Search: “certipy”

Agents Gone Wild: An AI-Orchestrated Global Campaign Against PaperCut NG/MF

AI-orchestrated campaign exploited PaperCut NG/MF RCE (CVE-2026-81578/82078), compromising 440+ instances at 395 organizations in 48 countries.

GreyNoise tracked a likely Russian-speaking actor using AI (OpenAI Codex harness plus a DeepSeek model) to develop, test, and deploy exploits for PaperCut NG/MF (CVE-2026-81578, CVE-2026-82078) starting 31 August 2026. The actor compromised at least 440 PaperCut instances across 395 organizations in 48 countries, achieving domain admin at 12 victims — fastest time to domain admin was five minutes and a US high school was fully compromised in seven minutes. Attack paths involved LSASS memory and registry secret harvesting, pass-the-hash to domain controllers, noPac attacks, account additions to Domain Admins, and DCSync to exfiltrate full NTDS.DIT credential dumps. Impact scope suggests access development potentially for handoff, with prior PaperCut intrusions historically leading to extortion.

GreyNoise·Sep 9, 00:00 UTC · 7d agoThreat actor in the wildCVE-2026-81578CVE-2026-82078CVE-2021-42278+1 CVEs1

Accountability in Certificate Transparency and Variants

Formal Dolev-Yao analysis shows plain Certificate Transparency requires an honest log, SCT Auditing removes that assumption, and Gossiping does not.

The paper analyzes accountability in Certificate Transparency and its SCT Auditing and Gossiping extensions in the Dolev-Yao model, starting from a vanilla PKI. It finds plain CT provides accountability only under the assumption of an honest log. The SCT Auditing extension can eliminate that assumption, while the Gossiping extension cannot. CT is supported by all major browsers and obliges Certificate Authorities to record issued certificates in public, monitored logs.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 13:45 UTC · 6d agoResearch

Aurora Ransomware Operators Use Cursor AI in Attacks Against 10 Targets

Aurora ransomware operators used Cursor AI running Claude Sonnet to plan and execute intrusions against dozens of organizations in nine countries.

CloudSEK and Gambit Security analyzed exposed infrastructure tied to the Russian-speaking Aurora (Aur0ra) group, revealing months of activity against more than 20 organizations across nine countries between April and July 2026, with 33 victims listed by Ransomware.Live. The operator used the Cursor agentic coding assistant to plan attacks in Russian, including an AD CS exploitation plan, and Gambit observed Cursor Agent (running Anthropic's Claude Sonnet) performing hands-on exploitation tasks such as Nmap scanning, NetExec enumeration, NTLM relay, and certificate attacks against 10 targets. Attacks begin with email bombing plus IT help desk vishing via Xray-core, followed by SMB/LDAP/WinRM/RDP lateral movement, log clearing, Defender disabling, and exfiltration; the Windows and Linux/ESXi encryptors are built from a single Zig codebase, with shadow copy deletion and VM-killing before encryption.

The Hacker News·Aug 31, 11:47 UTC · 16d agoRansomware in the wild1

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 · 1d agoAI research

Hackers Use Hundreds of AI Agents to Exploit PaperCut Flaws and Compromise 440 Servers Worldwide

A Russian-speaking actor used hundreds of AI agents to exploit PaperCut flaws, compromising 440 servers across 395 organizations in 48 countries.

GreyNoise's Global Observation Grid observed a Russian-speaking threat actor operating from IP 45.142.193.132 deploy hundreds of autonomous AI agents, built on OpenAI's Codex harness with a DeepSeek model, to exploit PaperCut NG/MF flaws CVE-2026-81578 (authentication bypass) and CVE-2026-82078 (unsafe reflection RCE). At least 440 servers across 395 organizations in 48 countries were compromised; the US had 98 victims and educational institutions accounted for 204. The agents paired with Mimikatz, Certipy, Rubeus, and Impacket, escalated to domain admin in 12 of 440 cases, and executed DCSync to exfiltrate the full NTDS.DIT credential database.

