Search: “Meduza”

Hackers expose donor data from Russian fundraisers for Ukrainians, political prisoners

Hackers breached the Stripe-WooCommerce integrations of Russian fundraisers Davayte and You Are Not Alone, exposing donor emails and partial card details.

Unknown hackers accessed the payment accounts of two Russian fundraising projects, Davayte and You Are Not Alone, in mid-August via a shared Stripe-WooCommerce integration used to run online auctions. Exposed data included donor email addresses and, in some cases, the last four digits of payment cards and issuing bank names; full card numbers, cardholder names, and donation details were not taken. Stripe blocked the unauthorized access before the entire donor email database could be downloaded and found no evidence of fraudulent transactions. Attribution remains unclear, with organizers unable to rule out Russian security services; both groups are designated 'undesirable' organizations in Russia, making donor identities sensitive, and a separate alleged leak of data from 669 Stripe merchants by a hacker named 'Satanic' has no confirmed connection.

The Record·Sep 2, 13:06 UTC · 14d agoData breach

Medusa ransomware tallies hundreds of new victims, says updated advisory on group’s tactics

CISA, FBI, and HHS updated their Medusa ransomware advisory, reporting over 500 victims and detailing the gang's access-broker and exploit tactics.

A joint advisory update from CISA, the FBI, and HHS expands the March 2025 Medusa guidance, drawing on a year of FBI investigations. The ransomware-as-a-service group's known victim tally grew from more than 300 to more than 500 between March 2025 and April 2026, with the Healthcare and Public Health sector frequently hit. Medusa pays access brokers $100 to $1 million, has exploited flaws such as Fortra GoAnywhere and BeyondTrust vulnerabilities, and leverages newly announced exploits within 24 hours, sometimes a week before public disclosure. The group uses living-off-the-land techniques, remote monitoring and management software, and RDP for lateral movement, and has been linked to actors including Microsoft-tracked Storm-1175 and North Korean hackers targeting healthcare.

CyberScoop·Aug 18, 17:19 UTC · 29d agoRansomware in the wild

More than 200 victims of Medusa ransomware identified over the last year, CISA says

CISA and FBI update Medusa ransomware advisory, reporting more than 500 total victims and warning the gang operationalizes newly disclosed exploits within 24 hours.

CISA and the FBI updated their March 2025 advisory, stating Medusa actors had hit more than 500 victims as of April 2026, up from 300 in 2025, with a focus on healthcare and critical infrastructure. The agencies say Medusa rapidly adopts newly announced exploits, sometimes using them up to a week before public vulnerability disclosure, but does not develop its own zero-days, preferring access obtained from unknown sources. The gang moved to an affiliate model in 2023, offers up to $1 million for exclusive initial access brokers, and uses credential stealers plus legitimate remote access tools including AnyDesk, Atera, ConnectWise and Splashtop. No new victims have appeared on its leak site since April, after the shutdown of the University of Mississippi Medical Center drew significant law enforcement attention.

The Record·Aug 18, 18:11 UTC · 29d agoRansomware in the wild1

Medusa ransomware gang has hit over 500 organizations, CISA warns

FBI, CISA, and HHS warn Medusa ransomware has hit over 500 organizations across critical infrastructure since June 2021, using phishing and unpatched flaws.

An updated joint advisory from CISA, FBI, and HHS states Medusa ransomware has affected more than 500 organizations, spanning healthcare, defense, manufacturing, government, IT, financial services, education, insurance, and legal sectors. Since early 2023 Medusa has operated a ransomware-as-a-service affiliate model and buys access from initial access brokers for $100 to $1 million. Affiliates gain entry via phishing and unpatched internet-facing software, exploiting newly disclosed flaws in ScreenConnect, Fortinet EMS, Fortra GoAnywhere, and BeyondTrust within 24 hours. The group runs double extortion, giving victims 48 hours before leak-site publication, with $10,000 in cryptocurrency buying a one-day delay.

