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Hackers Use Autonomous AI Agents to Harvest Thousands of Credentials in Under 6 Hours

Google Cloud documents a financially motivated actor using autonomous AI agents on a compromised cloud tenant to harvest 23,800+ credentials in under six hours.

Google Cloud reports that an attacker compromised a victim's cloud environment and deployed a multi-agent framework driven by preconfigured Markdown playbooks to autonomously handle vulnerability scanning, credential collection, error troubleshooting, and IP rotation. An exposed command-and-control server hosted the 'Recon' framework with a live dashboard managing over 23,800 harvested secrets, including cloud and AI-service API keys. The report also ties DUSTMAKER to UNC6780/TeamPCP, targeting AI development tools and CI/CD systems via trojanized MCP packages such as tiktoken_mcp. Google has disabled linked assets and updated protections after the actors' operational security failures.

Cyber Security News · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

Not All Relations Are Equal: Relation-Balanced and Calibrated Graph Learning for Provenance-Based Intrusion Detection

RECAL improves provenance-based APT detection with relation-balanced masked graph learning and calibrated errors, reaching 99.99% F1 on DARPA E3 datasets.

RECAL is an unsupervised framework for provenance-based intrusion detection that uses relation-balanced masked graph learning to capture rare interaction patterns, addressing statistical heterogeneity where relation frequencies differ by roughly 140,000X in CADETS. It calibrates reconstruction errors against each relation's benign error distribution to produce comparable anomaly evidence and reduce false alarms. On three DARPA E3 datasets, RECAL achieves F1 scores of 99.99%, 99.93%, and 99.99%, outperforming the best baseline on each dataset, and reduces mean false positive rate by approximately 105X, 4X, and 41X versus the lowest-FPR baseline.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

AD Rights Management Service (Part 1): Architecture, Deprecation, and Reconnaissance

Huntress maps AD RMS architecture and recon paths, setting up an offline key-extraction attack against its unrotatable 255-year root key.

Huntress's multi-part research examines Active Directory Rights Management Services, Microsoft's enterprise DRM role that still ships in Windows Server 2025 despite migration guidance favoring Azure Information Protection. Part 1 covers the trust model and how an ordinary domain account can locate RMS clusters and read rights-policy templates. Part 2 will detail four independent paths for extracting the Server Licensor Certificate (SLC) private key via service-group membership and the configuration database, enabling fully offline decryption of protected documents. The SLC certificate is valid from 2002 to 2258 and has no key-rotation mechanism, so a stolen key decrypts protected content indefinitely.

Huntress · 8d agoResearch1

A Princeton Researcher Proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT) that Carries Decoder State across Every Token, Fixing 96 Blocks per Token with Unbounded Temporal Depth

Princeton researcher Yifan Zhang proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer, carrying full decoder state across every token for unbounded temporal depth.

Yifan Zhang's technical report defines the Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT), pairing a causal encoder with a recurrent decoder whose final output and layerwise sliding-window attention cache carry into every subsequent token with no prompt-response boundary reset. The reference configuration ties 48 encoder and 48 decoder layers, executing 96 logical blocks per token while the state path grows to 48t blocks after t tokens at fixed per-token compute. The report details RL replay contracts that rebuild all states under current parameters and exact prefix snapshots for multi-turn serving, but explicitly reports no measured efficiency, reasoning quality, or scaling results.

MarkTechPost · 2d agoAI research1

Hackers Use Autonomous AI Agents to Launch Mass Credential Theft Attacks in Under 6 Hours

Google Cloud reports attackers used autonomous AI agents to steal thousands of credentials including 23,800 secrets in a sub-six-hour campaign.

Google Cloud threat intelligence observed financially motivated attackers compromising cloud infrastructure and using AI coding agents guided by written playbook files to scan, harvest and rotate credentials within six hours. An exposed C2 dashboard for a framework called Recon organized and validated more than 23,800 stolen secrets, including API keys for cloud and AI services. Related activity includes UNC6780 publishing the trojanized tiktoken_mcp package on PyPI to target CI/CD tokens and the DUSTMAKER stealer hiding in .claude, .vscode and .cursor workspace directories.

