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Security Incident – BGP Hijacking

Attackers BGP-hijacked Softaculous' Hetzner IP block for 33 hours, obtained valid TLS certificates, and delivered a malicious Virtualizor update to some servers.

Between August 28 and 30, 2026, AS62390 (NexonHost) announced 162.55.80.0/24 via transit AS6204 (Zet.net) without authorization, diverting traffic while retaining Hetzner's AS24940 on the AS path. The attacker obtained valid Let's Encrypt certificates for virtualizor.com domains because the CA's domain validation was also routed through the hijack, so affected connections showed no TLS warnings. A malicious Virtualizor update package reached a handful of installations; routing was fully restored, and reconstruction from RIPE RIS data showed all 368 collector peers carried the hijacked route at some point with roughly 28% time-weighted diversion.

Lobsters · security · 13d agoData breach

Trends in Web Threats: Old Web Skimmer Still Active Today

Unit 42 detected 577,000 landing URL incidents in Q1 2022, with an old web skimmer family still actively stealing payment card data.

Palo Alto Unit 42 detected 577,275 landing URL incidents (116,643 unique) and 2,043,862 malicious host URL incidents (180,370 unique) between January and March 2022. Web threat volumes declined after the November 2021 holiday peak, but an old web skimmer family remained active. Business and economy sites overtook personal sites as the most common apparently benign entry points. Most malicious domains geolocated to the United States, Germany, and Russia, though proxy servers and VPNs obscure true locations.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

BGP Hijack Delivers Malicious Virtualizor Update That Establishes Persistent Root Access

Attackers used a BGP hijack to divert Softaculous traffic and push a malicious Virtualizor update granting root persistence on some hypervisors.

Virtualizor reported that a BGP hijack between August 28 20:57 UTC and August 30 06:10 UTC diverted Softaculous update traffic to an attacker-operated server holding a valid Let's Encrypt certificate. Installations checking for updates during the window could receive a malicious package that added an attacker SSH key to root, created a proxyuser account, and installed a Java payload persisted via a systemd service. Hosting provider AlbaHost confirmed 5 of its 34 Virtualizor hypervisors were root-compromised. Virtualizor shipped Patch 9 with a Security Analyzer on September 1, but cryptographic package signing remains future work.

The Hacker News · 14d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

Google Search Makes It Harder to See Where a Link Really Goes Before You Click

Google now routes some Search results through opaque google.com/goto redirects, weakening hover-to-verify anti-phishing checks.

Google has begun serving some organic search results as opaque google.com/goto?url= redirects whose destinations can only be resolved server-side by Google, likely to raise scraping costs for rank trackers and archival services. The change removes the pre-click hover preview of the true destination URL, undermining a long-standing anti-phishing habit for spotting lookalike, typosquatted, or search-optimized phishing domains. Security teams are advised to rely on layered defenses such as domain reputation, DNS and web filtering, browser isolation, and user training rather than hover text.

GBHackers · 1d agoIndustry

What Is a Website Attack Surface? A Beginner’s Guide to Reducing Risk

Sucuri's beginner guide explains how logins, plugins, APIs, and forgotten backups expand a website's attack surface and how to reduce that risk.

Sucuri published educational guidance explaining that login pages, contact forms, plugins, APIs, staging sites, and forgotten backups each add exposed components that constitute a website's attack surface. The article frames continuous attack surface reduction as a risk management practice for website owners. It is evergreen educational content rather than breaking incident news.

Sucuri Blog · 28d agoIndustry

A rant about phishing: It's not the user's fault (and not DNS either)

Opinion piece argues multi-domain login redirects make legitimate flows indistinguishable from phishing, urging organizations to standardize on one recognizable root domain.

The author shows a real-world login flow that chains through numerous third-party domains (identity providers, cloud auth endpoints, OAuth APIs, 2FA pages), none on the company's own domain, so credentials and 2FA prompts are trivially impersonable. The piece argues URLs are inherently confusing because the security-relevant second-level domain sits mid-string, and that users trained to ignore URLs cannot distinguish legitimate pages from scams. It proposes RFC 2119-style requirements: single recognizable root domain, internal services on its subdomains, emailed or SMS links on that domain, and local redirects instead of third-party hosted pages.