Help Net Security·Aug 19, 00:00 UTC · 29d agoRansomware in the wild

Over 500 Critical Infrastructure Organizations Hit by Medusa Ransomware

FBI warns Medusa ransomware-as-a-service has hit over 500 critical infrastructure organizations while significantly improving its tactics, techniques and procedures.

The FBI warned that the Medusa ransomware-as-a-service operation has compromised more than 500 critical infrastructure organizations. The agency said the group has significantly enhanced its tactics, techniques and procedures, making it harder for defenders to counter. Defenders in critical infrastructure sectors should review exposure and harden against Medusa's updated TTPs.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 19, 10:50 UTC · 28d agoRansomware in the wild

Performance of Clinical AI System and Physicians and Frontier Language Models in primary care diagnostics

Clinical AI system Doctorina achieved 82.0% primary-care diagnostic concordance versus 57.0% for physicians across 150 synthetic consultations.

The study compared Doctorina, eight physicians, and four standalone frontier language models on 150 synthetic Polish-language primary-care consultations. Doctorina achieved 82.0% Top-1 diagnostic concordance versus 57.0% for physicians (25.0-point difference, 95% CI 17.7-32.7) and 97.3% versus 85.0% primary-or-reference-differential concordance. Normalized workup and treatment scores were 89.4 versus 66.9 and 83.7 versus 61.2. Kimi K3 ranked next on diagnosis, while Claude Opus 5 led the closely spaced management estimates among Opus, Doctorina and Kimi.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:25 UTC · 8d agoAI research

MaaS Campaign Combines ClickFix, ErrTraffic and Cruciferra

eSentire uncovered a malware-as-a-service campaign pairing ClickFix social-engineering lures with the ErrTraffic and Cruciferra malware families.

Threat researchers at eSentire identified an ongoing malware-as-a-service (MaaS) campaign that combines ClickFix social-engineering lures with the ErrTraffic and Cruciferra malware families. The campaign relies on ClickFix-style deception to trick users into executing malicious actions that deliver the malware. Further technical detail on affected sectors or infection volumes was not provided in the disclosure.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 19, 15:00 UTC · 28d agoMalware in the wild

Week in review: Records allegedly stolen from Azure tenants, Medusa ransomware hits 500+ orgs

Week in review: Medusa ransomware hit 500+ orgs per CISA, millions of Azure tenant records allegedly stolen, SafePal and French tax authority breaches disclosed.

Help Net Security's weekly roundup covers the FBI, CISA, and HHS joint advisory update reporting Medusa ransomware has breached more than 500 organizations since June 2021, and threat actor TheHatman's claim of millions of employee records stolen from Azure tenants of Fortune 500 firms including McDonald's, Vodafone, Kyndryl, and Tata Consultancy Services, per Hudson Rock. It also covers the SafePal breach affecting 39,798 customers, France's DGFiP breach exposing data on 678,000 individuals, and UT San delaying its fall semester after a cyberattack. Security items include critical unauthenticated GitLab flaw CVE-2026-19478, an actively exploited patched macOS Screen Sharing flaw deploying a cryptominer, US charges against 17 Mabna Institute Iranian hackers over 31TB of stolen academic data, and Google Mandiant's AI agents finding 100+ high-severity vulnerabilities.

Help Net Security·Aug 23, 00:00 UTC · 25d agoData breach in the wildCVE-2026-19478

Rosetta at AlexandriaX-2026: LoRA-Adapted NileChat for Context-Aware Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation

Rosetta ranks 4th and 5th in AlexandriaX-2026 dialectal Arabic dialogue translation using a LoRA adapter on NileChat-3B, finding limited pretraining benefit.

