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"Blank Slate" Campaign Takes Advantage of Hosting Providers to Spread Ransomware

Unit 42 profiles the Blank Slate malspam campaign: blank emails with double-zipped attachments delivering Cerber ransomware while cycling abused hosting provider domains.

The Blank Slate campaign sends empty emails containing double-zipped archives with macro-enabled Word documents or JavaScript files that launch PowerShell to download ransomware, primarily Cerber, and occasionally Sage 2.0 or Locky. Unit 42 observed 555 campaign domains over seven months, with actors repeatedly registering new domains and cycling abuse of legitimate hosting providers after takedowns. In a five-day January-February 2017 window, at least eight domains across seven IP addresses were observed hosting Cerber payloads.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild1

New AI Attack Hides Malicious Instructions in Normal-Looking Text to Evade Safety Filters

Check Point researchers show crafted prose hides policy-violating instructions that bypass all tested LLM gatekeepers, including GPT-4o mini and Llama Guard 3.

A new prompt-crafting technique embeds malicious payloads inside grammatical, natural-looking text without Base64, invisible Unicode, or obvious encodings, defeating lightweight pre-screening gatekeepers. In testing, all four evaluated gatekeeper models—gpt-4o-mini-2024-07-18, gpt-oss-safeguard:20b, claude-3-haiku-20240307, and llama-guard3:8b—classified the crafted wrappers as safe at a 100% bypass rate across 23 obfuscated prompts. GPT-5 Thinking in high-reasoning mode recovered and acted on the hidden instruction in 17 of 18 tests (~94.4%), often spending over a minute and multiple Python executions. Researchers recommend paraphrasing untrusted input, hardening gatekeeper policies, and applying defense-in-depth controls for agentic deployments.

GBHackers · 5d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

Re: Retrospective by 'gpg.fail' authors

GPG exploitation talk author clarifies a format-string 0day enabling code execution via printf %n writes and a polyglot PEM certificate payload.

Lexi Groves, author of the gpg.fail talk, clarified on oss-security that the first finding was an actual zero-day: a classic printf injection using %n for memory writes, with multiple X.509 certificates in one PEM file to re-enter and defeat ASLR before calling execv@plt. The payload executed the certificate itself, a polyglot file made by inserting a shebang and bash command into the PEM. A second finding was hash-collided by another party before the author could exploit it.

oss-securityupdated · 2h agofirst · 19h agoResearch 8 sources

Parallels Desktop Flaw Lets Non-Admin Mac Users Gain Root, but Intel Macs Can't Install Fix

JFrog disclosed CVE-2026-90894, a 7.8-rated local privilege escalation in Parallels Desktop for Mac, patched only in version 27, which Intel Macs cannot install.

JFrog researcher Yuval Moravchick disclosed CVE-2026-90894 (dubbed ParaShells, CVSS 7.8), a local privilege escalation in Parallels Desktop for Mac that lets non-admin users run code as root. The root-level prl_disp_service listens on a world-writable socket, and argument injection into a tar command via QProcess::splitCommand and the --use-compress-program option yields code execution as root, demonstrated on Parallels Desktop 26.4.0 build 57513 on Apple silicon. The fix appears in version 27.0.0, but Parallels Desktop 27 requires Apple silicon, leaving Intel Macs on the 26.x line with no build JFrog describes as fixed. No exploitation in the wild has been reported and Parallels has not published a statement.

The Hacker News · 6h agoVulnerability 4 sourcesCVE-2026-90894

[AINews] 10% worse, 100x cheaper, 10000x faster: Why Simulation is taking over

Latent Space argues AI training pipeline stages—rewards, data, teachers, curricula, environments—are flipping from human-made to model-made simulation.

Latent Space's AINews essay traces how each component of AI training has turned synthetic since 2022: reward models (InstructGPT, RLAIF), synthetic pretraining data (Microsoft Phi, NVIDIA Nemotron-4 340B), model teachers (Alpaca, DeepSeek-R1 distillation), and self-generated curricula (Self-Rewarding Language Models, SPIN). In 2026 it highlights Karpathy's autoresearch loop—700 experiments yielding 20 kept improvements, cutting GPT-2 training time from 2.02 to 1.80 hours—and Z.ai's GLM-5.3 fully synthetic RL environment, judging, and verification stack. It frames these shifts as 'simulation': 10% worse but 100x cheaper and 10,000x faster than human equivalents.

