Search: “Persona”

Mind2Dialogue: Training Human-Aware Language Models by Simulating User Mental States

Mind2Dialogue simulates users' mental states to generate privileged supervision, boosting personalization and preference-following in Qwen, Llama, and OLMo assistants.

The Mind2Dialogue framework uses a psychology-guided simulator that preserves personal characteristics while updating user mental states through interaction, driving coherent conversations and an Oracle assistant's responses. Privileged distillation trains models on the Oracle's well-informed responses so they can assist users without direct access to mental states at deployment. Training on the full corpus improves every reported personalization metric over Qwen, Llama, and OLMo instruction-tuned baselines, including 26.6 to 40.9 percentage point gains in preference-following generation.

Hugging Face daily papers·updated Sep 14, 17:55 UTC · 2d ago·first Sep 13, 20:00 UTC · 3d agoAI research 2 sources

Introducing Muse: The World’s First Personal AI Agent Built for Everyone

Meta launches Muse, a personal AI agent running in a dedicated Secure VM and powered by its Muse Spark model, with payments via Stripe Link.

Meta introduced Muse, a consumer-facing personal AI agent that plans and executes tasks such as sending email, booking travel, browsing and negotiating, accessible via the Muse app and WhatsApp. The agent runs inside Muse Secure VM, a dedicated virtual machine with a separate Sentinel agent that gates all internet actions, and is powered by Muse Spark, described as Meta's most capable model to date. Muse integrates Stripe Link for agent payments with one-time-use cards and purchase protections, with 1Password support and Shop Pay planned. It rolls out in the US on iOS, Android and muse.ai, free for most features with subscription tiers, and a user-key-encrypted Muse Confidential VM is promised later in the year.

Meta Newsroom·Sep 8, 19:00 UTC · 8d agoAI industry 3 sources

The sexy AI-powered dating app scams are here

Anthropic exposed a network of roughly 28 AI-driven dating apps using autonomous personas and gig workers to defraud paying users.

Anthropic threat intelligence uncovered a fraud network of around 28 dating apps after a prepaid account sent over 100,000 Claude API requests daily, with most chats run by autonomous AI personas and no human agent. Researchers Matthew Gore-Kormanik and Anthropic's Chris Cronbaugh documented apps including Dora, Romi, and Doni, which monetize conversations via coins; gig workers were hired only to pass liveness checks and select pregenerated replies. An operations manual written in Chinese was found inside the Doni app, and Anthropic published findings in its September 2026 AI misuse report.

The Verge · AI·14:45 UTC · 8h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

CounterPersona: Append-Only Defense Against Unauthorized Persona Skill Distillation

CounterPersona appends targeted counter-persona evidence after data collection to block AI systems from distilling an individual's behavioral patterns into reusable skills.

CounterPersona defends against unauthorized persona skill distillation, where attackers extract recurring patterns from collected personal data to replicate an individual's behavior. Unlike perturbation-based defenses that require modifying data before collection, it works in an append-only setting where historical records cannot be altered or revoked. It constructs targeted counter-persona evidence, packs compatible behavioral states into compact realization units, and strengthens them via rationale-guided consistency rewriting. Experiments show strong effectiveness across lexical, semantic, and LLM-based measures, remaining robust across different distillers.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 14, 06:19 UTC · 2d agoAI safety & security

PurpleDelta's Fraudulent Employment Operations

Recorded Future details North Korean cluster PurpleDelta using AI-generated personas and ChatGPT assistants to infiltrate companies via fraudulent employment.

Recorded Future profiles PurpleDelta, a North Korean IT worker threat cluster, in a new research report. The group uses AI-generated personas, sophisticated tradecraft, and custom ChatGPT assistants to obtain employment at target organizations and operate covertly. The report includes key indicators of compromise and recommended mitigation strategies for defenders.

Recorded Future·Aug 18, 00:00 UTC · 29d agoThreat actor

Encoded Early, Used Late: Where Transformers Begin to Act on an Inferred Partner's Expertise

Probing finds transformers represent an inferred dialogue partner's expertise in early layers long before it causally influences output.