The Rosetta system for the AlexandriaX-2026 shared task fine-tunes a LoRA adapter on NileChat-3B for context-aware English-to-dialectal Arabic dialogue translation. The adapter was additionally pretrained on MADAR and PADIC dialect corpora for the unconstrained track. It achieved spBLEU 26.10 (4th, constrained) and 25.09 (5th, unconstrained). External dialect pretraining improved only two of thirteen dialects while slightly degrading overall performance, indicating negative transfer.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 16:15 UTC · 7d agoAI research1

Enhancing Accessibility of Medical Texts through Large Language Model-Driven Plain Language Adaptation

Study shows LLMs with Mixture-of-Agents and QLoRA finetuning effectively simplify medical texts into plain language while preserving content.

The paper evaluates Plain Language Adaptation (PLA) using GPT-4o-mini, Gemini-1.5-pro, and LLaMA in zero-shot and few-shot settings. It compares prompting strategies, QLoRA finetuning across models, and integrates Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) techniques for robustness. Results demonstrate LLM-driven PLA makes healthcare texts more comprehensible while retaining essential content.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 16:33 UTC · 1d agoAI research

ModaLens: Measuring Image Sensitivity in Report-Conditioned Medical VLMs

ModaLens image-swap audit shows report availability cuts MedGemma-27B image sensitivity on MIMIC-CXR from 20.94% to 4.26% answer changes.

ModaLens is a paired image-swap audit measuring how report availability affects image sensitivity in report-conditioned medical VLMs. On MedGemma-27B across 3,199 paired MIMIC-CXR cases from 293 patients (14 questions per case), generated answers changed on 4.26% of image-swap trials with the report versus 20.94% without it, a 16.7-point paired difference (95% CI 15.6-17.7). The original prompt with a lowercase first-token readout gave 4.70% versus 17.07%, and the direction replicated in two further model lineages. Labels derived from reports limit conclusions about visual correctness; code, prompts, and run records are publicly released.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 13, 20:00 UTC · 3d agoAI research

Tables Decoded: DELTA for Structure, TARQA for Understanding

DELTA extracts tables into compact OTSL text and TARQA fine-tunes LLMs on it, beating VLM baselines on table QA.

DELTA separates physical structure recognition, logical structure recognition, and OCR to output tables in Optimised Table Structure Language (OTSL), a compact unified format encoding cell arrangements and content. It achieves TEDS-Structure scores comparable to state-of-the-art methods across FinTabNet, PubTabNet, and PubTables-1M, with robustness tested on a curated Hindi benchmark, TORQUE. TARQA, an LLM fine-tuned on OTSL sequences, gains 9.3 percentage points on WTQ TabQA and 9.2 points on FinTabNetQA TabVQA; code, models, and the benchmark are released on GitHub.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 16:59 UTC · 1d agoAI research

New Android malware relays bank cards to fraudsters while victims still hold them

Group-IB discovered WindRelay Android malware that streams NFC card data in real time, paired with SpyNote RAT, targeting Czechia, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

Group-IB identified WindRelay, an Android malware that uses NFC to communicate with victims' payment cards and relays the exchange live to attacker-controlled terminals. Fraudsters impersonate bank staff by phone, trick victims into installing a personalized SpyNote RAT, then silently deploy WindRelay to cash out using the victim-entered PIN. Researchers traced 23 samples on VirusTotal from November 2025 to July 2026, four C2 IPs, and campaigns against Czechia, Slovakia, and Slovenia. No affected apps were found on Google Play, and Google Play Protect detects known versions.

