Search: “Visa”

Your Shredded Visa Card May Still Work at the Checkout

UMass Amherst researchers demonstrated expired Visa contactless cards can complete real purchases via relay attacks exploiting Visa Kernel 3's unsigned expiry date handling.

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers presented at USENIX Security 2026 that expired Visa contactless cards can be revived for real purchases through an NFC man-in-the-middle attack on Visa's Kernel 3. The attack alters the expiry date the terminal sees (tag 5F24) while leaving the Track 2 Equivalent Data (tag 57) sent to the issuing bank unchanged, and the card's cryptographic signature does not cover the expiry date. Two Android phones emulating card and terminal relayed transactions within Visa's 500-millisecond limit. Mastercard, American Express, and Discover kernels blocked the attack, while Visa Kernel 3 did not; researchers also modified the Consumer Device Cardholder Verification Method flag at five US banks, and attackers can also exploit Terminal Verification Results zero-filling. Visa was notified in May 2025 and December 2025; no CVE has been assigned.

Security Affairs·Aug 21, 18:04 UTC · 26d agoResearch

Visa enhances A2A Protect to stop fraud before money leaves the account

Visa enhanced A2A Protect with a Featurespace-powered unified fraud score to help banks stop account-to-account fraud before funds leave accounts.

Visa announced an updated A2A Protect that integrates Featurespace technology into a unified fraud score, giving banks real-time risk insights on account-to-account payments without waiting for in-house model training or consortium participation. Visa claims a 75% increase in fraud detection within the first six months of deployment and a single API for integration. A2A transaction volume is projected to exceed 5.8 trillion by 2028, up 160% from 2024.

Help Net Security·Sep 2, 00:00 UTC · 14d agoTools

Your Expired Visa Card Could Be ‘Zombified’ to Make Contactless Payments

Roundup: expired Visa cards can be revived for contactless payments via NFC relay; plus Apple spyware warnings and Ukraine cyberattacks on Russian e-commerce.

WIRED's weekly security roundup leads with research showing expired Visa contactless cards can be revived to make new payments through an NFC man-in-the-middle attack that alters the card's expiration date. The roundup also covers Apple sending an unprecedented volume of spyware warnings to users and Ukrainian cyber and drone attacks against a major Russian e-commerce company.

WIRED · Security·Aug 22, 10:30 UTC · 25d agoResearch

Researchers find a loophole that lets expired credit cards make unauthorized payments

UMass Amherst researchers showed at USENIX Security 2026 that NFC relay attacks can rewrite unprotected expiration dates, letting expired Visa contactless cards keep making payments.

UMass Amherst researchers presented the Zombie Card attack at USENIX Security 2026, using two smartphones to relay and modify NFC payment data from expired Visa cards. The expiration date lies outside the card's digital signature coverage in Visa Kernel 3, and one major US bank accepted $1-$500 test purchases plus live $2.79 and $3.19 purchases with rewritten dates. Mastercard, American Express, and Discover rejected tampered dates; researchers notified Visa in May 2025 and no CVE or confirmed fix existed at publication.

Help Net Security·Aug 20, 00:00 UTC · 27d agoResearch

Risky Bulletin: Expired cards can be used for new transactions

Researchers show expired Visa contactless cards can be revived via NFC man-in-the-middle relay to run fraudulent transactions; roundup also covers major breaches.

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers built an NFC man-in-the-middle rig that updates a card's expiration date in transit and relays the modified payment to POS terminals, reviving expired contactless cards; Visa terminals and the backends of all five banks studied failed to catch the manipulation. The same roundup reports Iranian hackers shut down a small UK power plant for four days, Lazarus breached South Korea's Presidential Office as part of a campaign exceeding 100 victims, and French telecom SFR suffered a breach affecting over 2.1 million customers.

Risky Business News·Aug 24, 04:40 UTC · 23d agoResearch1

Zombie Card Attack Can Revive Expired Visa Cards for Contactless Payments

UMass Amherst researchers demonstrate Zombie Card, an NFC relay attack that revives expired Visa contactless cards for in-store purchases without breaking cryptography.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst presented the Zombie Card attack at USENIX Security 2026, showing that Visa's Kernel 3 does not cryptographically bind the Application Expiration Date (tag 5F24) the terminal reads with the Track 2 expiry seen by the issuer. By positioning an NFC man-in-the-middle relay, an attacker can rewrite the terminal-facing expiration date of an expired card and complete contactless purchases, provided the account remains open under the same PAN and the bank does not independently re-check expiry. Testing across five major US banks found three distinct policies; Visa Kernel 3 accepted the modified date, while Mastercard, American Express, and Discover kernels declined modified transactions. Findings were disclosed to Visa and affected banks in May 2025, no CVE has been assigned, and no exploitation has been reported.