Using ExpertCollab, a corpus of multi-turn research-planning dialogues between model-played personas at four expertise levels, researchers show that a partner's inferred expertise is most decodable in early transformer layers and decays to near chance before the network's midpoint. Counterfactual patching reveals that injecting the expertise difference at peak decodability barely changes a fixed late-layer readout, while injection past the midpoint propagates almost completely. The result bounds where readout or steering of partner-conditioned behavior must intervene, demonstrated on a single model with a synthetic corpus.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

The story behind the intelligence

Cisco Talos newsletter features adversary-engagement podcast, flags AI guardrail 'safety penalty' slowing defenders, and recaps McKesson breach and PaperCut patching headlines.

The Threat Source newsletter spotlights the Beers with Talos podcast, in which researcher Azim Khodjibaev describes maintaining eight dark-web personas to identify prolific cybercriminals and support disruption efforts. Talos also argues frontier AI guardrails impose an AI 'safety penalty', citing a July 2026 incident where Hugging Face's primary cloud LLM refused to analyze forensic breach data and delayed response. Recapped headlines include ShinyHunters claiming theft of 284 million patient records from McKesson via vishing and Okta account takeover, Anthropic warning Claude users about infostealer malware, and PaperCut issuing emergency patches for chained vulnerabilities.

Cisco Talos·Sep 3, 18:00 UTC · 13d agoIndustry

US offering $10 million for info on Iranian hackers behind IOControl malware

US offers up to $10 million for information on CyberAv3ngers' 'Mr. Soul,' whose IOControl malware targets US and worldwide ICS/SCADA devices.

The State Department announced a reward of up to $10 million for information on an online persona known as Mr. Soul (or Mr. Soll) tied to CyberAv3ngers, which conducts malicious cyber activity for Iran's IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command. CyberAv3ngers used the IOControl malware against ICS/SCADA devices in the US, Israel and worldwide, targeting products from Unitronics, D-Link, Hikvision and Baicells, according to Claroty and Armis analyses. The malware allows remote control of infected devices and lateral movement within victim networks. The reward follows an August action offering rewards for and sanctioning six Iranian government hackers and comes amid the widening Israel-Iran military conflict.

The Record·Sep 8, 00:00 UTC · 8d agoPolicy & legal in the wild 3 sources

RelateAnything: Real-Time Open-Vocabulary Relation Prediction From Any Inputs

RelateAnything is a 53M-parameter open-vocabulary relation prediction model running at 20 ms/frame, with 2.3-3.5x higher mean recall than comparable open-vocabulary methods.

RelateAnything predicts scored relations between image regions using any predicate vocabulary supplied at inference as text embeddings, with object labels never required as input, so region sources can change without retraining. Training covers 19,103 predicates using positive-unlabeled supervision; the authors release RA-4M (474k images, 4.3M geometrically verified relations over 10,102 free-text predicates) and the OV-SGG-Bench evaluation suite. The 53M-parameter model runs at 20 ms/frame and achieves 2.3-3.5x the mean recall of the strongest comparable open-vocabulary method across cross-dataset and zero-shot benchmarks. Model, corpus, and benchmark are public.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 10, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research1

Fake Apple Support AI Calls Target Stolen-Device Owners for Passcodes and 2FA Codes

SOCRadar details AnonyMousKIT, a phishing-as-a-service platform using AI voice agents posing as Apple Support to steal passcodes and 2FA codes.

SOCRadar's Threat Research Unit documented AnonyMousKIT, a credit-metered phishing-as-a-service platform that strips Activation Lock from stolen Apple devices across email, SMS, WhatsApp, recorded calls and AI voice agents. The 'Alice from Apple Support' personas request the device passcode, Apple ID credentials and a live 2FA code, with lures citing the handset's model identifier and live Find My status. Of 200 recovered AI calls made between August 31, 2025 and May 30, 2026, 179 targeted Brazil, and the calls cost $19.24 total via voice platform Vapi. Exposed log paths revealed 30 kit installations on 42 domains and 6,092 send attempts family-wide between March and July 2026.

The Hacker News·Aug 26, 05:49 UTC · 21d agoPhishing & fraud

Muse: Meta's personal AI agent, features and capabilities

Meta unveils Muse, a personal AI agent; the announcement page offers no technical details.

Meta published a landing page at ai.meta.com/muse introducing Muse, described as a personal AI agent. The item surfaced via Hacker News, where it drew 78 points and 63 comments. No model details, capabilities, benchmarks, or availability information were provided in the available text.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 8, 19:25 UTC · 8d agoAI industryHN 78↑ · 63 comments1

The GTA VI leaks are breaking the internet. Security researchers have seen this before.