Help Net Security·Aug 17, 08:29 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Malware in the wild

Storm-1175 Replaces Medusa With New StormEncryptor Ransomware

Microsoft reports China-linked ransomware group Storm-1175 switched from Medusa to a new C++ strain, StormEncryptor, likely exploiting N-able flaw CVE-2026-18577.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence reports that the financially motivated, China-linked group Storm-1175 began deploying a new ransomware strain called StormEncryptor on August 2, 2026, replacing its previous Medusa ransomware. StormEncryptor is written in C++, appends the .encrypted extension to files, and drops a !!!README_FIRST!!!.txt ransom note in each scanned directory. Microsoft assesses the group is likely exploiting CVE-2026-18577, an authentication bypass in N-able disclosed on August 2, 2026 and added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog the next day. Since 2023, Storm-1175 has exploited more than 16 vulnerabilities in products including Microsoft Exchange, Ivanti, ConnectWise ScreenConnect, JetBrains TeamCity, SimpleHelp, CrushFTP, and GoAnywhere MFT, often moving from initial access to data theft and ransomware deployment within days.

Security Affairs·Aug 13, 08:09 UTC · Aug 13, 2026Ransomware in the wildCVE-2026-18577CVE-2026-1731CVE-2023-21529+15 CVEs1

Agnes-AI/Agnes-3.0-Flash — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

Agnes AI releases open-weight Agnes-3.0-Flash Preview, a 33B multimodal model with 262k-token context under Apache 2.0.

Agnes AI released Agnes-3.0-Flash Preview, an open-weights multimodal checkpoint with 33B parameters and a 262,144-token context window under Apache 2.0. The model supports text, image, and video understanding, tool calling, and adjustable reasoning effort. The repo clarifies this preview checkpoint is distinct from the production/API Agnes 3.0 Flash model, which uses a different configuration with a 1M-token context window. Reported reference results include IFBench 74.20 and SciCode 38.08 against peers such as Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Kimi K2.5, and MiniMax M3.

Hugging Face trending models·Sep 11, 15:50 UTC · 5d agoModel release

Legora reviewed 41 documents in minutes with GPT-6 Astra

Legal-tech firm Legora says GPT-6 Astra reviewed 41 financial documents in minutes, catching all four planted errors and boosting accuracy about 40%.

Legal technology company Legora reported using OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to review 41 financial-statement documents in minutes. The workflow found all four planted errors and improved performance by nearly 40% compared to prior processes. The case study highlights AI-assisted financial review adoption in professional services.

OpenAI News·Sep 3, 12:00 UTC · 13d agoAI industry

CISA promotes a fresh way to deter cyberattackers: Lie to them

CISA issued first-time guidance advising critical infrastructure operators to deploy honeypots, honeytokens, and decoys to detect and distract intruders.

CISA published 'Using Cyber Decoys to Strengthen Detection and Response,' a 22-page guide marking the agency's first guidance on decoys such as honeypots and honeytokens. Acting executive director Chris Butera described decoys as a low-cost, high-fidelity way to detect adversaries already inside networks, complementing zero-trust and assume-compromise approaches. The guidance covers decoy principles, definitions, deployment scenarios, and is aimed especially at resource-constrained critical infrastructure sectors.

CyberScoop·Sep 16, 20:22 UTC · 4h agoAdvisory

Recorded FutureがGartner® サイバー脅威インテリジェンス・テクノロジー部門のMagic Quadrant™のリーダーの１社に位置づけられました。

Recorded Future·Aug 5, 00:00 UTC · Aug 5, 2026Phishing & fraud

ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF — new model trending #3 on Hugging Face

ISTA-DASLab releases GSQ-RCO non-uniform GGUF quantizations of Qwen3.8-27B down to 2.5 bpw, with task-lossless IQ3_S matching BF16 benchmark scores.

ISTA-DASLab released GGUF quantizations of Qwen3.8-27B produced with GSQ (Gumbel-Softmax Quantization) and RCO (Riemannian Constrained Optimization), non-uniform methods that allocate per-tensor precision via gradient-based search under a total size budget. Four checkpoints range from 2.50 bpw (8.4 GB) to 3.50 bpw (11.8 GB), plus a BF16 vision projector (mmproj) enabling multimodal use. The recommended IQ3_S build is task-lossless, matching the BF16 base exactly on AIME25 (100.00) and LiveCodeBench v6 (85.71) at roughly one fifth of the BF16 size. Optional -mtp variants add a Multi-Token Prediction head for speculative decoding in llama.cpp.