The Hacker News·Aug 20, 18:30 UTC · 26d agoResearch

Cybersecurity M&A Roundup: 33 Deals Announced in August 2026

SecurityWeek tallied 33 cybersecurity M&A deals announced in August 2026, headlined by Visa's $2.4B BioCatch buy and Munich Re's $575M At-Bay acquisition.

Thirty-three cybersecurity M&A deals were announced in August 2026. The largest include Visa acquiring fraud-detection firm BioCatch for $2.4 billion in cash and Munich Re buying cyber insurtech At-Bay for $575 million through its HSB unit. Fortinet acquired AI security company Virtue AI, Palo Alto Networks bought agentic workflow platform Console, Cribl acquired AI-native SOC startup Radiant Security, and Deel bought deepfake-detection firm Clarity for a reported $40-50 million. Brinqa, Datavault AI, Echo, and Kiteworks also announced acquisitions.

SecurityWeek·Sep 10, 16:14 UTC · 6d agoIndustry

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·Sep 4, 15:49 UTC · 12d agoAI research

U.K. Supreme Court Opens Door for Spyware Victims to Sue Foreign States

UK Supreme Court ruled Bahrain not immune from spyware litigation, letting two dissidents pursue claims over FinSpy hacking; case returns to the High Court.

The UK Supreme Court ruled in The Kingdom of Bahrain v. Shehabi that Bahrain is not immune from litigation over its alleged use of FinSpy spyware against two Bahraini dissidents living in the UK. Citizen Lab researchers Siena Anstis, Natalia Krapiva, and Kate Pundyk, writing in Lawfare, called the decision a milestone for accountability in transnational repression. The case now returns to the UK High Court, where attribution, causation, and injury must be proven.

Citizen Lab·Sep 2, 14:14 UTC · 14d agoPolicy & legal in the wild

Tajin Group: Guarantee Marketplace Vendor Involved in Phishing and Chinese Money Laundering Group

Recorded Future details Tajin Group, a Chinese-speaking vendor on Telegram guarantee marketplaces running phishing, carding, and money laundering operations targeting Chinese banks.

Insikt Group analyzed Tajin Group, a Chinese-speaking threat actor operating on Telegram-based guarantee marketplaces Dabai Guarantee and, since May 2026, Xinbi Guarantee. The group conducts phishing, payment card theft, and money laundering targeting mainland Chinese citizens and banks, testing stolen cards from twelve countries on platforms like CCAvenue and Geidea. Operators bought and sold at least 100 Telegram usernames and anonymous virtual numbers via Fragment Market to strengthen OPSEC, linking multiple usernames to single Telegram accounts. Recorded Future warns Tajin Group's TTPs are likely to be replicated by other vendors on Chinese-language guarantee marketplaces at global scale.

Recorded Future·Sep 15, 00:00 UTC · 1d agoThreat actor

Your phone or computer may soon ask how old you are

California's Digital Age Assurance Act forces Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android to collect age brackets from January 2027, with open-source exemptions pending.

California's Digital Age Assurance Act, signed in October 2025, requires major operating systems to collect user age brackets (under 13, 13-15, 16-17, 18+) and share non-identifying age signals with app developers starting January 1, 2027, with existing setups complying by July 1, 2027. AB1856, passed in late August 2026, would exempt open-source operating systems under GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses and awaits the governor's signature. Colorado, Illinois, and New York have similar age assurance measures, and the EFF has criticized the law for privacy and censorship concerns.

Malwarebytes Labs·Sep 3, 08:54 UTC · 13d agoPolicy & legal

OpenAI: Cambodian scam centers used ChatGPT to lure Indian nationals, conduct investment fraud

The Record·Aug 4, 20:45 UTC · Aug 4, 2026Phishing & fraud

Claude is no longer available for minors

Anthropic restricts Claude consumer accounts to users 18 and over, using detection signals and third-party Yoti verification to confirm age when minor activity is suspected.