Cyber Security News·updated Sep 11, 10:05 UTC · 5d ago·first Sep 9, 14:40 UTC · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild 8 sourcesCVE-2026-81578CVE-2026-82078CVE-2021-42278+1 CVEs1

CREST Onboards First Cohort for AI-Enabled Pentesting Accreditation

CREST accredited 10 companies, including ImmuniWeb and Thoropass, in the first cohort of its new AI-Enabled Penetration Testing accreditation.

CREST granted its AI-Enabled Penetration Testing accreditation, an optional module added in July 2026 to its Penetration Testing Accreditation Standard, to a first cohort of 10 firms spanning Europe, India, the US, and Canada, including Closed Door Security, ImmuniWeb, JUMPSEC, Packetlabs, Pentesys, REDSECLABS, Risk Associates, SECNORA, Solusec, and Thoropass. The module lets providers that integrate AI into pentesting demonstrate responsible AI governance through independent assessment. A March 2026 CREST report found 76% of cybersecurity providers increased AI usage year over year and 69% already integrate it into daily service delivery; its June AI Charter has been signed by over 100 organizations.

Infosecurity Magazine·Sep 3, 13:00 UTC · 13d agoIndustry

Scores Alone Do Not Prove Discovery: The Discovery Certification Protocol for Auditing AI Research Agents

Researchers introduce the Discovery Certification Protocol, an auditable test framework that verifies whether AI research agents' claimed discoveries are genuine.

The Discovery Certification Protocol (DCP) converts AI research agents' discovery claims into executable recovery and feedback tests organized as gated audits. Controlled audits in SQLite optimization and virtual catalyst control produced zero recoveries in 96 episodes, with an upper bound of 0.0468. A deterministic, LLM-free verifier reproduces audit decisions from frozen evidence, giving AI research a common evidence language for outcomes, alternative routes, and feedback effects.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research

The 2026 PNPL Competition: Word Classification and Efficient Cross-Subject Generalisation in LibriBrain100

The 2026 PNPL competition releases LibriBrain100, a MEG speech dataset with 32 extra subjects, targeting word classification and cross-subject BCI generalization.

The 2025 PNPL competition on non-invasive speech decoding from MEG achieved F1-macro scores of 95.6% for speech detection and 73.6% for phoneme classification, built on LibriBrain's ~50 hours of single-subject data. The 2026 edition extends this with LibriBrain100, adding 32 subjects (~40 minutes each) plus ~80 hours of within-subject data. Two tracks target within-subject word classification at scale and cross-subject generalization with subject-specific fine-tuning shrinking from ~40 to ~20 to ~10 minutes, aiming at clinically feasible non-invasive BCIs for people with profound paralysis.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 2, 20:00 UTC · 13d agoAI research

Emergency Department Revisit Quality Review Screening: Exploring Human Decision-Making and Artificial Intelligence Support

A retrospective study found GPT-4 over-flagged emergency department revisit cases while an LLM knowledge-graph screener achieved 83-100% positive predictive value.

In an exploratory retrospective study of 99 emergency department diagnosis pairs from a multihospital health system, clinicians and GPT-4 independently judged whether revisit pairs warranted further assessment. GPT-4 responses correlated poorly with clinicians, flagging 94% of pairs for follow-up, 4.4-13.3 times more than clinicians, though prompt engineering was minimal. An algorithm leveraging an LLM-populated knowledge graph (KGA) achieved 83-100% positive predictive value against at least one clinician rater, suggesting LLM-based screening could broaden revisit quality review without substantially increasing reviewer workload.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 16:37 UTC · 6d agoAI research1

SkillSpector: NVIDIA's open-source security scanner for AI agent skills

Help Net Security·Aug 3, 00:00 UTC · Aug 3, 2026Malware

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

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

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

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:25 UTC · 7d agoAI research

ImpossibleRubrics: Stress-Testing Generated Rubrics as Reward Signals

ImpossibleRubrics benchmark shows LLM-generated rubric reward signals are exploited 8-26% of the time by adversarial answers on impossible tasks.