Lobsters · security · 6d agoPhishing & fraud

Google’s new search redirects make links harder to check before you click

Google routes some search result links through encoded google.com/goto?url= redirects, breaking hover-to-verify link checks and raising scraping costs.

Google has started routing some search result links through opaque google.com/goto?url=... redirects using a custom Google-specific encoding, with the destination visible only via the redirect response's Location header. Google confirmed the rollout as an anti-abuse measure, most likely to make bulk extraction of destination URLs from search results more difficult and costly. Malwarebytes warns the change undermines the standard hover-before-clicking safety advice, while legitimate rank-tracking, SEO auditing, archival, and accessibility tools now face the same rate limits and costs as abusive scrapers.

Malwarebytes Labs · 2d agoIndustry

Trends in Web Threats in CY Q2 2022: Malicious JavaScript Downloaders Are Evolving

Unit 42 detected 751,000 landing URL incidents in Q2 2022 and documented malicious JavaScript downloaders evolving to evade detection.

Unit 42 detected 751,331 landing URL incidents (253,644 unique) and 1,744,629 malicious host URL incidents (256,844 unique) from April through June 2022. Total landing URL incidents rose compared with Q1 2022, and unique host URL incidents grew 42%, indicating attackers deploying more variants. The report includes a case study of a JavaScript downloader campaign demonstrating new evasion techniques. Personal sites, blogs, and business sites were the top apparently benign entry points.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

27.5KB language-agnostic WebGPU syntax highlighter

A developer released gpu-lexer, a 27.5KB language-agnostic syntax highlighter that uses a tiny WebGPU model to label code tokens in the browser.

gpu-lexer splits source into words, whitespace, and symbols, then a small WebGPU model uses local and whole-file context to assign nine token classes, working on languages never seen in training. On held-out files, 12.57% of token labels differ from Shiki, though this measures agreement with Shiki rather than objective correctness. In benchmarks against Shiki 4.4.3, Prism.js, Highlight.js, Sugar High, and Starry Night, it highlighted 10 concatenated copies of three.min.js (5.56M characters) about 10x faster on an Apple M4 Pro in Chrome 152. The author frames it as an experiment, not a grammar-equivalent highlighter.

Hacker News · security · 7d agoAI tools & infraHN 21↑ · 5 comments1

PEEP: A Browser RAT Posing as a Chrome Extension

SOCRadar's STRU analyzed PEEP, an emerging Chromium-based RAT disguised as a Chrome extension enabling post-exploitation control of browsers.

SOCRadar's Threat Research Unit (STRU) identified and analyzed PEEP, a Chromium-based post-exploitation toolkit distributed as a browser extension. PEEP provides RAT-style capabilities while posing as a legitimate Chrome extension. It is assessed as an emerging threat worth monitoring by defenders.

SOCRadar · 12d agoMalware

Generative Late-Interaction Embeddings For Visual Document Retrieval

GLIE compresses visual document retrieval embeddings to four vectors per page while retaining nearly 80% of uncompressed nDCG@5 accuracy.

Researchers analyzing late-interaction retrieval embeddings found they lie exactly on the unit sphere and concentrate near a manifold of intrinsic dimension five to six. GLIE learns a few k vectors per page that serve as a lightweight index and a basis to regenerate the full embedding set for exact rescoring of top candidates at query time. On ViDoRe v1 with four vectors per page, GLIE retains nearly 80% of uncompressed nDCG@5 versus 70% for the best prior post-hoc method, using a 415K-parameter network trained in under three GPU-minutes on 1,000 pages.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

Google’s New Search Redirects Make It Harder to Check Where Links Lead Before Clicking

Malwarebytes reports Google's new encoded google.com/goto?url= redirects break hover-preview link checking, weakening a common phishing defense.

Google now routes some search results through opaque google.com/goto?url= redirects using custom encoding, so browser link previews no longer reveal the true destination, only the claimed label above the result. Malwarebytes found the final destination is visible only in the redirect response's Location header, complicating hover-based safety checks as well as scraping, archiving, and audit tools. The change arrives amid malvertising, search-result poisoning, and fake installer campaigns like the recent Node.js infostealer lure. Google says it deploys measures against evolving abuse but did not explain the change.