Anthropic's support documentation states the Claude consumer product is available only to users over 18, and accounts flagged by minor-activity detection systems must verify age before continuing. Verification is handled by third-party provider Yoti through ID documents, selfies, or other accepted methods; Anthropic receives only a pass/fail result and never sees or stores the ID or images. Flagged accounts remain disabled until verification is passed, at which point they are reinstated.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 11, 10:48 UTC · 5d agoAI industryHN 61↑ · 78 comments1

⚡ Weekly Recap: AI-Powered PLC Attacks, GitLab Attacks, Stripe Key Leaks and More

US agencies warn of AI-assisted attacks on exposed Siemens PLCs; the week also saw GitLab CVE-2026-19478 exploited and trojanized npm packages found.

The weekly recap leads with a US government warning that threat actors use AI-generated scripts and Censys/ZoomEye scanning to attack internet-exposed Siemens S7 PLCs in water, energy and manufacturing, calling it an active threat. Other stories include active exploitation of GitLab CVE-2026-19478 (CVSS 9.4, unauthenticated project rewriting), 14 trojanized npm packages delivering the RedC2 4.0 Linux backdoor, and the Zombie Card attack that revives expired Visa cards for contactless payment fraud. It also covers suspected Russian clusters UNC6293, UNC7005 and UNC5976 phishing campaigns, a faster Cloudflare Workers Spectre JWT leak, and a bespoke Cl0p JSP web shell deployed after exploiting PTC Windchill flaws.

The Hacker News·Aug 28, 08:05 UTC · 19d agoThreat actor in the wildCVE-2026-194781

Building Multilingual Bridges: Data Mixing as the Pillar of Generalization for In-Language Reasoning

Tiny Aya L2-Thinker, a 3.35B model, achieves over 93 percent in-language reasoning across 60 languages via optimized multilingual data mixing; weights released.

The paper studies L2 reasoning, the ability to reason consistently in the language of the user's prompt, approached through SFT data composition and scheduling. Tiny Aya L2-Thinker (3.35B) achieves an in-language reasoning rate above 93 percent across 60 languages on six benchmarks spanning math, commonsense, instruction following, open-ended generation, and cultural reasoning. Findings show generalization to held-out languages comes from broader language coverage, multilingual non-reasoning data, and a strong English reasoning backbone, suggesting reasoning is language-agnostic and transferable without per-language supervision. Model weights and multilingual reasoning data are publicly released.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 16:56 UTC · 7d agoAI research1

OpenAI reveals how criminals used ChatGPT to run scams

Help Net Security·Aug 3, 00:00 UTC · Aug 3, 2026Phishing & fraud

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

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

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

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

OpenAI Disrupts Poipet Scam Network Using ChatGPT Across Multiple Fraud Schemes

The Hacker News·Aug 5, 18:33 UTC · Aug 5, 2026Phishing & fraud

Safety for Whom? Boundary-Aware Self-Distillation for Controlled LLM Safety Refusal

A self-distillation safety framework tunes narrow-boundary refusals in Qwen3-8B, raising target-domain refusal to 84.75% while cutting over-refusal from 15.20% to 5.20%.

The paper formulates narrow-boundary safety, where deployments need refusals within specific topics rather than whole subjects, and proposes an offline self-generated framework with controlled topic generation, escalating retries, and harmful-benign boundary pairs. On political persuasion with Qwen3-8B, the method raised target-domain refusal from 9.47% to 84.75% and cut the mean unsafe-response rate across three broader benchmarks from 26.26% to 0.14%. Verified target-model responses reduced over-refusal from 15.20% to 5.20%, and boundary-pair data cut comply-side over-refusal on held-out pairs from 32.94% to 4.16%. Results show data composition controls the safety-usability trade-off and alignment should be evaluated on both sides of the refusal boundary.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 2, 20:00 UTC · 13d agoAI safety & security1

Proofpoint Strengthens Executive Leadership Team with Appointment of Chief Legal Officer and Chief People Officer

Proofpoint appointed Brian Levey as Chief Legal Officer and Puja Jaspal as Chief People Officer, strengthening its executive leadership team.

Proofpoint announced on September 8, 2026 the appointments of Brian Levey as Chief Legal Officer and Puja Jaspal as Chief People Officer. Levey previously served as Chief Business Affairs & Chief Legal Officer at Upwork and spent 13 years at eBay; Jaspal was Chief People Officer at Fastly with prior senior roles at Cisco, Visa, and Google. The hires support Proofpoint's stated expansion around human and AI-agent security.

Proofpoint Threat Insight·Sep 8, 09:30 UTC · 8d agoIndustry

E-Commerce Access, Vedicline Data, Langflow RCE, ASUS Claim, and Energy Shell Access

SOCRadar reports underground posts claiming a Bangladeshi e-commerce database, Vedicline data leak, Langflow RCE, ASUS breach, and energy-sector shell access.