ImpossibleRubrics is a benchmark of 169 impossible tasks across six impossibility categories, each paired with a verifiable oracle certificate, plus 48 answerable controls, for stress-testing LLM-generated rubrics used as reward signals. Eleven rubric generators were exploited 8-26% of the time on an unbiased 150-task cut and up to 36% on a stress cut, while a certificate-faithful rubric scored 0%. A single generic 'be decisive, penalize hedging' rubric was exploited 64% of the time, suggesting tailored criteria can reveal which claims attackers should fabricate.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 14, 20:00 UTC · 1d agoAI research

New TCG guidance gives buyers a way to test PQC-ready TPM claims

Trusted Computing Group published PTP 1.07-based requirements defining PQC-ready and PQC-upgradable TPM designations to guide buyers assessing quantum-safe hardware.

The Trusted Computing Group published requirements establishing PTP 1.07, based on TPM 2.0 Library Specification Version 1.85, as the baseline for a 'TCG PQC-ready TPM', and defined a second designation, 'TCG PQC-upgradable TPM', for chips that can be upgraded to that support. The guidance lets buyers request vendor evidence that TPMs meet end-to-end post-quantum requirements for identities, attestation, and hardware-anchored trust rather than single-algorithm compliance. TCG also announced plans to extend its certification programs to certify TPMs meeting PTP 1.07, noting that 90% of businesses still lack a formal PQC roadmap.

Help Net Security·Aug 25, 00:00 UTC · 22d agoTools

ExecCritic: Learn to Test, Test to Improve for Coding Agents

ExecCritic separates test generation from patching for coding agents, lifting SWE-bench Verified resolution to 72.6%.

ExecCritic pairs a test-verify-revise scaffold with role-specific reinforcement learning: a Test agent writes repository-native tests and a Repair agent fixes code from execution feedback, both using Qwen-3.5-35B-A3B backbones. Post-trained Qwen agents compose to 72.6% on SWE-bench Verified, an 11.4-point gain over the 61.2% no-test baseline, without stronger-model or oracle feedback at evaluation time. The work shows test quality is the key variable: base-agent tests lowered resolution to 57.3% while GPT-5.6-sol tests raised it to 65.3%.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:53 UTC · 7d agoAI research1

VU#431093: TCG TPM 2.0 reference code found vulnerable to information leakage and timing side-channel attacks

CERT/CC discloses two TPM 2.0 reference code flaws allowing RSA key decryption and forged TPM attestations via crafted commands.

CERT/CC published VU#431093 covering two vulnerabilities in the TCG TPM 2.0 reference implementation: CVE-2026-6726 (information leakage via falsified TPM keys) and CVE-2026-6727 (timing side-channel in RSA OAEP decryption). An attacker with privileged access to a TPM command interface could send crafted TPM commands to decrypt ciphertexts for affected TPM-managed RSA keys, including the RSA Endorsement Key, or obtain credentials enabling forged TPM 2.0 attestations. Remediation is tracked in TCGVRT010 and TCGVRT0011.

CERT/CC Vulnerability Notes·Aug 11, 15:12 UTC · Aug 11, 2026VulnerabilityCVE-2026-6726CVE-2026-6727

Managing the cyber risk of agentic AI

UK NCSC guidance recommends safeguards, sandboxing, and active oversight to manage cyber risks of autonomous agentic AI systems.

The UK National Cyber Security Centre published guidance on managing the cyber risk of agentic AI systems. It recommends safeguards, sandboxing, and active human oversight to limit unintended autonomous activity while realizing the benefits of these systems. The publication is official national guidance for organizations deploying agentic AI.

NCSC UK·Aug 20, 12:00 UTC · 27d agoAdvisory

K-Bench: a clinically calibrated benchmark for evaluating large language models in high-risk mental health conversations

Clinician-calibrated K-Bench evaluates 125 LLM configurations on 200 high-risk mental health vignettes, exposing wide variation in suicide and violence risk handling.

K-Bench is a clinician-calibrated, protected benchmark evaluating 125 model configurations from 33 base models across 14 providers on 200 multi-turn vignettes covering suicide, self-harm, domestic violence, substance misuse and no-risk presentations. A frozen GPT-4o judge achieved 94.2% exact agreement with clinician consensus across 6,751 eligible comparisons from 151 clinician-rated transcripts. Leading models combined supportive conversation with combined-risk scores above 95, while risk exploration varied substantially among weaker configurations; therapeutic prompting helped weaker models and elevated reasoning produced no average improvement. A continuously updated public leaderboard is hosted at k-bench.ai with protected test materials.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 16:49 UTC · 1d agoAI safety & security

Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0 (1999)

Seminal 1999 USENIX study finds most novice users cannot correctly sign and encrypt email with PGP 5.0 in 90 minutes.