Cyber Security News · 1d agoResearch

Advanced URL Filtering Archives

Palo Alto Networks markets Advanced URL Filtering as combining a malicious URL database with real-time ML and DL web protection.

The Unit 42 blog page is a product category archive for Advanced URL Filtering. The product description states it combines a malicious URL database with a real-time web protection engine powered by machine learning and deep learning models. No research findings, incidents, or vulnerabilities are discussed.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 8d agoIndustry 6 sources

Climate-ModernBERT: Revisiting Corpus Composition for Domain-Adaptive Continued Pretraining

Climate-ModernBERT domain-adapted encoders reach 76.3 average F1 across nine climate benchmarks, 2.8 points above vanilla ModernBERT-Base.

The authors continue pretraining ModernBERT-Base on three climate corpora - academic text, climate-filtered web data, and synthetic documents - and compare joint mixtures against parameter-space merging of specialized checkpoints. The best model achieves 76.3 average F1 across nine climate NLP benchmarks, a 2.8-point improvement over the vanilla baseline. Academic climate corpora provide the strongest adaptation signal, and parameter-space merging outperforms joint multi-source training while preserving complementary corpus information; all variants are released.

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

Everything in Moderation: Per-Domain Coverage Optima and Alignment-Resistant Domain Gaps in Multi-Domain Mid-Training

Controlled mid-training experiments on Qwen3-8B-Base find each domain has a 10-40% coverage optimum and domain gaps survive alignment SFT.

Using Qwen3-8B-Base (with a 4B replication) across five semantically rule-disjoint KOR-Bench domains, the authors train 30 data allocations spanning the five-domain simplex at five seeds each. All five domains show interior optima in the moderate 10-40% coverage band, and domain gaps persist after a fixed-budget compensatory SFT pass, which raises 116/120 cells yet bridges 0/240 pairs at a 5% threshold. Zero coverage collapses mid-training-only accuracy, though a FineWeb-Edu-only control shows the collapse is partly generic drift. The results argue mid-training data composition requires principled design rather than reliance on later alignment.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research1

19 Chrome and Edge Extensions Found With Wallet-Stealing and Crypto

Socket found 19 malicious Chrome and Edge extensions, active since February 2024, stealing wallet seed phrases and credentials and draining crypto from about 80,000 users.

Socket researcher Karlo Zanki documented a cluster of 18 Chrome and one Edge extensions with wallet secret stealing and cryptocurrency draining capabilities, tracked as campaign Superior and possibly active since February 2024. The actor created 14 extensions and bought five legitimate ones, later pushing malicious updates; the largest, Enable Right Click & Copy, has roughly 80,000 installs across both browsers. The extensions maintain WebSocket C2 connections with endpoint rotation, strip CSP headers, and load 16 modules including multi-chain wallet drainers, hardware-wallet seed-phrase harvesters, credential grabbers, and ClickFix-style lures.

The Hacker News · 19d agoMalware in the wild

Think Before You Link: Rarity, Reasoning, and Retrieval in Multilingual Entity Linking

Training-free reasoning-plus-retrieval framework lifts multilingual multimodal entity linking accuracy by 6.9% overall and up to 23.3% on rare entities.

The paper broadens rarity measurement in multimodal entity linking using knowledge-graph structural metrics beyond popularity-based pageview metrics, identifying many rare entities that popularity metrics miss. Across these rare-entity slices, state-of-the-art accuracy drops by 15.4-39.9%, exposing distinct failure modes under different rarity definitions. The proposed training-free framework iteratively searches and reasons over Wikipedia with a reasoning-capable vision-language model; experiments show reasoning and retrieval are complementary. On the MERLIN benchmark covering Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Tamil, and Vietnamese, the system improves overall accuracy by 6.9% and up to 23.3% on rare entities, with MERLIN-Rare test slices released.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Multi-Vector (Late Interaction) Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers

Hugging Face details building and using multi-vector late-interaction embedding models with Sentence Transformers for retrieval workloads.

Hugging Face published a guide on multi-vector, late-interaction embedding models (ColBERT-style) supported through Sentence Transformers. The post covers how practitioners can build and use these models for retrieval and RAG pipelines. It is a developer tooling and technique write-up, not a security advisory.

