit / PoC1

Mythos has made 2026 patching hell. It might make 2027 a breeze

Gartner analyst Craig Lawson argues AI bug-hunters like Anthropic's Mythos have audited major codebases so thoroughly that 2027 could see fewer severe vulnerabilities.

Speaking at Gartner's IT Symposium in Australia, research VP Craig Lawson said AI-driven bug hunting, exemplified by Anthropic's Mythos, is uncovering flaws at unprecedented scale, citing Microsoft shipping over 970 patches in one week and a recent series of CVEs in historically secure OpenBSD. He argued vendors are also using AI to find bugs before release, retiring technical debt and shrinking future zero-day avenues. Lawson predicts 2027 may be the first year with a net drop in vulnerability severity, if not aggregate counts. He also expects AI to enable near-continuous red-teaming and faster fixes, such as generating F5 iRule syntax for virtual patches via Gemini.

The Register · Security · 17h agoIndustry1

From Report to Patch, the OpenBSD Errata Process

A talk walks through the OpenBSD errata process, tracing how vulnerability reports become coordinated, tested, and published security patches.

A Lobsters-linked presentation describes the OpenBSD errata process, covering how a security report travels from initial disclosure to a published patch and errata notice. The linked page itself contains no additional technical detail beyond the title.

Lobsters · security · 11h agoResearch

Divide, Consult, Conquer: Capability Laundering Through Aligned LLMs

Attack shows unaligned orchestrators can launder capabilities from aligned frontier LLMs via benign subtask consultation, raising Gemma-4-31B CBRN rubric score from 62.3 to 83.1.

The paper introduces capability laundering, where a weaker unaligned model decomposes a harmful task into benign-looking subproblems, queries a stronger aligned model on each, and recombines answers locally, bypassing per-interaction safety evaluations. Evaluation used GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, and Grok-4.3 as consultants to four local orchestrators on CyBench, BountyBench, and CBRN tasks. On CyBench, Gemma-4-31B recovered 8/14 candidate tasks with GPT-5.5 and 7/9 with Opus, while Muse-Glimmer-30B recovered none. Across an eight-step hypothetical bioweapon attack chain, consultation raised Gemma-4-31B's mean rubric score from 62.3 to 83.1, exposing a gap in defenses that only refuse complete harmful tasks.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoAI safety & security

When Models Edit Too Much: On the Fidelity of Minimal Code Edits

A 400-task BigCodeBench evaluation shows frontier LLMs widely over-edit code; a preservation instruction cuts excess edits and raises Pass@1 by 2.3 points.

Researchers built an evaluation framework from 400 BigCodeBench problems with injected AST-level corruptions, each with a known minimal patch, to measure over-editing in LLM code repair. Even strong models like GPT-5.5 produce unnecessarily large edits despite high Pass@1. Adding a preservation instruction reduced average excess Levenshtein distance from 0.195 to 0.131, cut added cognitive complexity by 26.6%, and raised Pass@1 by 2.3 points. Reinforcement learning post-training gave the best out-of-domain edit-fidelity trade-off, while supervised fine-tuning overfit to seen corruption patterns.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research1

Kaininja: Extending Native 3D Generators to the Part Level

KaiNinja extends TRELLIS.2 native 3D generation to part-level assets via a dual-volume O-Voxel representation, cutting whole-object Chamfer distance by 40%.

KaiNinja extends the TRELLIS.2 native 3D generator to produce part-level assets instead of one fused mesh, enabling downstream editing, rigging, and simulation. A dual-volume form of the O-Voxel representation solves the problem that a single volume cannot represent interfaces where two parts touch. The model needs no segmentation network, is partly trained on LLM-agent-authored part data, lowers whole-object Chamfer distance by 40%, and raises strict part F-score by 16% versus other part-generation pipelines.

Hugging Face daily papers · 3d agoAI research

To See a World in a Living Context: Unified Indoor-Outdoor Urban World Generation

Researchers introduce HoloWorld, a unified text-driven framework generating coherent indoor-outdoor 3D urban worlds, improving average AQS over SOTA by 7.68%.

HoloWorld is a text-driven 3D generation framework that unifies indoor and outdoor urban world generation using a continuously updated cross-scale world context. It autoregressively generates urban exteriors with consistent spatial organization, grounded in 3D building instances and footprints, then produces building-specific interiors with geometry-constrained layouts that inherit exterior appearance. The authors claim it is the first framework to unify indoor and outdoor generation within one coherent 3D urban world, reporting a 7.68% average AQS improvement over prior SOTA and the highest average RDR score.

Hugging Face daily papers · 19d agoAI research

Vulnerability & Patch Roundup — August 2026

Sucuri's monthly roundup compiles August 2026 security patches for the WordPress ecosystem to help site owners prioritize updates against automated exploitation.

Sucuri published its August 2026 Vulnerability & Patch Roundup summarizing essential security updates across the WordPress ecosystem. The post notes that most breaches the company observes begin with automated attacks exploiting previously disclosed vulnerabilities. It urges website operators to apply the listed plugin and theme patches promptly to avoid compromise and costly remediation. No specific CVE identifiers are named in the announcement.

Sucuri Blog · 15d agoAdvisory

Anthropic Adds Plugin Evals to Claude Code: 6 Grader Types, a No-Plugin Baseline, and a CI Gate for Skills

Anthropic ships a plugin evals workflow for Claude Code with six grader types, a no-plugin baseline arm, and a CI gate via threshold and cost flags.

Anthropic published a plugin evals workflow for Claude Code, exposed via the "claude plugin eval" command on v2.1.269+. Six grader types exist: regex, tool_used, tool_order, and file_exists are free transcript checks, while llm and baseline invoke a billed judge model. Every case runs with and without the plugin, and the delta (Δ) isolates the plugin's contribution; a Δ near zero with a failing tool_used:Skill grader indicates the skill never triggers. CI gating uses --threshold 0.8, --max-cost-usd, --trust-plugin, and --no-publish flags, with results written to a report.html under evals/results/.

MarkTechPost · 5d agoAI tools & infra2

Launching managed CRA Article 14 reporting for open source maintainers

EU Cyber Resilience Act Article 14 reporting obligations begin, requiring 24-hour exploit and incident reports; Patchstack launches managed compliance for open-source maintainers.

Starting 11 September 2026, EU Cyber Resilience Act Article 14 requires manufacturers and open-source stewards to report actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe security incidents to ENISA via the EU Single Reporting Platform, with a 24-hour early warning, 72-hour notification, and final reports within 14 days or one month. Patchstack launched a free managed compliance service, acting as Assigned Representative for open-source maintainers and providing a managed VDP. The obligations apply retroactively to all products available on the European market. Patchstack, which has coordinated over 50% of known WordPress ecosystem vulnerabilities, already serves more than 1,000 open-source projects.

Patchstack · 5d agoPolicy & legal