SOCRadar's Dark Web Team identified several new underground posts, including an alleged Bangladeshi e-commerce customer database offered for sale. The roundup also covers a claimed Vedicline data leak, Langflow remote code execution, an ASUS breach claim, and energy-sector shell access sales. Details on record counts and victims were not provided in the excerpt.

SOCRadar·Sep 7, 09:20 UTC · 9d agoData breach

The Collective Cyber Defense letter wrote your next vendor questionnaire

Op-ed argues the 200-company Collective Cyber Defense letter's three endorsed metrics should become standard vendor procurement questions.

More than 200 companies including Microsoft, Google, AWS, CrowdStrike, Anthropic and Okta signed an August 27 open letter calling for faster cyber defenses against AI-enabled attacks. The letter endorses three measurable metrics: coverage, containment speed, and verified remediation. The author turns those into five concrete procurement questions buyers should pose at vendor renewals, while noting the letter contains no deadlines, dollar figures or measurable targets.

CyberScoop·Sep 1, 10:00 UTC · 15d agoIndustry

Heterogeneous Cross-Chain Transaction Tracing for Solana Bridges via Candidate-Set Selective Decision

SolTracer traces cross-chain transactions onto Solana bridges, improving open-world association F1 by 20.16% over the strongest baseline for illicit-fund tracing.

The paper formalizes four Solana-bound cross-chain transaction modes and proposes SolTracer, which maps heterogeneous execution semantics into a unified event space and uses candidate-set selective decision-making with abstention when valid targets are absent. In the challenging open-world setting with a 50% TA ratio, SolTracer improves F1 by 20.16% over the strongest baseline. An empirical study of real-world transfers examines count-value divergence across bridge mechanisms, cross-asset shifts, and decoupling between on-chain settlement and explorer visibility.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 11:43 UTC · 6d agoResearch

Getting a stranger’s phone kicked off the cellular network costs a few dollars

Researchers show attackers can remotely block strangers' phones and alarm gateways on US cellular networks by abusing lost/stolen IMEI reporting for $2.50-$4 per device.

Researchers from Michigan State University and three partner schools found six weaknesses in the lost/stolen device reporting ecosystem spanning devices, carrier systems, and cross-carrier block-list sharing. They demonstrated blocking unopened Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 phones and home alarm gateways on three major US carriers, with each block costing $2.50-$4 and taking roughly 20-80 seconds. The attacks exploit thin identity and ownership checks in prepaid accounts, IMEI leakage from vulnerable cellular chipsets used by two vendors with over 40% global market share, and pre-release IMEI databases purchasable for $600. Victims receive no notification, and restoring service requires proving device ownership to the carrier.

Help Net Security·Sep 11, 06:00 UTC · 5d agoResearch

[20260807] - Core - MFA Authentication Bypass

Joomla fixed CVE-2026-73337, an MFA authentication bypass caused by insufficient state checks, affecting Joomla CMS 4.0.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2.

Joomla security advisory 20260807 describes CVE-2026-73337, an authentication bypass in Joomla CMS multi-factor authentication. Insufficient state checks create a vector that allows 2FA checks to be bypassed; the vendor rates the impact as high with moderate probability. Affected versions are 4.0.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2; fixes ship in 5.4.8 and 6.1.3. The issue was reported by bloman and Matej Rada on 2026-07-25.

Joomla Security Centre·Aug 17, 14:00 UTC · Aug 17, 2026AdvisoryCVE-2026-73337

Pornhub's Parent Company to Pay $120 Million to Settle Child Sexual Abuse Lawsuits

Pornhub parent Aylo will pay $120 million settling child sexual abuse class actions, without admitting liability, and adopt stricter content moderation commitments.

Aylo, Pornhub's parent company (formerly Mindgeek, acquired by Ethical Capital Partners in 2023), will pay $120 million to settle two 2021 class actions in California and Alabama alleging its platforms hosted child sexual abuse material in violation of federal trafficking and child imagery laws. The settlement fund begins with $25 million in 2026 followed by six annual installments. The class covers anyone under 18 appearing in content on Mindgeek-operated sites between February 12, 2011 and December 6, 2024. The deal, subject to court approval, adds commitments to age-verify models, conduct human and automated content review, and report suspected abuse material to authorities.