Cyber Security News · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild

ReCite: Agentic Reasoning for Faithful Citation

ReCite is an agentic citation framework using claim-level reasoning and verification, outperforming large generative models in strict citation accuracy.

ReCite is a decoupled agentic framework that orchestrates location perception, intent-aware query planning, and reflective verification for citation recommendation. Trained on synthesized reasoning trajectories, the agent verifies claim-evidence consistency and triggers self-correction loops when retrieved candidates lack logical support. Experiments show the lightweight framework outperforms state-of-the-art massive generative models in strict citation accuracy, addressing misattribution where cited papers are real but logically unsupportive.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

StyleSmuggler: Magento and Adobe Commerce 0-day RCE (CVE-2026-75650) under active attack

Sansec details actively exploited StyleSmuggler 0-day (CVE-2026-75650, CVSS 10.0) unauthenticated RCE in Magento and Adobe Commerce, patched by Adobe hotfix APSB26-146.

Sansec is investigating StyleSmuggler, an actively exploited unauthenticated remote code execution chain in Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce, now tracked as CVE-2026-75650 with CVSS 10.0. Adobe released hotfix VULN-39341 via APSB26-146 (priority 1) on September 7 for versions 2.4.4 through 2.4.9, but stores were being exploited for roughly three days before the fix existed. The implant is a Rust backdoor that disguises itself as kworker, fc-cache, or chronyd processes and exfiltrates host data in MessagePack records sent as fake NTP replies over UDP port 123. Adobe advises rotating the encryption key and every credential it protected, and Sansec stresses patching does not clean already-compromised stores.

ActReview: Rebuttal-Guided Training Data and Rubric Rewards for Actionable Peer Review Generation

ActReview post-trains Qwen3-8B-Base on OpenReview rebuttals to generate actionable peer-review feedback with grounded revision suggestions, benchmarked on 1,000 curated instances.

The paper defines Actionable Peer-review Generation as diagnostic claim generation plus revision suggestion generation and introduces ActReview, a rebuttal-guided post-training framework. From OpenReview review-rebuttal threads the authors build ActReview-40K, aligning reviewer weaknesses with author responses grounded in localized paper evidence, and post-train Qwen3-8B-Base with multi-task SFT followed by GRPO using weakness-specific rubric rewards. They also release ActReview-Bench, a human-curated 1,000-instance benchmark, on which ActReview outperforms prior specialized review-generation models on actionability and grounding while remaining competitive with strong prompt-based LLMs. Human evaluation confirms improved revision usefulness but identifies a remaining gap in technical accuracy.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

DPRK APTs: Ted backdoor and curlRAT target South Korean media and automotive sectors

Rapid7 uncovered a DPRK-linked Linux toolkit using a HAProxy-embedded ted backdoor, SSH keylogger, and curlRAT against South Korean media and automotive firms.

Rapid7 Labs identified a previously undocumented framework attributed with medium confidence to DPRK actors, targeting South Korean automotive and media organizations likely since early 2025. The toolkit embeds a backdoor compiled into HAProxy 2.8.12 using its filter API, plus trojanized crond, agetty, atd, sshd, and polkitd, an SSH keylogger storing credentials under /var/lib/sshd/, and a curl-based RAT with a watchdog thread. It enables remote command execution, malicious script injection into served webpages (a watering-hole loop), credential harvesting, and long-term surveillance. Hardcoded C2s are associated with APT37 via ThreatFox, and exposed groupware portals and mail servers align with Kimsuky tradecraft; the initial access vector and any CVE remain unconfirmed.

Rapid7 Blog · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild1

ActReview: Rebuttal-Guided Training Data and Rubric Rewards for Actionable Peer Review Generation

ActReview post-trains Qwen3-8B-Base on 40K rebuttal-derived instances with rubric rewards to generate actionable, grounded peer-review feedback, plus a 1,000-instance benchmark.