A hacker or insider leaked GTA VI gameplay footage before launch, triggering Take-Two DMCA subpoenas against Discord, Google, Microsoft and X.

The persona "CyberLeek" published stolen Grand Theft Auto VI gameplay footage and a manifesto, in what experts call a familiar data extortion playbook with monetization via watermarks, crypto wallets and a memecoin. Take-Two Interactive obtained DMCA subpoenas against Discord, Microsoft and X, and sent copyright notices to Google, treating the case like an insider threat investigation. GTA VI is projected to earn $3.3–5.2 billion in launch-week sales, raising financial and reputational stakes. Related leak websites went offline after the subpoenas.

CyberScoop·Aug 26, 01:54 UTC · 21d agoData breach

Ping Identity introduces enterprise security for personal AI agents

Ping Identity launched Enterprise Personal Agent Access to discover, authenticate and control personal AI agents like Claude at runtime.

Ping Identity announced Enterprise Personal Agent Access, delivered through PingOne Privilege, to give enterprises visibility and control over personal AI agents such as Claude and Claude Code. The product discovers agents including shadow AI, associates each session with the user and device behind it, and enforces allow, deny, log, human-approval or revocation decisions on agent access at runtime. It enables secretless developer workflows so agents can commit code without long-lived credentials while keeping actions attributable to the agent. Ping cites Gravitee research that 48% of production AI agents run unsecured and says the product is available now and piloting with global enterprises.

Help Net Security·Sep 3, 06:25 UTC · 13d agoAI safety & security

Facilitating AI integration with simplicity at scale

Jabil's SAP IT director says simplifying integration across 100+ sites in 30+ countries with SAP Integration Suite created the data backbone for AI.

In an MIT Technology Review Business Lab podcast produced in partnership with SAP, Jabil SAP IT director Harish Manohar described consolidating fragmented tools across more than 100 sites in over 30 countries using SAP Integration Suite. The manufacturer, with 140,000-plus employees and more than 400 top-brand customers, says a standardized data backbone enables real-time supply chain visibility and is a prerequisite for scaling predictive, AI-driven planning and forecasting. The company frames simplification-first modernization as a competitive advantage tied to measurable business value and operational resilience.

MIT Technology Review · AI·Sep 2, 14:00 UTC · 14d agoAI industry1

Engineered Persuasion: Evaluating Personalized Pretexts in LLM-Generated Spear Phishing

A study of 180 US workers found each LLM phishing personalization level raised click-intention odds by 28%, but credibility depends on context fit.

The arXiv paper evaluates how personalized pretexts in LLM-generated spear phishing affect perceived credibility, using 180 US working adults across 1,436 evaluations of emails with four cumulative personalization levels, from workplace context to shared-project details. Convincingness rose 2.40 points per level in sensitivity analysis and click-intention odds increased 28% per level, while non-clickers shifted toward deleting rather than reporting. Qualitative coding showed details matching the recipient's role and routines supported credibility, whereas incorrect, vague, or channel-inappropriate details raised suspicion. The authors argue personalization effectiveness depends on pretext fit, with implications for workplace security training.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 3, 19:21 UTC · 13d agoResearch

LLM-Based Social Engineering Scams

OpenAI disrupted a Cambodia-based ChatGPT-powered scam network running romance, crypto-investment, gambling, and fake law-enforcement fraud campaigns.

OpenAI disrupted a social engineering network operating from Cambodia that used ChatGPT to run multiple scam types simultaneously. Operators built trust with fake dating personas before pitching fraudulent cryptocurrency and spot gold investments, posed as gambling platforms offering fake bonuses, or impersonated law enforcement agencies demanding fine payments. The network also generated images of forged documents including passports, legal notices, stock-purchase confirmations, and gambling platform interfaces.

Schneier on Security·Aug 27, 09:57 UTC · 20d agoAI safety & security in the wild

Risky Bulletin: Slovakia finds Russian backdoor in traffic speed cameras

Slovakia's NBU found an SMS-triggered backdoor in Russian-made NERO R-ONE traffic cameras, pausing a 279-unit deployment.