404 Media·Aug 17, 21:04 UTC · 29d agoPolicy & legal

The G7 tells industry to hurry up and prep for post-quantum encryption

A G7 working group report urges governments and industry to accelerate post-quantum cryptography migration, framing quantum risk as a near-term economic threat.

A cybersecurity working group formed at the June 2026 G7 Summit in France called on organizations to stop postponing migration of critical systems to post-quantum cryptography, warning that harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks against currently encrypted data exist today. The report was signed by CISA, the UK NCSC, France's ANSSI, Germany's BSI, Canada's CSE, Japan's NCO, and Italy's ACN. It also cautions that some NIST-selected PQC algorithms have already been broken on classical computers, reinforcing support for crypto-agility. The push aligns with a recent US executive order moving federal PQC migration timelines from 2035 to 2030, while Google and others target 2029.

CyberScoop·Sep 3, 19:29 UTC · 12d agoPolicy & legal

State Department says Trump raised cyber scam compound issue with Xi

The Record·Aug 6, 20:33 UTC · Aug 6, 2026Phishing & fraud

What the first year of EU AI Act transparency enforcement could look like

Help Net Security·Aug 7, 00:00 UTC · Aug 7, 2026AI policy

Anthropic's Enterprise Frontier Safeguards lets your Claude logs stay in your cloud

Anthropic launches Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, letting regulated customers keep Claude usage logs in their own cloud storage under their own keys with automated misuse detection.

Anthropic unveiled Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, co-designed with eight members of the Analysis and Resilience Center for Systemic Risk and more than 100 customers including Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Visa, Mastercard, Comcast, KPMG, and Salesforce. Misuse-detection activity data can live in the customer's Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage under customer-managed keys, with fully automated review and no human inspection by Anthropic; automated systems watch for offensive cyber or biological capability development and signs of stolen credentials. The offering replaces the friction around Fable 5's 30-day retention policy, costs nothing extra, spans Claude Enterprise, Claude Platform, Amazon Bedrock, Google's Agent Platform, and Microsoft Foundry, with broad availability targeted for later this fall.

Help Net Security·Sep 2, 00:00 UTC · 14d agoAI industry1

FST Pay: Deterministic Safety-Gated Architecture for Youth Digital Payments

FST Pay proposes a deterministic safety-gated architecture for teen digital payments, pairing invariant authorization checks with decoupled post-settlement AI explanations.

Researchers propose FST Pay, a formal architecture for adolescent digital payments on rails like UPI that applies six deterministic invariant checks (spending limits, guardian co-sign policies, amount thresholds, merchant category codes, temporal intervals, hardware integrity) to classify transactions as ALLOW, REVIEW, or BLOCK. High-risk transactions trigger an asynchronous guardian co-sign workflow. Generative AI is restricted to post-settlement natural-language insights and holds no mutation privileges over the ledger, avoiding non-determinism on the real-time authorization path.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 08:03 UTC · 6d agoResearch

Knowledge Retention & Sharing in DF/IR

DFIR veteran reflects on knowledge retention and sharing gaps across the industry, from EnCase training to PCI forensics workflows.

A personal essay recounts decades in digital forensics and incident response, arguing the industry rarely moves beyond individual or tribal knowledge to operationalize lessons learned. Examples include building condition files and custom EnScripts for PCI investigations at IBM ISS X-Force, and the lack of shared investigative processes in early-career environments.

Lobsters · security·Sep 10, 09:06 UTC · 6d agoIndustry

FTC Withdraws Obsolete Policy Statement

The FTC rescinded its 2021 policy statement that applied the Health Breach Notification Rule to health apps and connected devices collecting consumer health data.

The Federal Trade Commission formally rescinded its 2021 Policy Statement on Breaches by Health Apps and Other Connected Devices. The statement had purported to apply the FTC's Health Breach Notification Rule to health apps and connected devices that collect consumer health information. The Commission considers the statement obsolete following its 2024 update to the Health Breach Notification Rule.

DataBreaches.net·Sep 10, 13:40 UTC · 6d agoPolicy & legal 2 sources

Indian man who fled US arrested on charges he helped scammers siphon $7.5 million from the elderly

US prosecutors charged Indian national Jay Goswami as a money mule who collected $7.5 million from nine elderly scam victims, now facing extradition from Canada.