The framework builds ActReview-40K from real OpenReview review-rebuttal threads, aligning reviewer weaknesses with author responses and grounding feedback in localized paper evidence. Qwen3-8B-Base is post-trained with multi-task supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO using candidate-aware, weakness-specific rubric rewards. Experiments show improved actionability and grounding over prior specialized review-generation models, supported by ActReview-Bench, a human-curated 1,000-instance evaluation set. Human evaluation confirms better revision usefulness while noting a remaining gap in technical accuracy.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

AD Rights Management Service (Part 2): Extraction, Offline Decryption, and the Unrotatable Key

Huntress research shows AD RMS SLC root key is unrotatable and never expires, so its compromise permanently exposes all RMS-protected documents.

Part 2 of Huntress's AD RMS series details server-side attacks: extracting the Server Licensor Certificate (SLC) private key and performing offline decryption of protected documents. The SLC key has no expiry or rotation mechanism, with a 255-year certificate validity (2002–2258), so whoever recovers it can decrypt every document the deployment ever protected, indefinitely. The author released SharpRMS, a unified tool combining the 2016 DisARMS client-side attacks with new server-side key extraction and decryption capabilities. The research frames the SLC as comparable to KRBTGT and the DPAPI domain backup key, though not equivalent to domain compromise.

Huntress · 6d agoResearch

Opaque recurrence, and other AI terms that you should probably know

TechCrunch updates its plain-English glossary defining common AI terms from AGI and agents to chain-of-thought reasoning.

TechCrunch maintains a regularly updated glossary of AI terminology, defining terms such as AGI, AI agents, API endpoints, chain of thought, coding agents, compute, deep learning, and diffusion. It highlights 'opaque recurrence', the reasoning technique in OpenAI's new Astra model that has drawn attention from AI safety researchers. The piece is an educational living document rather than new research or a product announcement.

TechCrunch · AI · 8d agoAI industry

GTIG AI Threat Tracker: From Prompting to Autonomy – The Evolution of Adversarial AI

GTIG's Q2 2026 tracker shows adversaries adopting agentic AI workflows, including credential harvesting in under six hours and supply chain attacks by UNC6780.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's Q2 2026 report documents adversaries moving from basic prompting to agentic AI workflows and automation, including a cloud compromise followed by agent-enabled mass credential harvesting executed in under six hours. It tracks financially motivated actor UNC6780 (TeamPCP) conducting large-scale open source supply chain compromises across PyPI, npm, and Docker Hub since March 2026, deploying credential stealers. The report also highlights growing targeting of proprietary AI models, source code, prompts, and API credentials, plus LLMJacking practices where adversaries steal developer credentials or hijack cloud infrastructure to run unauthorized AI workloads.

Google Threat Intelligence · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild

"They don't care about this": A Systematic Study of TEE Build Reproducibility in the Wild

91% of 115 surveyed TEE deployments across Intel SGX, TDX, and AMD SEV fail to provide reproducible builds needed for verifiable remote attestation.

A systematic study of 115 TEE deployments found 91% were not reproducible and 80% lacked both source code and a reference build, undermining remote attestation guarantees. Interviews with 12 developers of 50 Intel SGX projects confirmed that only one participant treats reproducibility as a development priority. The authors identify technical barriers such as embedded timestamps plus ecosystem-level issues like lack of build-environment control in multi-stakeholder projects, and call for holistic, committed reproducibility practices.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Papercut AI Swarm Attack Heralds Changes for Cyber Kill Chain

Dark Reading reports AI-driven 'swarm' attacks like the PaperCut incident now span recon, lateral movement and exfiltration, forcing a rethink of the cyber kill chain.

Dark Reading examines how attackers are incorporating AI across the full kill chain, from building lab environments to stage and test agentic attacks through reconnaissance, lateral movement, and exfiltration. It cites a swarm-style AI attack on PaperCut systems as evidence that AI-enabled attackers are changing established defense and detection models.

Dark Reading · 4d agoThreat actor

Recursive Code World Models: Building Complex Worlds through Recursive Scene Programs

RCWM reconstructs complex 3D worlds as executable code from a single image using recursive scene programs with global-local-global solver recursion.