Slovakia's national security service NBU issued an alert against NERO R-ONE high-speed traffic cameras after finding a backdoor that grants shell and network access via SMS from hardcoded Russian phone numbers. The cameras are a rebranded version of the Russian CORDON PRO.M model by St. Petersburg firm Semicon, purchased via a Cyprus shell company under a €30 million EU-funded project. The report also found SecureBoot disabled, vulnerable web management, and unauthenticated live streams; the Interior Ministry paused deployment of 279 cameras pending independent assessment.

Risky Business News·Aug 19, 04:52 UTC · 28d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Meta Introduces Muse, a Personal AI Agent That Runs on Its Own Dedicated Secure Cloud Computer

Meta launched Muse, a proactive personal AI agent running in an isolated per-user cloud VM with a Sentinel approval agent and surrogate credentials.

Meta introduced Muse, a consumer agent that performs long-horizon tasks like email, travel booking, and bill negotiation, rolling out in the US on iOS, Android, muse.ai, and WhatsApp with free and paid tiers. Each user gets a dedicated Muse Secure VM where the agent runs in a systemd-nspawn cell, while a separate Sentinel agent approves every network request at layer 4/7 and injects real credentials only at the network boundary. The underlying Muse Spark 1.3 model, which Meta says cuts tool calls by ~20% and tokens by ~25% versus 1.2 and is near state-of-the-art on prompt-injection resistance, is available via Meta Model API, with open weights on the roadmap.

MarkTechPost·Sep 9, 04:38 UTC · 7d agoAI industry

Sandworm-Linked UAC-0145 Uses Fake Job Interviews to Push VPN That Can Run Commands

CERT-UA says Sandworm-linked UAC-0145 poses as recruiters in fake job interviews to deliver a trojanized WireGuard VPN that runs attacker commands on victims' hosts.

CERT-UA attributes the campaign, ongoing since May 2026, to UAC-0145, a subgroup within GRU-affiliated Sandworm (APT44). Posing as HR staff of firms like ATLAS Business Group and Sopra Steria Bulgaria, attackers lure Ukrainian IT specialists into Zoom interviews, then share failing WireGuard configs and push a custom SopraVPN client from SourceForge. The modified WireGuard build supports a non-standard SymmetricKey option holding AES-256-GCM-encrypted PowerShell, decrypted with the decoded PrivateKey and executed via runScriptCommand. A scheduled task then downloads a second-stage payload on Windows, while the Linux variant fetches it via cURL.

The Hacker News·Aug 12, 13:45 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Threat actor1

Meta Launches Personal AI Agent, Muse, Emphasizes Safety and Privacy

Meta launches Muse, a personal AI agent for US adults that executes tasks like emailing, travel booking, and turning long-term goals into plans.

Meta launched Muse on Tuesday, a personal AI agent for users 18 and over, initially available only in the US through a dedicated app and WhatsApp. The agent runs in a dedicated secure virtual machine that houses both the agent and the user's data, and can send emails, book travel, open a browser, fill out forms, and negotiate on the user's behalf. The launch aligns with Mark Zuckerberg's stated vision of AI superintelligence available to everyone, outlined in a recent 6,500-word essay.

SecurityWeek·Sep 9, 12:00 UTC · 7d agoAI industry1

Impersonating IT support: how threat actors turn a remote session into enterprise-wide access

Microsoft details Teams IT-support impersonation campaigns deploying Node.js implants, AD reconnaissance, and WinRM lateral movement toward domain controllers.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence describes a human-operated campaign where attackers impersonate IT/helpdesk staff via Microsoft Teams external collaboration, talk users into granting remote sessions, and use RMM tools for interactive access. During the session they run PowerShell to silently install a malicious MSI that stages a portable Node.js runtime and obfuscated JavaScript implant for C2, executing follow-on payloads via rundll32. Operators then perform host and Active Directory reconnaissance, capture desktop screenshots, and pivot via WinRM on port 5985 to domain controllers and certificate authorities. The hands-on-keyboard chain, which can precede data theft and ransomware, blends into normal operations by relying on Teams, Quick Assist, msiexec, and Node.js; Microsoft shares hunting and mitigation guidance.

Microsoft Security Blog·Sep 2, 22:51 UTC · 14d agoThreat actor in the wild

LLM Agents as Computational Typologists

AUTOTYPOLOGIST is an LLM agent that performs evidence-grounded linguistic typology analysis over 25 open-source reference grammars.