Latent Space · 25d agoAI industry

Evaluating Time-Series Foundation Models and Multimodal Dietary Context for CGM Forecasting

Study finds zero-shot time-series foundation models underperform on CGM forecasting; fine-tuned Chronos-Bolt cuts RMSE up to 18.4% and dietary context adds signal.

The paper evaluates time-series foundation models for continuous glucose monitoring forecasting across eight public datasets covering Type 1 diabetes, Type 2 diabetes, and non-diabetes populations. Under a unified protocol, zero-shot foundation models did not consistently outperform baselines like Elastic Net and PatchTST, but lightweight fine-tuning did, with fine-tuned Chronos-Bolt reducing RMSE by 6.5%-18.4% in the T1D cohort and 8.6%-18.2% in the non-diabetes/T2D cohort. A residual-based fusion framework adding dietary context from CGMacros reduced overall RMSE by about 3% and postprandial RMSE by about 15% versus CGM-only baselines.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research

Crooks Are Buying Your Expired Domains and Using Them to Deliver Malware

Infoblox finds dropcatch expired domains fuel malware delivery and C2, with actor Sable Squirrel spending ~$7M on 10,000+ domains.

Infoblox Threat Intel reports that in H1 2026 dropcatch (re-registered expired) domains made up nearly 20% of all new registrations, about 65,000 per day, inheriting reputation and traffic that attackers exploit. Threat actor Sable Squirrel spent nearly $7 million on 10,000+ expired domains, running Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Australian streaming platforms (Xoilac, Cakhia, 90phut) that double as C2 servers for Quasar RAT, AsyncRAT, DCRat and Remcos RAT. Scavenger actors like Shady Squirrel acquire previously compromised domains and feed inherited traffic to SocGholish and tech support scam networks.

Security Affairs · Aug 16, 2026Threat actor

Testing race conditions with memory access tracing and stack-based delay injection

Google Project Zero released MAccConc, Linux kernel tooling that traces memory accesses to explore and test race condition interleavings.

A Google Project Zero researcher published MAccConc (Memory Access Concurrency), tooling for exploring possible interleavings of multithreaded test cases in the Linux kernel, available on GitHub. The tools use KCOV with ASAN outline-mode instrumentation to record per-access memory traces, enabling automatic testing of all A-B-A interleavings plus terminal and GUI explorers for manual analysis. The work targets confirming race condition candidates, building reliable regression tests, and enabling concurrency fuzzing, drawing on ideas from SKI and Ned Williamson's sockfuzzer.

Google Project Zero · 8d agoResearch1

One Symptom, Three Levers: A Critical Review of On-Policy Self-Distillation

A review paper frames on-policy self-distillation collapse as governed by three levers: token weighting, privileged information, and guidance decay.

The paper critically reviews On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), where a language model trains on its own generations scored token-by-token by a teacher conditioned on privileged information such as reference solutions or environment feedback. It identifies collapse, the progressive narrowing of producible reasoning paths, as the dominant failure mode and analyzes it through three levers: signal weighting, the nature of privileged information, and teacher dynamics. The review is restricted to mathematical reasoning, reports no new experiments, and offers a shared vocabulary separating settled findings from disputed ones.

Hugging Face daily papers · 22d agoAI research

SECURITY AFFAIRS MALWARE NEWSLETTER ROUND 111

Security Affairs malware newsletter Round 111 roundup; the provided page text contains only cookie-consent boilerplate with no story details.

Security Affairs published Round 111 of its malware newsletter, a periodic roundup of recent malware coverage. The provided page text contains only cookie-consent language, so no specific stories, actors, or incidents can be extracted.

Security Affairs · 24d agoMalware

What the AI Warning Letter Completely Missed

Opinion piece argues the recent AI warning letter identifies a risk window but omits which actors pose risks and who can mitigate.