The paper introduces Recursive Code World Models, coupling a Recursive Scene Program representation with a recursive construction solver for image-to-3D-world reconstruction. Each solver call establishes the whole scene, recursively reconstructs unresolved parts, and revisits the whole to refine composition, while a vision-language coding agent compares reference images with scene renders to guide refinement. RCWM outperforms prior code-based image-to-scene reconstruction methods, and ablations show deeper recursive calls improve fine-scale reconstruction.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research1

Risky Bulletin: Dutch intel services to get extensive new powers

Netherlands proposed a bill granting AIVD and MIVD expanded warrantless tapping, faster hacking powers, and forced data disclosure, citing Russia, China, and Iran threats.

The Dutch government introduced a bill greatly expanding surveillance powers of intelligence agencies AIVD and MIVD, allowing up to one year of tapping without pre-approval and simplified hacking operations against 'foreign adversaries'. Agencies could compel Dutch companies or citizens to provide data under threat of charges, share data with the private sector, and oversight bodies would merge into a new CTT board. The bill follows similar overhauls in Ireland, Germany, and France after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The newsletter also reports Moonwell hacked for $8.7M, a Cosmos EVM bug exploited for ~$3M, ShinyHunters listing McKesson with claimed hundreds of millions of records, and a pro-Kremlin DDoS claim against Norway's government network.

Risky Business News · 16d agoPolicy & legal

Molecular Déjà Vu: Digit-Level Retrieval of Published Values in Frontier Language Models

Audit of 22 frontier models finds widespread verbatim retrieval of published molecular property values, with higher reasoning increasing recall of memorized numbers.

An arXiv audit tests 22 frontier LLMs across 12 molecular regression benchmarks for verbatim retrieval of published values. More than 50% of the LLMs show verbatim retrieval on five datasets, and identical experiments are flagged 89% more often at a high reasoning level than at the lowest one. Suppressing retrieval moves model prediction errors closer together in relative terms, suggesting predictive capability is not determined solely by memorized values.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 11d agoAI research1

Attack Chains, Not Just Attack Surfaces: Why Testing Individual Techniques Misses the Point

Filigran introduces Attack Chaining in OpenAEV to continuously simulate multi-stage attack paths, exposing gaps that isolated MITRE ATT&CK technique testing misses.

Filigran announced Attack Chaining, a new scenario type in its OpenAEV platform that links individual techniques into automated, continuously-run multi-stage attack paths, using each step's real output (credentials, tokens, open ports) to branch dynamically toward a final objective. The article cites Filigran's State of Threat Management report, in which 93% of security leaders reported a business-impacting cyberattack in the past 12 months, 88% said AI accelerates attackers, and 84% blamed siloed tools and disconnected testing. The 2025 DGFiP breach is cited as an example where individually survivable weaknesses chained into a major intrusion. The feature includes conditional chaining logic, live attack path mapping, structured findings for identifying chokepoints, and predefined scope and safety guardrails.

The Hacker News · 1d agoTools

Forgetting Without Restarting: Execution-State Unlearning for Stateful LLM Agents

Researchers propose provenance-guided selective replay letting LLM agents forget revoked information without restarts, matching full reset behavior.

The paper formalizes execution-state unlearning for stateful LLM agents, requiring that agents behave as if a revoked memory record was never observed across transcripts, compressed memory, tool plans, and KV caches. It proves exact unlearning requires at least T-τ+1 recomputed transitions and that Provenance-Guided Selective Replay attains this bound via a provenance graph, KV cache cropping, and sanitized replay. In audits across three agent suites, nine baselines, and three model families, memory deletion left leakage unchanged, instruction-based forgetting collapsed under elicitation (Leak@probes = 1.00), and selective replay matched full resets at up to 9x fewer recomputed tokens.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoAI safety & security1

Implementation of Machine Learning Workflows with NVIDIA cuML, RAPIDS, GPU Benchmarking, Explainability, Clustering, and Model Inference

Hands-on tutorial implements NVIDIA cuML and RAPIDS to GPU-accelerate scikit-learn-style ML workflows with benchmarking, clustering, and inference.