Hugging Face Blog · 29d agoAI tools & infra1

[webapps] CubeCart 6.7.4 - Stored XSS

A proof-of-concept stored cross-site scripting exploit targeting CubeCart 6.7.4 was published on Exploit-DB.

Exploit-DB lists a proof-of-concept exploit for a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in CubeCart 6.7.4, a PHP-based e-commerce web application. The listing demonstrates injection of attacker-controlled script that persists in the application, but no exploitation in the wild or CVE assignment is reported in the provided text.

Exploit-DB · 16d agoExploit / PoC1

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

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

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

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

terms.txt: A Consent and Compensation Protocol for Agentic Web Access

terms.txt specifies a robots.txt-style protocol for per-path, per-purpose AI crawler consent and compensation, with enforcement adding 0.20-0.65 ms per request.

The paper documents that automated clients now make up most web requests, that training dominates Cloudflare-classified crawling, and that the largest AI platforms fetch thousands of pages per returned visitor while robots.txt cannot express identity, purpose, terms, or price. It specifies terms.txt plus an origin-enforced exchange using Web Bot Auth signatures, signed intent, delegation tokens, HTTP 402 negotiation, and signed receipts. A dependency-free implementation adds 0.20 to 0.65 ms per request on one vCPU.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Training and Finetuning Multi-Vector Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers

Hugging Face published a tutorial on training and finetuning multi-vector embedding models using the Sentence Transformers library.

Hugging Face's blog walks through training and finetuning multi-vector embedding models with Sentence Transformers. Multi-vector approaches store multiple vectors per document to support late-interaction retrieval. The post is a practical guide for developers building retrieval pipelines with the library.

Hugging Face Blog · 21d agoAI tools & infra1

[dos] LuCI DHCPv6 - Lease Hostname Stored Cross-Site Scripting

Stored cross-site scripting in OpenWrt LuCI via malicious DHCPv6 lease hostnames allows router interface attacks.

Exploit-DB entry 52637 describes a stored cross-site scripting vulnerability in LuCI, the OpenWrt web administration interface. A attacker on the local network can set a malicious hostname that gets stored in DHCPv6 lease data and rendered unsafely in the LuCI UI. When an administrator views the lease status page, the injected script executes in the router's management context.

Exploit-DB · Aug 11, 2026Exploit / PoC

.blend URL Viewer

Simon Willison demos a .blend URL viewer built with GPT-6 Astra in Codex and ChatGPT Images 2.5 generating Blender models.

Simon Willison used ChatGPT Images 2.5 to generate a Faberge egg concept image themed after the TV show Pluribus, then had Codex running GPT-6 Astra (high) execute a Blender local skill to build a 3D model from it. He published the result as a .blend URL viewer tool and continues experimenting with agentic Blender workflows. The post is a hands-on demo of AI-driven creative tooling rather than a security or release announcement.

Simon Willison · 6d agoAI tools & infra

Microsoft Links 30+ Rotating Domains to MacSync Stealer Infrastructure

Microsoft links 30+ rotating domains to the MacSync macOS infostealer, confirming active credential and file exfiltration through chunked HTTP PUT uploads.

Microsoft Defender Experts correlated 30+ domains with MacSync Stealer, requiring aligned endpoint and network behaviors (process ancestry, command-line patterns, /curl/, /dynamic?txd=, and /gate?buildtxd= paths, API-key headers, chunked HTTP PUT parameters) to link infrastructure. Execution begins from an interactive zsh session consistent with ClickFix social engineering, with curl retrieving and Base64/gunzip decoding the payload, followed by collection of Keychain data, browser credentials, SSH keys, AWS credentials, Kubernetes configs, and Apple Notes. Data is zipped to /tmp/osalogging.zip, chunked, uploaded via HTTP PUT, and artifacts are deleted afterward; the analysis builds on RST Cloud's May 8 findings and overlaps with Microsoft's earlier 250+ domain ClickFix campaign distributing MacSync and Atomic Stealer (AMOS).