US prosecutors charged 21-year-old Indian national Jay Sunilbharthi Goswami with wire fraud and money laundering for working as a money mule for India-based scammers. The scammers posed as law enforcement or government officials by phone and email, convincing at least nine elderly victims in New York and New Jersey to hand over $7,559,185 in cash, gold bars, and gift cards. Goswami collected the money and shipped it to India, allegedly earning about $90,000 while on a student visa at Fairleigh Dickinson University. After fleeing to Canada across the Peace Bridge, he was arrested at Toronto's airport and is awaiting extradition to the US.

The Record·Aug 24, 18:48 UTC · 22d agoPolicy & legal in the wild

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·Sep 4, 16:38 UTC · 12d agoAI research

New CISO appointments 2026

Companies including Mistral AI, Trellix, Marriott, and ANZ appointed new CISOs in July-September 2026 amid high security-leadership turnover.

CSO Online's rolling column tracks senior security appointments, noting many companies are hiring a CSO/CISO for the first time. Notable moves include Thomas Coudray leaving Ledger to become Mistral AI's CISO, David Soto joining Trellix from Amazon, and Daniel Dubowski becoming Marriott International's SVP and CISO. Other appointments span ANZ, Gigamon, Axonius, Tricentis, Remitly, Allied Universal, and the State of California.

CSO Online·Sep 7, 10:09 UTC · 9d agoIndustry

Notes on gotchas while migrating 35kb preprompts from Opus to self-hosted Ollama

Opinion piece urges migrating 35KB preprompts from Anthropic/OpenAI to self-hosted Ollama, citing session privacy risks and safety filters blocking security research.

The author documents gotchas migrating 35KB preprompts from Claude Opus to self-hosted Ollama, motivated by fears that frontier providers train on user sessions, citing the OpenAI Navier-Stokes controversy. The piece argues inference providers cannot audit their own retention or training pipelines and that only self-hosted hardware offers verifiable privacy. It also criticizes frontier safety filters for refusing vulnerability research tasks and calls for models that support exploitability testing in CI/CD pipelines.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 14, 13:59 UTC · 2d agoAI industryHN 41↑ · 13 comments1

100-plus companies call for ‘global surge’ in AI

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, AWS and 100+ organizations sign open letter urging a 'global surge' in AI-powered cyber defenses.

More than 100 companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Capital One, Mastercard, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks and Proofpoint signed an open letter published Thursday calling for accelerated cybersecurity defenses as AI capabilities advance. The letter argues a shrinking 'defenders' window' exists to fix accumulated weaknesses such as excessive permissions, misconfigurations and unpatched legacy systems before AI-enabled attacks grow more widespread. It asks governments to coordinate cross-border defense and fund protection of critical infrastructure, and asks frontier AI labs to provide model access, funding and support. It references a June US executive order creating the Gold Eagle AI threat-sharing clearinghouse.

CyberScoop·Aug 28, 13:41 UTC · 19d agoIndustry

AutoTrans: AI-Assisted Automatic Translation of Security Assertions for RISC-V Processors

AutoTrans uses LLMs with regex extraction and formal verification to automatically translate security assertions across RISC-V processors, achieving 78% unattended acceptance.

AutoTrans is an automated framework for translating verified security assertions between RISC-V processor targets, where manual translation takes hours per assertion. It combines a regex-based SystemVerilog signal extractor to prevent LLM signal hallucination, a pinned prompt template yielding byte-identical prompts resilient to model updates, and JasperGold FPV formal verification of generated assertions. Applied with DeepSeek V4 to translate assertions between RISC-V targets such as IBEX and NS31A, it achieves a 78% automatic translation acceptance rate without human intervention and 100% after human refinement.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 9, 11:31 UTC · 7d agoResearch

Leaks, data breaches, and ransom notes: The worst hacks of 2026 so far

TechCrunch's 2026 roundup covers SSA data exposure, Iranian water-utility attacks, Klue breach hitting ~200 firms, and Meta AI chatbot account hijacks.

TechCrunch's mid-year roundup highlights a whistleblower claim that DOGE uploaded a live Social Security database copy to an unsecured third-party server, which House Democrats called potentially the largest US breach in history. CISA reported Iranian hackers targeted over 100 US water providers over the summer, while Russian-linked attacks hit Polish, Swedish, and Norwegian energy and water infrastructure. Market research firm Klue was breached via a stale 2022 pilot credential, exposing cloud keys of ~200 customers including Jamf, HackerOne, and LastPass to extortion gang Icarus. Separately, tens of thousands of Instagram accounts were hijacked by abusing Meta's AI chatbot to trigger password resets to attacker-controlled emails.

TechCrunch · Security·Sep 15, 16:00 UTC · 1d agoData breach in the wild