The tutorial demonstrates NVIDIA cuML as a GPU-accelerated machine learning framework, using cuml.accel to speed up unmodified scikit-learn scripts with zero code changes and the native cuML API for CuPy/cuDF interoperability. It benchmarks CPU versus GPU implementations of PCA, K-Means, nearest-neighbor search, logistic regression, random forests, and DBSCAN on datasets up to 200,000 samples with 64 features. It also builds GPU pipelines with UMAP, t-SNE, and HDBSCAN, validates GPU-generated SHAP explanations, uses the FIL library for forest inference, and covers model serialization and GPU/CPU portability.

MarkTechPost · 3d agoAI tools & infra

Fresh-Challenge VDF Attestations for Model-Relative Response Latency

Fresh-Challenge VDF Attestations bind verifiable delay functions to unpredictable public challenges, yielding succinct evidence of model-relative response latency.

The paper specifies FCLA, a protocol composition that binds a VDF to an unpredictable public challenge, a message, and independently auditable release/receipt records. Under explicit assumptions about VDF sequentiality and a calibrated bound on an adversary's sequential evaluation rate, an accepted transcript is inconsistent with post-challenge generation. A benchmark of the public reference implementation confirms the expected evaluation-versus-verification separation on one documented machine. The contribution is a protocol design analysis, not a new VDF construction.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch

AI Coding Tools Now a Prime Target for Threat Actors, Google Warns

Google Threat Intelligence Group warns threat actors increasingly target AI coding tools and proprietary AI data, with UNC6780's Dustmaker enabling large-scale supply chain compromises.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's September 8 report says AI-assisted coding tools have become prime targets, contributing to large-scale software supply chain compromises in 2025 and early 2026. Financially motivated group UNC6780 used its Dustmaker credential stealer to extract tokens from GitHub Actions runner memory and compromise packages across PyPI, npm, and Docker Hub, then sold harvested AI tool credentials to other criminals. Chinese nation-state actor UNC6508 conducted espionage against proprietary AI research at North American academic, medical, and military institutions, while extortion gangs stole models, prompts, and source code in Q2 2026. GTIG also documented agentic attacker experimentation, including an autonomous multi-agent credential harvesting campaign built in under six hours and a 'Recon' C2 framework managing over 23,800 harvested secrets.

Infosecurity Magazine · 8d agoThreat actor in the wild 2 sources1

Show HN: LLM Attention Visualization

A developer released a browser-based tool that visualizes which past tokens influence each LLM output token using aggregated, value-weighted attention scores.

A Show HN project presents a React application built on Transformers.js that renders per-token attention influence by aggregating attention weights scaled by value-vector magnitudes across all attention heads and layers. To expose internal tensors, the author instrumented the ONNX computation graph, hosted a modified model on Hugging Face, and pre-generated prompts to avoid long model downloads in the browser. Demos with a 600-million-parameter model show how verbatim copying draws heavily on source tokens and how single outputs blend information from multiple phrases.

PentestGPT: Open-source automated penetration testing agentic framework

Open-source PentestGPT runs autonomous LLM-driven penetration tests via Claude Code and Codex, with legacy human-in-the-loop mode supporting many providers.

PentestGPT, originally published at USENIX Security 2024 by Gelei Deng and colleagues, is an open-source framework that lets a large language model autonomously run penetration testing stages (recon, exploit, walkthrough) with no human in the loop, driving Claude Code or Codex CLIs. A legacy interactive mode uses three cooperating LLM sessions maintaining a Pentesting Task Tree and supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, xAI, Qwen, Moonshot, and local models via Ollama. The tool sends anonymous telemetry to Langfuse by default, excluding command outputs, credentials, and flags, and is available free on GitHub.

Help Net Security · Aug 12, 2026Tools1

ScienceBuddy: Recursive-in-Recursive Self-Improvement for Interactive Scientific Agents

ScienceBuddy couples harness evolution with model reinforcement learning so scientific agents continually self-improve from researcher feedback in an interactive workspace.