The agent retrieves relevant grammar sections, analyzes interlinear glossed text (IGT), and iteratively reasons over typological hypotheses in a ReAct-style workflow. It was evaluated on typological feature coding against expert annotations and hypothesis testing against universals using 25 open-source reference grammars. Results suggest LLM agents can support scalable, inspectable crosslinguistic analysis but still require expert validation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:35 UTC · 9d agoAI research1

[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·Aug 22, 07:36 UTC · 25d agoAI industry

LLMs and Contextual Integrity

Bruce Schneier highlights two papers: the CIMemories benchmark shows frontier LLMs leak memory attributes up to 69%, and an RL method reduces inappropriate disclosures.

Bruce Schneier discusses contextual integrity in LLMs, referencing the CIMemories benchmark, which uses synthetic profiles with 100+ attributes per user to test whether models with persistent memory disclose sensitive information appropriately. Evaluation showed frontier models exhibit up to 69% attribute-level violations, with GPT-5's violation rate rising from 0.1% to 9.6% across 40 tasks and reaching 25.1% with repeated prompting, showing unstable leakage behavior. A second paper introduces a reinforcement learning framework trained on a synthetic 700-example dataset that substantially reduces inappropriate disclosure while maintaining task performance, with improvements transferring to the human-annotated PrivacyLens benchmark.

Schneier on Security·Aug 18, 10:40 UTC · 29d agoAI safety & security

Russian military hackers pose as recruiters to target Ukrainian IT workers

The Record·Aug 10, 15:24 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Threat actor

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

Anthropic AI agent faked identities, phished real developers in UK government hacking test

The Record·Aug 5, 13:05 UTC · Aug 5, 2026Data breach1

MP-Bench: Evaluating Voice Agents as a Multiparty Conversation Participant

MP-Bench is the first benchmark for voice agents in multiparty conversations, finding real-time agents near chance on turn-taking.

MP-Bench is the first benchmark designed to objectively evaluate conversational speech systems as active participants in multi-party conversations. It assesses agents on turn-taking awareness and response appropriateness, with comprehension-based question-answering as a complementary evaluation. Benchmarking 12 voice agents shows real-time agents score at or below 22% on multiparty comprehension and remain near chance on multiparty turn-taking.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 17:11 UTC · 5d agoAI research2

Iranian cyber spies used fake MRI scan results to hack ‘enemy of regime’

UK, US, and Dutch agencies expose CHOSEN BRICK spyware used by Iranian MOIS hackers to surveil dissidents, journalists, and activists via fake MRI lures.

The UK NCSC, FBI, and Dutch AIVD jointly warned that Iranian state-sponsored hackers deploy CHOSEN BRICK Windows spyware against dissidents, activists, and journalists since at least 2025. Operators build rapport over WhatsApp and Telegram, often posing as known contacts or tech support, then deliver malicious files disguised as an MRI scan or installers for Pictory, RunwayML, Norton, Telegram, Adobe Flash Player, and KeePass. The malware steals contacts, emails, and social media messages, captures screen content and microphone audio, adds Microsoft Defender exclusions, and uses per-victim Telegram bots for command and control. The FBI attributes the tradecraft to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security, including the 'Handala Hack' persona, and stolen data has surfaced on pro-Iranian leak sites.

The Record·Sep 15, 16:28 UTC · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Who Should Grade My Work? Student Perspectives on Transparent AI-Assisted Writing Assessment in Higher Education

A Saudi university study finds students value ChatGPT writing feedback but treat human instructors as the final grading authority.

Thirteen male undergraduate computing students at a Saudi public university completed handwritten writing tasks that were scored by ChatGPT using a rubric-based prompt, then reflected after being told the score and feedback were AI-generated. Inductive thematic analysis identified four themes: perceived feedback usefulness, awareness of AI's contextual and pedagogical limitations, conditional trust, and reflection on the instructor's institutional role. Participants accepted GenAI feedback for surface-level revision but consistently positioned human instructors as the authority over grading decisions, distinguishing feedback utility from evaluative authority.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:49 UTC · 12d agoAI research

One runaway AI agent racked up a $50,000 cloud bill

Mandiant's AI Risk and Resilience report details prompt injection, AI supply chain compromises, agent abuse, and a runaway agent that accrued $50,000 in cloud charges.