Hugging Face trending models·Aug 28, 18:38 UTC · 19d agoModel release1

Multiple ArtraDownloader Variants Used by BITTER to Target Pakistan

BITTER used three ArtraDownloader variants since 2015 to target Pakistan, China, and Saudi Arabia, deploying BitterRAT and exploiting CVE-2017-11882 in one wave.

Palo Alto Unit 42 documents ArtraDownloader, a previously unreported downloader family used by the suspected South Asian group BITTER, with three variants and roughly 80 unique samples dating back to February 2015. Between September 2018 and January 2019, BITTER used spearphishing documents hosted on compromised Pakistani websites to target Pakistan and, for the first time, Saudi Arabia; one RTF sample exploited the EQNEDT vulnerability CVE-2017-11882. The downloader retrieves BitterRAT over HTTP, uses simple registry keys for persistence, and byte-level string obfuscation. Infrastructure overlap with the previously reported MY24 InPage-exploit payload was also observed.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 13:22 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wildCVE-2017-11882

WindRelay Malware Pairs With SpyNote RAT in Live-Call Scam

New WindRelay Android NFC-relay malware paired with SpyNote RAT enables real-time card cloning during live scam calls.

Infosecurity Magazine reports on WindRelay, a new Android NFC relay malware that was used together with the SpyNote RAT. The malware let a fraudster relay a victim's contactless card data in real time during a live social-engineering call, enabling the card to be cloned mid-call. The attack combines mobile RAT infection with near-field-communication relaying to defeat contactless payment protections.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 12, 14:30 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Malware in the wild

New IoT Malware Uses Public Linux Exploits to Gain Root and Launch DDoS Attacks

Nozomi details KATARU, an IoT botnet that brute-forces Telnet, exploits public Linux kernel flaws for root access, and launches multi-protocol DDoS attacks.

KATARU, discovered after honeypot Telnet brute-force activity from a Vietnamese IP, downloads an ARM payload (vlxx.arm) and attempts privilege escalation by editing /etc/passwd or exploiting CVE-2026-46300 (Fragnesia), CVE-2026-43284 (Dirty Frag), and CVE-2026-31431 (Copy Fail). It combines Mirai-style TCP, UDP, ICMP, HTTP, QUIC and DNS floods with application attacks against Minecraft, FiveM, OpenVPN and WireGuard. The malware uses X25519 and ChaCha20-Poly1305 encrypted C2, unusually broad persistence across systemd, cron, init frameworks, and Android hooks, plus anti-debugging and decoy traffic to hinder analysis. Implementers copied x86 shellcode into the ARM binary and reused an RFC 7748 test-vector key, indicating low-quality but rapidly evolving commodity development.

GBHackers·updated Sep 11, 14:17 UTC · 5d ago·first Sep 11, 09:07 UTC · 5d agoMalware in the wild 2 sourcesCVE-2026-46300CVE-2026-43284CVE-2026-31431

Guildma (Astaroth) malware infection from Brazilian Portuguese email, (Tue, Sep 1st)

Guildma (Astaroth) malware spread via geofenced Brazilian Portuguese phishing emails, using zip archives, shortcuts, and AutoIt loaders.

SANS researchers documented a Guildma (Astaroth) malware infection initiated on 2026-08-31 by a malicious Brazilian Portuguese email offering a DocuSign-themed PDF. The delivery link is geofenced to Brazil and requires Brazilian Portuguese browser and OS language settings, otherwise serving a legitimate installer. The infection chain uses a zip archive containing a Windows shortcut that retrieves a DLL saved as an alternate data stream, which installs a compiled AutoIt package for persistence. Unique SHA-256 indicators and HTTPS traffic to Azure-hosted and .cfd domains were observed, with prior reports noting the campaign's abuse of GitHub.