This Dark Reading commentary critiques a recent AI warning letter for correctly identifying an approaching risk window while failing to name who is coming through it or who will close it. The piece is brief opinion commentary on AI risk discourse rather than a technical report.

Dark Reading · 13d agoAI safety & security

Safety for Whom? Refusing the Right Subset of a Topic, Not the Whole Topic

Multiverse Computing's Hugging Face post argues language models should refuse only the relevant subset of a topic instead of over-refusing whole subjects.

A Hugging Face blog post by Multiverse Computing examines refusal granularity in language models, arguing models should refuse the relevant subset of a topic rather than the entire topic. No full article text was available for additional technical detail.

Hugging Face Blog · 8d agoAI safety & security

TART: A Modular Tool for Technique-Aware Audio-to-Tablature Guitar Transcription

TART pipeline transcribes guitar audio to tablature with fingering and technique labels, outperforming prior baselines by up to 8.5 Tab F1 points.

TART is a modular four-stage pipeline for audio-to-tablature guitar transcription, combining an audio-to-MIDI transcription model, an expressive technique classifier, an audio-conditioned T5 encoder-decoder for string-fret assignment, and an automated tablature generator. In zero-shot evaluation on GuitarSet, EGDB, and two noisy augmented benchmarks, it averages 81.35% audio-to-MIDI F50 (+6.67 over the best baseline), 71.8% string-fret Tab F1 (+8.5), and 54.08% end-to-end Tab F1. The authors state it is the first framework to generate tablature with both fingering and expressive technique annotations directly from guitar audio.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research2

Shared Hosting at Risk: LiteSpeed Enterprise Bug Can Grant Root from a Single Tenant

Critical LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise flaw (pre-6.3.7) lets a low-privilege shared-hosting tenant escape CageFS isolation and gain root; forced update urged.

cPanel warned that a critical privilege-escalation vulnerability in LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise (fixed in 6.3.7) lets a malicious low-privilege website user bypass account isolation controls including CloudLinux CageFS and gain root on shared-hosting servers, enabling cross-tenant compromise. No CVE, severity rating, or technical details have been published, and it is unclear whether the flaw is being exploited. This is the third root-level LiteSpeed escape on cPanel servers since May, following CVE-2026-48172 and CVE-2026-54420, which were actively exploited and added to CISA's KEV catalog.

Security Affairs · 1d agoVulnerability 2 sourcesCVE-2026-48172CVE-2026-54420

I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop your coding agent from burying the answer

Developer releases I-have-ADHD, an open-source skill that stops coding agents from burying direct answers under verbose output.

A GitHub project titled I-have-ADHD packages a 'skill' intended to make AI coding agents answer directly instead of hiding the answer inside lengthy output. It gained traction on Hacker News with 45 points and 42 comments. It targets prompt/agent configuration rather than introducing a new model or infrastructure component.

Hacker News · AI · 8d agoAI tools & infraHN 45↑ · 42 comments1

FLAT: Resampling Image and Text into 1D Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal Tokens for Retrieval and Generation

FLAT jointly trains a multimodal encoder with text-to-image and image-to-text decoders, producing flexible-length tokens that hit 83.1 GenEval on T2I after fine-tuning.

FLAT (Flexible-Length Aligned Transmodal representations) is a pre-training framework that jointly optimizes a shared multimodal encoder with T2I and I2T decoders, combining contrastive alignment with bidirectional cross-modal generative objectives. It maps visual and textual inputs into a unified continuous 1D sequence space and uses nested dropout over prefix-K tokens for dynamic output lengths. A single pre-training stage supports cross-modal retrieval and generation (71.1 GenEval), with task-specific fine-tuning reaching 83.1 GenEval on T2I, 40.5 BLEU-4 and 138.6 CIDEr on MS-COCO captioning, and strong Recall@5 on MS-COCO and Flickr30K.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research

TempCloze: Can Video-LLMs Identify the Missing Middle?

TempCloze benchmark tests Video-LLMs' temporal reasoning with 1,521 videos, finding temporal alignment is the primary failure mode across 31 models.