Whitten and Tygar's USENIX Security Symposium paper evaluates whether cryptography novices can use PGP 5.0 effectively, using cognitive walkthrough analysis and a laboratory user test. The majority of test participants failed to successfully sign and encrypt a message within 90 minutes, despite PGP 5.0 having a well-regarded graphical interface. The authors argue that security requires usability standards beyond those of general consumer software and propose domain-specific UI design principles for security. The paper is a foundational reference in usable security research.

Lobsters · security·Sep 9, 06:47 UTC · 7d agoResearch

US Defense Contractors Admit Their Rising CMMC Scores May Not Be Accurate

US defense contractors report rising self-assessed CMMC Phase I scores while doubting the accuracy of those self-evaluations.

Self-assessment scores under the US Department of Defense's Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Phase I have reportedly reached an all-time high. Contractors themselves doubt whether these self-reported scores accurately reflect their real security maturity. The uncertainty highlights concerns about the reliability of self-assessments in the program's initial phase.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 20, 12:40 UTC · 27d agoPolicy & legal

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

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

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

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:49 UTC · 11d agoAI research

Ncsc Raises Alarms Prompt

The UK NCSC raised alarms about prompt injection risks in LLM-integrated systems, urging organizations deploying AI to review exposure.

The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has raised alarms about prompt injection attacks against systems using large language models. The warning highlights how attackers can manipulate model instructions to bypass safeguards, exfiltrate data, or trigger unintended agent actions. Organizations deploying LLM-based features are advised to assess and mitigate their exposure to this technique.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 19, 00:00 UTC · 28d agoAI safety & security

First Galileo SAS Authenticated Time Solution

Researchers demonstrate the first timing solution computed from Galileo's new Signal Authentication Service, protecting receivers against GNSS spoofing.

Galileo's new Signal Authentication Service (SAS) on the E6-C signal directly authenticates ranging measurements, closing a gap left by OSNMA, which only protects navigation data. Researchers built a snapshot software receiver implementing a simplified SAS protocol and computed an authenticated receiver clock bias from recordings of both SAS-capable satellites, collected with a Septentrio SDR prototype. The results demonstrate feasible authenticated timing ahead of full SAS operational deployment.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 14, 16:26 UTC · 1d agoResearch

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, 00:00 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Tools1

Curriculum Learning as Transport: Understanding Curricula with Wasserstein Geodesics

Researchers model curriculum learning as Wasserstein transport over difficulty distributions, finding curriculum benefits are strongly task- and budget-dependent with no dominant strategy.

The framework represents curricula as trajectories of training distributions over discrete difficulty levels, decoupling ordering, matched exposure, endpoint smoothness, and pacing. Across a calibrated suite of 12 tasks and 33 difficulty axes under fixed training budgets, no single strategy dominates, though easy-to-hard ordering improves hard-level performance relative to exposure-matched static sampling. Endpoint smoothness and pacing substantially affect where along the difficulty spectrum a curriculum is effective, and the transport view supports extensions to learned pacing and structured difficulty spaces.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:39 UTC · 7d agoAI research1

ICO Reprimands Criminal Records Office After 2023 Breach

The UK ICO formally reprimanded ACRO Criminal Records Office over a 2023 breach caused by patching and security monitoring failures.

The UK Information Commissioner's Office issued a formal reprimand to ACRO Criminal Records Office following a breach in 2023. The regulator found failures in patching and security monitoring contributed to the incident. The action underscores regulator expectations for timely patching and monitoring at data-holding organizations.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 13, 08:30 UTC · Aug 13, 2026Policy & legal

Privilege escalation from IIS AppPool to NT Authority/SYSTEM

A write-up demonstrates privilege escalation from an IIS AppPool identity to NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM via the AD CS RPC endpoint.