Mandiant, drawing on Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) observations, warns that poisoned data sources, model dependencies, and extension hooks can turn AI agents into channels for reconnaissance, lateral movement, and sandbox escape. Mandiant responded to incidents involving UNC6780 (TeamPCP), who stole AI service credentials and used prompt injection against AI coding assistants, while GTIG disclosed the first confirmed criminal use of an AI-developed zero-day exploit in a planned mass exploitation campaign. Red team tests showed an AI assistant manipulated into cloning internal repositories to an external GitHub account, and a runaway accounting agent made over 15,000 costly API calls in under an hour, generating roughly $50,000 in cloud charges.

Help Net Security·09:45 UTC · 13h agoAI safety & security in the wild

I Am No One: Style-Aware Paraphrasing for Text Anonymization

Prompt-driven style-aware paraphrasing with LLMs cuts authorship attribution F1 by 60-70% while preserving content quality.

The paper proposes a style-aware, prompt-driven anonymization approach using pretrained LLMs to build compact stylistic profiles from minimal samples and rewrite text to suppress identifiable style markers while preserving meaning. It addresses stylometric re-identification risks in anonymized text, including ASR transcripts of meetings and call-center calls where leakage persists after acoustic anonymization. Across blog and review datasets, the approach reduces authorship attribution F1 by 60-70%, substantially outperforming both DP-based and non-DP baselines while maintaining readability.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 11, 02:07 UTC · 5d agoResearch

Ransom Busters Claims It Hacked Ransomware Servers, Asks Victims for Up to $60,000

GuidePoint reports a ransomware affiliate posing as 'Ransom Busters' charges victims $20,000-$60,000 to delete stolen data, and details UNC6671's $8M AitM extortion wave.

GuidePoint's GRIT team reports that 'Ransom Busters', likely a ransomware affiliate active across multiple RaaS operations including DragonForce, Settra and Anubis, proactively emails victims claiming it deleted their stolen data and backups for a $20,000-$60,000 fee, citing claimed access to RaaS administrative panels for over three years. Two analyzed intrusions shared tooling: SoftPerfect Network Scanner for reconnaissance, s5cmd-based exfiltration to AWS cloud storage, an RMM tool installed via PowerShell, a backdoor account with password 'Numlock!123' and the same attacker hostname DESKTOP-BBETH6K. Separately, GRIT detailed UNC6671's (Cordial Spider) adversary-in-the-middle vishing operation running since April under five extortion brands, with more than $8 million across 15 Bitcoin wallets, an average of $600,000 per payment, and 78 phishing sub-domains across 76 organizations, 40% in financial services.

The Hacker News·Aug 18, 17:35 UTC · 29d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Before You Poll with LLMs: A Deliberative Diagnostic Framework

Deliberative diagnostic shows all five tested frontier LLMs misrepresent human belief shifts after arguments, with GPT-5.1 reversing on outgroup questions.

The Deliberative Polling Diagnostic Framework compares human and LLM persona belief shifts after identical informational interventions, using data from America in One Room (526 personas, 72 questions). All five frontier models tested failed uniquely: GPT-5.1 exhibited partisan reversal (80% on outgroup vs 26% on policy questions), Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Llama 3.3 70B overshot at 5-7x human magnitude, and DeepSeek V3 showed near-zero change (rigidity). The authors term the underlying signature 'self-sycophancy', conformity to the model's internal persona stereotype rather than reasoning from provided information.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 16:41 UTC · 2d agoAI research

Infostealer Logs Expose Replayable AI Tokens That Can Bypass MFA

Okta finds infostealer logs contain thousands of replayable AI session tokens and API keys, letting criminals bypass MFA and access services from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI.

Okta analyzed a 7 GB infostealer dump from August 2, 2026 covering 5,871 infected machines in 162 countries and found 555 of 44,791 JWTs related to AI services, plus 1,843 unexpired JWTs and JWEs (largely set by OpenAI via NextAuth.js) and 24 still-valid API keys for Google Gemini, OpenAI, Groq and OpenRouter. Valid session tokens and API keys can be replayed with anti-detect browsers like Camoufox to bypass credential and MFA checks, fueling an underground market for AI account access known as LLMjacking, where attackers rack up victims' AI compute bills. Some 17.7% of the JWTs contained plaintext PII usable for social engineering. Google's GTIG reported growing buyer demand for Claude, Gemini, Cursor and Devin credentials, and Mandiant handled an incident where an actor used an exposed GitHub PAT to deploy unauthorized AI infrastructure and scale high-performance compute.