TempCloze is a video cloze benchmark in which models must identify the true missing middle clip given the beginning and ending clips, using 1,521 carefully filtered videos from seven sources, mostly long-take and egocentric footage. Distractors are constructed along three dimensions: Semantic, Alignment and Progression, with shared scenes and objects to reduce appearance cues. Evaluation of 10 proprietary and 21 open-source Video-LLMs found Alignment is the primary bottleneck, with models often recognizing plausible semantics and local event progression but struggling with temporal alignment.

Hugging Face daily papers · 16d agoAI research

Show HN: Ordewell – turn one goal into an ordered plan of coding-agent tasks

Ordewell is an open-source tool that decomposes a single goal into an ordered plan of coding-agent tasks, posted on Hacker News.

Ordewell, shared as a Show HN project on GitHub, converts one high-level goal into an ordered plan of tasks for coding agents to execute. The post received 40 points and 29 comments on Hacker News. It focuses on task planning and orchestration for autonomous coding agents.

Hacker News · AI · 1d agoAI tools & infraHN 40↑ · 29 comments

Fwd: XZ Utils 5.8.4 and a security fix

XZ Utils 5.8.4 fixes an invalid memory write that occurs when a decoder is reinitialized after allocation failure in 5.8.3 and older.

XZ Utils 5.8.4 has been released with a security fix for versions 5.8.3 and older. The flaw is an invalid memory write that can occur when a decoder is reinitialized after an allocation failure. The announcement was posted on the oss-security mailing list by Sam James pointing to the upstream stable release. Users and distributions running affected versions should upgrade to 5.8.4.

oss-security · 7d agoVulnerability

There Is No Patch Tuesday on the Blockchain: Why Solidity Developers Need Fusion-Grade AppSec Before They Deploy

Checkmarx argues Solidity developers need pre-deployment AppSec because disclosure-to-weaponization time has collapsed from 840 days to 1.6 days.

A Checkmarx write-up contrasts traditional software patch cycles with blockchain development, where there is no Patch Tuesday and fixes require on-chain upgrades. It cites stats that median disclosure-to-weaponization time collapsed from 840 days to 1.6 days and that 80% of exploitations now occur on or before disclosure day. The piece advocates fusion-grade application security for Solidity teams before contracts deploy.

Checkmarx · Aug 17, 2026Research1

Merchants of Insecurity

Opinion essay titled Merchants of Insecurity, apparently critiquing security industry practices; no article body was included in the feed.

The feed provides only the title and a comments link for this Lobsters-shared post from blog.happyfellow.dev; no article text was available. Based on the title, it appears to be an opinion piece about incentives in the security industry, possibly arguing vendors profit from perpetuating insecurity.

Lobsters · security · 21d agoIndustry

cPanel LiteSpeed Web Server Vulnerability Allows Shared Server Users to Gain Root-Level Access

Critical LiteSpeed Enterprise flaw fixed in 6.3.7 lets low-privilege shared-hosting users escalate to root and bypass CageFS.

cPanel issued an urgent advisory for a critical privilege escalation in LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise versions before 6.3.7, allowing a low-privilege shared-hosting account to gain root-level server control and bypass tenant isolation controls including CloudLinux CageFS. Root access would let attackers access other hosted sites, steal databases and credentials, deploy phishing pages, and install backdoors. Administrators are urged to upgrade to 6.3.7 immediately via lsup.sh and to review privileged account activity, cron jobs, SSH keys, and system binaries; no CVE identifier was published.

Cyber Security News · 1d agoVulnerability

Right Tool, Right Job: Native-Language Evaluation, Tokenizer Sensitivity, and Methodological Findings from a French-Only BabyLM

French BabyLM entry METRON-FR (125M GPT-2, 92.47M words) shows tokenizer artifacts dominate child-scale zero-shot evaluation; proposes standard diagnostics.

METRON-FR is a 125M-parameter GPT-2 pretrained on 92.47M French words, submitted to the BabyLM 2026 Strict track, scoring 85.97% on the native Quebec-French QFrBLiMP benchmark and 62.80% on the BabyLM-weighted leaderboard. A cross-lingual GLUE protocol combining French task-data translation with rank-16 LoRA shows relational tasks gain while world-knowledge tasks regress. Bilingual Lexicon Induction reaches p@1 of 68.84%, 18x above chance, and ablations show single-token zero-shot scoring is dominated by tokenizer and template artifacts at child scale.