The authors release ScienceBuddy, an interactive scientific research workspace that transforms researcher requests, feedback, and execution evidence into tasks and evaluation rubrics for continual learning. Its recursive-in-recursive self-improvement paradigm couples harness evolution (inner recursion, model fixed) with model reinforcement learning under the improved harness (outer recursion). Case studies span four scientific task families, and the system is released to the scientific community as a research product.

Threat actors are coming for your AI assets to operationalize their use of AI

Google GTIG reports espionage and crime groups stealing AI models, prompts, and API credentials, plus distillation campaigns and agentic AI attack automation.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's quarterly AI Threat Tracker reports adversaries stealing proprietary models, source code, prompts, and API credentials from government, healthcare, and media targets, including China-based UNC6508 compromising clouds to run unauthorized LLM workloads. Distillation campaigns against Google's models exceeded 100 million prompts launched via thousands of stolen account credentials through proxy networks. Mandiant also observed a financially motivated actor deploy an autonomous multi-agent framework that harvested thousands of third-party credentials in under 6 hours, and a 'Recon' framework on a live C2 server managing over 23,000 stolen credentials including cloud and AI API keys.

CSO Online · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

When LLM Decompilers Recompile More and Preserve Less

Researchers show LLM decompiler outputs can recompile yet diverge behaviorally, proposing the Decompile-Diverge fuzzing oracle to catch hidden changes.

The paper demonstrates that LLM-based decompilers can produce code that recompiles and passes all shipped tests yet diverges on other legitimate inputs—4.9% overall and up to 13% for one system—and can make disclosed vulnerabilities vanish without a visible crash. Across 300 real GitHub functions and 287 CVE-grounded functions, a refinement LLM lifted Ghidra's build rate from 75% to 90% while Matched rate fell from 74% to 62%, with up to one tenth of vulnerabilities showing Crash Absence. Decompile-Diverge detects these gaps by synthesizing drivers, growing fuzzing corpora from the reference, and rerunning decompiled code on identical inputs.

arXiv cs.CR · 11d agoResearch

Passkey-themed social engineering leads to identity and cloud compromise

Microsoft tracks ongoing cloud intrusions where passkey-themed helpdesk lures enable AiTM credential theft, MFA persistence, and SharePoint data theft.

Microsoft Security Research is tracking active cloud-based intrusions, observed since May 2026, that begin with helpdesk impersonation calls and SMS lures urging urgent passkey, MFA, or SSO updates. The lures lead to adversary-in-the-middle phishing or device-code authentication flows that capture credentials and session tokens or grant actor access, after which the actors add authentication methods, conduct Microsoft Graph reconnaissance, and download SharePoint and OneDrive content via REST APIs. Phishing domains embed victim organization names as subdomains (e.g., contoso.add-passkey[.]com), are often registered with Nicenic, and go operational within hours. Microsoft advises revoking sessions and removing unauthorized authentication methods for confirmed compromises.

Microsoft Security Blogupdated · 1h agofirst · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild 10 sources2

Autonomous Research for Open-Ended Problems: A Case Study on Telecom Ticket Retrieval

Case study shows autonomous LLM research reaches 90% of SOTA on telecom ticket retrieval in 10 weeks versus 10 months human work.

The paper explores adapting autonomous research to open-ended, industry-grade ML problems through a telecom ticket retrieval case study with commercial and open-source agents. Autonomous research reached 90% of state-of-the-art performance (0.34 vs. 0.38 Recall@1) in 10 weeks versus 10 months of human work, at up to $200 per Cursor campaign. The authors find agents excel at narrow hyperparameter optimization but lack human-like intuition, recommending human-agent collaboration.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 4d agoAI research

Week in review: Salesforce and ServiceNow portals exposed for 17 months, exploited Metabase 0-day

Weekly digest: exploited Metabase zero-day breached Framework; Salesforce/ServiceNow portals read for 17 months; Microsoft patched 400+ flaws.