SANS Internet Storm Center·Sep 1, 21:30 UTC · 15d agoMalware in the wild

Structural Jailbreaks Generalize but Do Not Compound: A cross-provider and multilingual study of Involuntary In-Context Learning

Researchers show IICL structural jailbreaks generalize to Google Gemini, lifting attack success to 80-100% on harm and financial benchmarks; non-English prompts attenuate it.

The study red-teams two Google Gemini models with Involuntary In-Context Learning (IICL), a structural jailbreak reframing harmful requests as the final cell of a data-labeling task. IICL lifts attack success from at most 6.7% to 80-90% on HarmBench and 97-100% on financial abuse (FinProof), an order of magnitude above prior results on OpenAI's GPT-5.4. Against a compounding hypothesis, forcing IICL output into Spanish, Hindi, or Arabic attenuates the attack in 11 of 12 conditions, attributed to a 'relevance curse' producing lower-quality harmful content in lower-resource languages. Findings replicate under an independent non-Google judge (Cohen's kappa 0.86 over 377 paired verdicts).

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 8, 07:38 UTC · 8d agoAI safety & security

Verifiable by Construction: Claim-Level Evaluation of Verbatim Citation in Clinical Question Answering

Evaluation of twelve LLMs on 222 clinical questions shows verbatim quotes rarely substantiate claims; claude-opus-5 fully substantiates only 37.1%.

The authors build a standardized harness over four clinical practice guidelines and evaluate twelve LLMs on 222 synthetic clinical questions, measuring citation attachment, verbatim quote production, and claim substantiation. Most models attach verbatim quotes to over 90% of claims from prompting alone, though lightweight models like claude-haiku-4.5 struggle. Quotes frequently fail to substantiate claims: claude-opus-5 quotes 98.0% of claims but fully substantiates only 37.1%, exposing a capability gap for verifiable clinical QA.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 17:53 UTC · 2d agoAI research

XHToken/Spark-X2.5-4B-GGUF — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

XHToken released GGUF weights of Spark-X2.5-4B, a compact model with 1M-token context and 200+ language support, under Apache 2.0.

The Hugging Face repository provides BF16 GGUF conversions of Spark-X2.5-4B, a compact general-purpose language model for conversation, writing, translation, reasoning, coding, tool use, and agentic workflows. The model uses a hybrid attention architecture, supports a native context length up to 1M tokens, and covers more than 200 languages. Local inference is supported through Ollama and LM Studio via an XHToken llama.cpp fork, with a --think=false flag to disable thinking mode for faster responses. Released under Apache License 2.0; it was trending #30 on Hugging Face at publication.

Hugging Face trending models·Aug 28, 11:26 UTC · 19d agoModel release

CISA Flags Langflow RCE, Tomcat, and N

The Hacker News·Aug 8, 05:44 UTC · Aug 8, 2026Vulnerability in the wildCVE-2026-9198CVE-2026-34486CVE-2026-18556+6 CVEs

Malspam Targeting Brazil Continues to Evolve

Brazilian malspam campaigns continue evolving, abusing Google URL shortener and Dropbox and using Squiblydoo plus DLL side-loading to deploy likely infostealing botnet malware.

A June 2017 Brazilian malspam campaign spoofed IPTU tax notification emails, using the recipient's address as the sender, and abused Google's URL shortener and Dropbox to deliver a zip containing a malicious Windows shortcut (.lnk) file. The LNK used the Squiblydoo technique (regsvr32.exe) to download and execute a scriptlet with elevated privileges, retrieving a signed G-Buster Browser Defense executable alongside a malicious fltLib.dll loaded via side-loading, likely an information-stealing botnet. Post-infection HTTP traffic exposed over 400 infected Windows hosts, mostly in Brazil, with 2,132 Banload-tagged samples observed in the first half of 2017.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 09:31 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Malware in the wild