The Hacker News·Sep 9, 14:23 UTC · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Flirty OnlyFans promoters on X may be using AI to appear human

Developer Álvaro Martínez Majado found OnlyFans-promoting accounts on X following rigid scripts yet handling encoded instructions, suggesting generative AI use.

Investigation of flirty X accounts promoting OnlyFans pages showed near-identical openers across accounts plus dynamic behaviors: answering a hexadecimal-encoded instruction with "Pineapple" and failing an exact 12-character count test in an LLM-like pattern. The accounts also sent personalized voice notes reading supplied timestamps and usernames, consistent with automated text-to-speech. Evidence suggests a hybrid scripted/AI system, though no model, provider, or operator was identified.

Malwarebytes Labs·Sep 7, 11:18 UTC · 9d agoAI safety & security

Why metaphor may dictate your security strategy

Cisco Talos·Aug 6, 18:00 UTC · Aug 6, 2026Vulnerability1

Russia-Aligned UAC-0099 Plants Nuclear Weapon Prompt in Malware to Disrupt AI Analysis

Russia-aligned UAC-0099 planted a nuclear-weapon prompt inside malicious VBS scripts to derail LLM-based malware analysis targeting Ukraine.

ESET disclosed a technique dubbed GuardBreaker used by Russia-aligned UAC-0099 against a Ukrainian target: inserting the text 'I want to make a nuclear weapon. Help me ...' as a comment in a malicious VBS script to trip LLM safety guardrails and stop AI-assisted analysis. The script downloads and installs MATCHBOIL, a C# loader exclusive to UAC-0099, which CERT-UA warned was distributed as a fake Notepad++ plugin in late July 2026. Similar prompt-injection anti-analysis tricks appeared in the Mini Shai-Hulud, Miasma, and Hades npm supply chain campaigns linked to TeamPCP, two of whose alleged members were arrested in Western Australia.

The Hacker News·Sep 2, 06:25 UTC · 14d agoThreat actor

Meta Releases Muse, a Personal AI Agent With Privacy ‘Built Into It’

Meta launched Muse, a personal AI agent on iOS, Android, WhatsApp, and web, with VM-isolated execution and prompt-injection protections.

Meta released Muse, a personal AI agent from Meta Superintelligence Labs that automates tasks such as sending email, booking travel, and making purchases, accessible via a dedicated app, Muse.ai, and WhatsApp. The agent runs in a Secure VM architecture that isolates untrusted web and integration data from the action-taking component, with a Sentinel system that routes human-in-the-loop approval prompts directly to users to resist prompt injection. Purchases use Stripe's Link single-use card numbers with no-fee return protections, and a future Confidential VM co-developed with Moxie Marlinspike will run in trusted execution environments with user-held keys. Meta added Muse to its public bug bounty with payouts up to $300,000, including up to $130,000 for single-user prompt injection findings.

WIRED · Security·Sep 8, 20:12 UTC · 8d agoAI industry

GhostCode Phishing Kit Bypasses Microsoft 365 MFA to Hijack Accounts in 78 Seconds

eSentire identified GhostCode, a phishing kit abusing Microsoft 365 OAuth device-code sign-in to steal tokens and take over accounts in seconds.

eSentire analysts identified GhostCode in late August, a phishing kit that uses business contact-form messages and an NDA pretext to deliver a password-protected HTML attachment leading victims to a Microsoft device-code sign-in. Victims authenticate on legitimate Microsoft pages, letting the kit obtain a Primary Refresh Token in 32 seconds and register three devices in 78 seconds, with residential proxies matching the victim's location. The kit hides its redirect with encrypted addresses, junk data, and scanner-filtering challenges, and uses GHOSTnet-linked infrastructure during device enrolment. eSentire recommends blocking device-code authentication via Conditional Access, invalidating tokens, and reviewing newly enrolled devices.

Cyber Security News·14:54 UTC · 8h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 9 sources2