Help Net Security's week in review aggregates top stories: a 'City-Forum' campaign tracked by Reco has been pulling records from Salesforce and ServiceNow portals worldwide for 17 months, and Framework suffered a breach via an exploited Metabase zero-day exposing customer contact and IP data. It also covers Microsoft's August 2026 Patch Tuesday fixing 400+ flaws including exploited zero-day CVE-2026-68820, Cisco's fix for exploited firewall DoS bug CVE-2026-20349 (added to CISA KEV), and a second N-able N-central hotfix for actively exploited CVE-2026-18577. Other items include GitHub expanding Dependabot malware alerts to eight package ecosystems and EU AI Act enforcement beginning on 2 August 2026.

Help Net Security · Aug 16, 2026Industry in the wildCVE-2026-18577CVE-2026-68820CVE-2026-203491

Learning Length-Extrapolatable Recurrent Models

Researchers propose Credit Stabilization through Time, a training method letting recurrent models extrapolate up to 128x their training length.

The paper argues that length extrapolation failure in BPTT-trained recurrent models is better explained through state credit, the signal through which future losses reach earlier recurrent states. It introduces Credit Stabilization through Time (CST), which locally rescales the state-credit signal during backpropagation without rotating the corrected component or changing forward computation. Controlled experiments show improved performance beyond the training horizon, with gains at up to 128x the training length.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

Massive Redis Cryptojacking Campaign Hijacks Thousands of Linux Servers

RedisRaider cryptojacking campaign compromises thousands of exposed, unauthenticated Linux Redis servers using cron persistence to deploy XMRig Monero miners.

Hunt.io researchers track a large-scale cryptojacking operation named RedisRaider that scans IPv4 ranges for Redis services exposed on TCP port 6379 and targets instances accepting unauthenticated connections. From a master list of 12,966 candidate hosts, 2,342 were confirmed to accept commands without authentication. Attackers abuse Redis commands (CONFIG SET dir/dbfilename, SET, BGSAVE) to write malicious cron entries into /etc/cron.d or /var/spool/cron, launching XMRig-based Monero miners, with branches including SSH authorized-key injection, Lua probing, and WordPress spraying. The article also references CVE-2026-81934, a Redis TLS use-after-free allowing unauthenticated command execution, fixed in releases including 8.2.9, 8.4.6, 8.6.6, 8.8.2, and 8.10.1.

GBHackers · 7d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-81934

Reflection-aware Generative Novel View Synthesis

Ref-GeNVS is a training-free method for reflection-consistent generative novel view synthesis that treats mirror images as two complementary views.

An arXiv paper proposes Ref-GeNVS, a training-free approach to generative novel view synthesis in scenes containing mirrors. It estimates the mirror plane, reflects camera poses to create virtual views, and applies mirror-gated attention plus reflection injection within a multi-view diffusion model. On synthetic and real mirror scenes, Ref-GeNVS outperforms recent generative NVS methods while requiring no fine-tuning.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 11d agoAI research

NVIDIA and CrowdStrike Strengthen Agentic Cybersecurity Frontier

NVIDIA and CrowdStrike announce SafeMind, an agentic cybersecurity system built on Nemotron models, plus Falcon IQ for agentic workload automation.

At CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 2026, NVIDIA and CrowdStrike announced SafeMind, an agentic cybersecurity system combining CrowdStrike's purpose-built frontier models and harnesses with NVIDIA Nemotron open models in a continuous red-versus-blue coevolution loop. A Blue Solano model post-trained on Nemotron 3 Super reportedly achieved higher accuracy than leading frontier models at 99% lower cost. CrowdStrike also introduced Falcon IQ, powered by Nemotron models in the Charlotte AI AgentWorks platform, coordinating more than 50 agents for automated defensive workflows. CrowdStrike cited an 89% year-over-year rise in AI-enabled attacks and a fastest eCrime breakout time of 27 seconds as context for agentic defense.

NVIDIA Blog · 14d agoAI industry

NeoHorse-1: Towards Recursive Self-Improvement via Agentic Post-Training with Routing Harness

NeoHorse-1 introduces agentic post-training with intelligent routing that lifts agent benchmark scores at 4B and 9B scales, prototyping recursive self-improvement.