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

Roland is getting into generative AI music with Melody Flip

Roland launched Melody Flip, a DAW plugin that generates genre-themed MIDI loops rather than complete songs like Suno or Udio.

Roland's Melody Flip is a DAW plug-in offering around 250 genre-based 'Palettes' for generating melodies, chord progressions, basslines, and drum patterns, either from scratch or derived from a reference track. Users can control genre, note density, BPM, and key but cannot use text prompts, and outputs are simple loops with General MIDI-style tones intended for MIDI export into a DAW. The launch follows well-received hardware releases like the SH-4d, Gaia 2, and TR-1000, though music-community sentiment toward generative AI may limit goodwill.

The Verge · AI · 12d agoAI industry

Cliff Stoll’s DEF CON Talk

Schneier on Security posts about Cliff Stoll's DEF CON talk; the visible text provides no substantive details about its content.

Schneier on Security published a brief post referencing Cliff Stoll's talk at DEF CON. The available text consists almost entirely of standard blog navigation, author biography, and archive listings, with no concrete details about the talk itself. As a general security-community item, it carries no direct risk impact for defenders.

Schneier on Securityupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoIndustry 2 sources1

CodeTD: Topology of Attention Detects Hallucinations in Code LLMs

CodeTD detects hallucinations in code LLMs before execution by analyzing topological patterns of attention maps, outperforming recent baselines.

CodeTD applies topological data analysis (TDA) to code LLM attention maps to quantify prompt-generation mismatch as a pre-execution correctness signal. Experiments cover HumanEval, MBPP, BigCodeBench, and MultiPL-E across 5 programming languages and 10 code LLMs up to 34B parameters. The method outperforms recent baselines and transfers between coding benchmarks, helping catch code that fails the task or embeds security vulnerabilities.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research1

Omni-Streaming Thinking

Omni-Streaming Thinking fixes premature cross-modal commitment in streaming omni-modal models via pending claims verified against modality-specific evidence, beating baselines by over 10%.

The paper identifies 'premature cross-modal commitment', where streaming models keep relaying early visual interpretations even after audio contradicts them. OST generates evidence-linked pending claims with future verification intervals, stores audio and visual evidence separately, and refutes claims when contradictory evidence appears. Built on a frozen Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct backbone with lightweight adaptation, it outperforms open baselines by more than 10% relative on five streaming and audio-visual benchmarks. On the new OST-DiagBench it reaches d-prime 2.95 versus at most 1.38 for open baselines, while reducing vision-induced auditory hallucinations.

Hugging Face daily papers · 3d agoAI research1

Hackers Can Hide Malicious AI Commands Inside Normal English to Bypass Security Filters

Check Point's PuzzleMask technique hides malicious prompts in ordinary English that fast gatekeeper models miss but high-reasoning downstream models execute.

Check Point researchers disclosed PuzzleMask, a technique concealing policy-breaking instructions in natural-language prose without encodings or invisible characters. Fast screening models classified all 23 crafted wrappers as safe, while a high-reasoning model recovered and acted on the hidden instruction in 17 of 18 tests (94.4%). The gap stems from capability imbalance between gatekeeper and target models, with defenses including paraphrasing untrusted input, stricter self-referential wording rules, and output/tool-call monitoring.

Cyber Security News · 5d agoAI safety & security1

[0day-rubbish] core-admin 1.0.164 (build 16468) Systemic shell command injection via ineffective quote escaping (8.8)

0day Rubbish discloses a CVSS 8.8 shell command injection in core-admin 1.0.164 via ineffective quote escaping, enabling authenticated remote code execution.

0day Rubbish Research Team publicly disclosed a systemic shell command injection (CWE-78) in core-admin 1.0.164 (build 16468). The flaw stems from ineffective quote escaping and scores 8.8 (AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H). The disclosure does not mention a CVE identifier or observed exploitation in the wild.

Full Disclosure · 8d agoVulnerability1