The Hacker News · 28d agoMalware in the wild

LexFlip: A Dissociation Diagnostic for Legal Meaning Preservation Metrics

LexFlip releases 373 minimal perturbations of Quebec statutory French that reverse legal force while preserving tokens, exposing weaknesses in embedding-based meaning preservation metrics.

LexFlip provides 373 minimal perturbations of Quebec statutory French that reverse legal force while preserving 0.93 of tokens, creating dissociation items that break monotone token-overlap metric validation. The seven embedding and BERTScore metrics tested register only 0.022-0.039 of their identical-to-unrelated range on these edits, versus 0.670 for bidirectional NLI. Against FrJudge, with a measured human ceiling of r=0.597, a bare length feature outscores every semantic metric tested.

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

[webapps] Bludit CMS 3.20.0 - Reflected Cross-Site Scripting

A reflected cross-site scripting flaw in Bludit CMS 3.20.0 is documented with a public proof-of-concept exploit on Exploit-DB.

Exploit-DB published exploit ID 52678 targeting Bludit CMS 3.20.0, a web application affected by reflected cross-site scripting. The listing contains a proof-of-concept but includes no CVE identifier or evidence of active exploitation.

Exploit-DB · 14d agoExploit / PoC1

Does Syntax Matter? A Graph-Augmented Variational Topic Model for Computational Social Sciences

SCPTM graph-augmented variational topic model shows syntax aids topic diversity and descriptor quality but gains stem mainly from the variational encoder.

The Structural Contextual Probabilistic Topic Model represents corpora as heterogeneous document-word graphs with lexical and syntactic edges processed by a Graph Attention Network inside a VAE for mixed-membership topic distributions. Across four corpora, neural gains in document-topic alignment are attributable to the variational encoder rather than syntax, while graph-augmented variants improve topic diversity everywhere. Dependency paths add value on argumentative deliberative texts but are redundant in technical and institutional registers.

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

Can Foundation Models Moderate Online Content? Evaluating Instruction- vs. Example-Driven Policy Operationalization

ModerationBench shows foundation models can nearly triple Bluesky's moderation F1 (0.60 vs 0.22), with instruction- and example-driven guidance performing comparably.

Researchers built ModerationBench, a new benchmark of 4,000 manually annotated in-the-wild posts from Bluesky, to test whether foundation models can reliably operationalize content moderation policies. They systematically compare instruction-driven guidance (reasoning from policy precepts) with example-driven guidance (generalizing from precedents) for Vision-Language Models. Both paradigms achieve comparable peak effectiveness, and foundation models nearly triple the F1 of Bluesky's deployed moderation system on Random Posts (0.60 vs 0.22).

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

[webapps] Bludit CMS - Stored XSS

A stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Bludit CMS was disclosed through a public proof-of-concept published on Exploit-DB.

Exploit-DB published a webapps entry for a stored XSS flaw in Bludit CMS, an open-source flat-file content management system. Stored XSS allows an attacker to persist malicious scripts that execute in other users' browsers, potentially enabling session theft or unauthorized actions. The listing did not include a CVE identifier or affected version range.

Exploit-DB · 15d agoExploit / PoC1

PEEP Turns Chrome and Edge Into Post-Compromise Backdoors for Host Command Execution

SOCRadar disclosed PEEP, a post-exploitation Chromium extension toolkit that turns Chrome and Edge into host-level backdoors via native messaging and C2 polling.

SOCRadar researchers detailed PEEP, a Chromium-based post-exploitation toolkit masquerading as a 'Smart Bookmarks' extension injected directly into Chrome and Edge profiles by forging Secure Preferences integrity values, bypassing Web Store checks. A native-messaging host binary (nm_host.exe) extends the browser agent to host-level command execution, file management, credential theft, and session hijacking, while the extension polls C2 endpoints at 206.237.30.232 or xfjcc.fun every 30 seconds over plaintext HTTP and exfiltrates browsing history, cookies, and tab metadata. PEEP is derived from the open-source RedExt red teaming framework, adds PowerShell persistence scripts, and includes a Linux-targeting Python script, suggesting cross-platform intent. The activity is unattributed but contains Chinese-language artifacts; a C2 /health endpoint showed 34 agent entries and 10 active sessions.

The Hacker News · 9d agoMalware in the wild1