NeoHorse-1 is a family of agent-native models trained through agentic post-training: routing-harness logs (predicted capability demand, service tier, interaction) become structurally validated training data organized into a three-stage SFT curriculum plus routing-guided on-policy distillation. Capability-guided allocation converts evaluation feedback into the next training mixture, closing an evaluation-selection-update loop. Post-training raises the macro-average from 58.94 to 64.87 at 4B and from 65.60 to 69.04 at 9B across eleven agent, tool-use, coding, and instruction-following benchmarks. The authors position it as a prototype of harness-mediated recursive self-improvement.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Threat actors are giving AI agents a bigger role in cyberattacks

Google Threat Intelligence's Q3 2026 tracker shows threat actors using AI agents for autonomous credential harvesting, including a six-hour campaign compromising thousands of credentials.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's Q3 2026 AI Threat Tracker, based on Mandiant incident response and platform telemetry, documents adversaries shifting toward AI-driven multi-step attack workflows. Mandiant investigated a financially motivated actor that compromised cloud infrastructure and used an AI coding chatbot plus agent instructions to run vulnerability scanning, troubleshooting, and IP rotation autonomously, harvesting thousands of third-party credentials in under six hours; an exposed 'Recon' C2 server held over 23,800 harvested secrets including cloud and AI API keys. Separately, two PRC-nexus espionage actors experimented with Gemini, Claude, and Codex to build automated penetration testing and exploitation frameworks, with Shai-Hulud used for C2 and credential harvesting. GTIG says no fully autonomous attack pipelines have yet been observed in the wild.

Help Net Security · 7d agoThreat actor 2 sources

Adversarial Testing of Automated Program Repair Agents for Security Vulnerabilities

SWEADV benchmark shows adversarial issue descriptions make LLM program-repair agents write insecure fixes in 51.7% of cases, evading most detection tools.

Researchers built SWEADV, a benchmark of 750 adversarial issue descriptions derived from 150 SWE-bench Verified repair tasks, covering command execution, deserialization, path traversal, denial of service, and weak hashing attack types. Tested on mini_swe agents backed by GPT-5-Mini, MiniMax-M2.5, and DeepSeek-R, adversarial descriptions induced malicious behavior with successful repair in 51.7% of cases. Detection was weak: LLM-as-judge pre-repair screening reached only 62.3% accuracy, and post-repair detection via static analysis and LLM-as-judge achieved just 39.4% and 55.4%.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoAI safety & security1

ThreatsDay: GhostJacking AI Attacks, EtherHiding ClickFix, Cursor CLI Flaw + 17 More Stories

A weekly bulletin aggregating short security updates, including the City-Forum data-theft campaign, a ShipMonk breach, a Cursor CLI flaw, and GhostJacking AI attacks.

The Hacker News ThreatsDay Bulletin bundles roughly 20 short updates across cloud services, AI tools, malware, breaches, and scams. Highlights include the City-Forum campaign pulling data from unauthenticated guest access in Salesforce Experience Cloud and ServiceNow Service Portals since March 2025, and a ShipMonk breach exposing Trezor customer order data for orders in seven countries between May 10 and August 8, 2026. Other items cover a patched Cursor CLI flaw that let cloned repositories run commands before the workspace-trust prompt, Okta's analysis of the Work Panel vishing console used by actors like UNC6671, and GhostJacking AI agent hijacking via a patched Claude Desktop sandbox escape. Meta also launched an on-device WhatsApp Scam Alert machine learning model that keeps message content on the device.

The Hacker News · 28d agoIndustry

Dream-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through Evolving Worlds

Dream-RSI refines exploration policies by dreaming in replay simulators built from discovery history, cutting discovery costs across coding tasks.

Dream-RSI is a framework for scalable recursive self-improvement in autonomous coding agents, where a lightweight orchestration layer makes exploration explicit and programmable while leaving the underlying agent unchanged. Its core insight is that accumulated discovery history can serve as a replay simulator over the realized search space, providing immediate, low-cost off-policy feedback to evaluate and refine exploration policies without expensive online evaluations. Across algorithm engineering, mathematical optimization, and GPU kernel engineering, Dream-RSI achieves competitive or improved discovery quality at substantially reduced cost.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research