A technical write-up details a Windows privilege escalation path that moves an IIS application pool identity to NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM by abusing the Active Directory Certificate Services RPC endpoint. The technique chains the restricted IIS AppPool service context with AD CS access to reach SYSTEM on the host. The post is relevant for defenders mapping privilege escalation paths on Windows web servers.

Lobsters · security·Aug 31, 12:36 UTC · 16d agoResearch

ZK-Trace: Certified Collusion Tracing with Zero-Knowledge Credentials for Federated GNSS Interference Monitoring

ZK-Trace combines Tardos fingerprints and zero-knowledge credentials to trace leaked classifier copies in federated GNSS monitoring without leaker cooperation.

ZK-Trace addresses leakage of a proprietary classifier distributed to partly trusted stations in federated GNSS interference monitoring, combining public identity marks, recipient-specific Tardos fingerprints, and zero-knowledge credential verification to support offline tracing. The paper provides false-accusation and tracing-score bounds with an interval-arithmetic checker allocating a common budget across accusation and tamper decisions. In a simulated GNSS federation it isolates all 160 single-owner copies and traces 712 of 720 two-owner mixtures with a 0.001 false-naming budget, while feature marks survive feature matching in 20/20 runs at 4.8 percentage-point accuracy cost but are erased by function-only distillation.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 8, 14:00 UTC · 8d agoResearch

The inconvenient truth about AI pentesting: someone has to check all the work

Survey of 158 practitioners shows AI pentesting floods teams with findings, creating 'validation debt' most teams cannot process.

The article argues AI pentesting creates 'validation debt': discovery scales far faster than teams' ability to verify AI-generated findings. In a survey of 158 practitioners, only 20.3% had workflows to triage more than 500 AI-generated candidates per engagement, while 29.7% called such volume unmanageable. One respondent spent two days validating 300 AI findings, of which 250 were duplicates, non-exploitable, or nonexistent. The author recommends capacity planning, ruthless deduplication, and risk-based prioritization before adopting AI pentesting tools.

Security Affairs·Aug 11, 16:20 UTC · Aug 11, 2026Industry

Researchers Use Claude to Port Pre-Auth RCE Exploit From One PLC Model to Another

Forescout used Anthropic's Claude to port a working pre-auth RCE exploit for CVE-2021-31886 between WAGO PLCs, executing ARM shellcode on live hardware.

Forescout Vedere Labs used Claude interactively to port an RCE exploit for CVE-2021-31886, a CVSS 9.8 stack buffer overflow in the Nucleus FTP server's USER command, from a WAGO 750-852 to a WAGO 750-831 PLC, running attacker-supplied ARM shellcode. The final RCE stage cost $535.74 in API usage over 8 hours 32 minutes, and a follow-up attempt to build a C2 implant permanently bricked the device. CERT@VDE lists many Nucleus V1-based WAGO models as vulnerable with no updates available; Siemens plans no Nucleus NET remediation. The work follows a joint NSA/CISA/FBI/DOE/EPA advisory warning of AI-generated exploitation scripts targeting internet-exposed Siemens S7 PLCs.

The Hacker News·Sep 2, 07:47 UTC · 14d agoResearchCVE-2021-318862

Patch Tuesday to Pentest Wednesday: How an Equipment Rental Company Is Turning Continuous Testing Into Continuous Exposure Management

An equipment rental company uses Horizon3 NodeZero for continuous exposure management, surfacing an SSH key exposure in eight hours versus annual pentesting.

The company moved from periodic penetration testing to continuous exposure management using the NodeZero Proactive Security Platform, feeding telemetry into a Splunk-based CTEM pipeline via Horizon3 APIs. NodeZero exposed SSH RSA key pairs from a PHP web server change about eight hours after introduction and found more findings in 12 hours than a third-party engagement found in roughly 30 days. An Active Directory password audit of 15,000 passwords found about 300 identical or similar compromised passwords, driving a banned-password list, 12-character minimums, service desk changes, and self-service reset rollout; users with similar passwords later dropped from 880 to 209. NodeZero also validated a suspected Cisco vulnerability as exploitable.

Horizon3.ai·Sep 9, 15:58 UTC · 6d agoIndustry