ZeroHour

Search: “vlc”

28 stories

Smart search ranks by meaning as well as keywords (one row per story, last 45 days).

Multiple VLC Media Player Vulnerabilities Allow Attackers to Corrupt or Read Heap Memory

Two VLC 3.0 flaws, CVE-2026-56711 (heap corruption, CVSS 8.6) and CVE-2026-73324 (memory leak), let crafted PNGs or RTSP playlists corrupt memory or leak data.

Hap Security researcher Fabian Wahle disclosed two VLC Media Player flaws on September 9, 2026, affecting versions 3.0.0 through 3.0.23. CVE-2026-56711 (CVSS 8.6) is an integer overflow and out-of-bounds write in the AllocatePicture function, exploitable via a crafted PNG with oversized IHDR dimensions, potentially causing crashes or code execution. CVE-2026-73324 (CVSS 6.9) lets a malicious RTSP server read adjacent heap memory through an unterminated 4096-byte response line, triggerable via a realrtsp playlist URL. No patched release is confirmed yet; users should avoid untrusted media files, playlists, and RTSP streams.

ZDI-26-639: Oracle VirtualBox VMSVGA Heap-based Buffer Overflow Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

ZDI disclosed a heap-based buffer overflow in Oracle VirtualBox's VMSVGA component (CVE-2026-71116) enabling local privilege escalation.

Zero Day Initiative published ZDI-26-639, a CVSS 7.5 heap-based buffer overflow in the VMSVGA component of Oracle VirtualBox. Local attackers who already execute high-privileged code on the guest system can leverage the flaw to escalate privileges on affected installations. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2026-71116. No exploitation is reported.

Weekly Cybersecurity Newsletter – Top 50 Biggest Cybersecurity Stories of the Week

GBHackers weekly digest rounds up 50 stories including Microsoft's 973-CVE patch drop, exploited Cisco FMC flaws, and Claude agent attacks.

GBHackers' September 7-12, 2026 newsletter summarizes the 50 biggest cybersecurity stories of the week. Highlights include Microsoft patching a record 973 CVEs with two exploited zero-days, active exploitation of Cisco FMC, Check Point VPN and Ivanti flaws, China-linked crews chaining Chrome and Windows zero-days, AI agents mass-exploiting PaperCut to compromise 440 servers, and the emergence of Panzer cross-platform ransomware. It also covers Anthropic and OpenAI agentic AI incidents and CrowdStrike's SafeMind launch.

GBHackers · 1d agoIndustry in the wild

VDiff-Bench: A Challenging Benchmark for Fine-Grained Image Difference Identification

VDiff-Bench, a 1,756-question benchmark, shows multimodal LLMs struggle with fine-grained image-difference identification, scoring as low as 8.7% on low-level changes.

VDiff-Bench is a multiple-choice benchmark of 1,756 four-way questions over image pairs covering 10 change categories including position, motion, color, texture, OCR/text and illumination, with curated hard negatives. Evaluation of 11 state-of-the-art open- and closed-source MLLMs shows fine-grained visual comparison remains brittle: 7-8B-scale open-source models score 52.5-70.6% on semantic changes but only 8.7-33.3% on low-level changes like noise and texture. Notably, Grok 4.3 shows a sharp performance drop on noise and texture differences, falling behind large open-source models like Kimi K2.5 and K3.

Hugging Face daily papers · 11d agoAI research

VoT: Vision-of-Thought for Unified Multimodal Representation Alignment

Researchers propose Vision-of-Thought (VoT), a discrete visual-planning token layer between VLMs and diffusion transformers improving text-to-image semantic alignment.

VoT introduces a discrete visual-thinking layer between vision-language models and diffusion transformers, letting the VLM act as a multimodal planner that emits tokens describing objects and layouts before pixel generation. A specialized VoT tokenizer is trained with VLM alignment, feature reconstruction, and vector-quantization losses. Experiments show improved semantic alignment and a structured, interpretable interface for controllable generation.

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

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.

RenderFormer-V2: Neural Rendering with Heterogeneous Scene Primitives

RenderFormer-V2 is a transformer-based neural renderer handling caustics, volumetric scattering and out-of-distribution materials without per-scene training or specialized code.

RenderFormer-V2 is a learned transformer-based neural rendering model that models global light transport as a sequence-to-sequence transformation, handling caustics, volumetric scattering, environment lighting, textured and displaced surfaces and out-of-distribution materials. It uses a two-stage process: a view-independent stage resolving primitive-to-primitive transport, and a view-dependent stage converting the neural scene representation into pixels. Improvements include combined windowed-attention with a rendering-informed attention sink for scalability, support for heterogeneous primitives like environment maps and participating media, and a surface-reflectance-independent neural material encoding, validated across diverse scenes with extensive ablations.

Hugging Face daily papers · 12d agoAI research

CoVeR: Coverage-Based Token Pruning for Multi-View 3D Reasoning in VLMs

CoVeR, a training-free coverage-based token pruner, preserves 93.5% of VLM 3D-reasoning performance using only about 8% of visual tokens.

Researchers introduce CoVeR, a deterministic, training-free selector that chooses visual tokens to cover every region of a multi-view 3D scene using only token coordinates. Unlike learned-importance and voxelization pruners, it enforces an exact per-scene token budget, avoids saturation plateaus, and prevents near-duplicate selections. Experiments across four vision-language models show it surpasses prior state of the art by 3.9 percentage points on average across three 3D reasoning benchmarks.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Rogue ScreenConnect Clients Spread Four-Stage VBScript Chain to Newly Connected Hosts

Huntress says rogue ScreenConnect clients spread a four-stage VBScript chain delivering backdoors, privilege-escalation tools, or an XMRig miner to newly connected hosts.

Huntress identified three unrelated August 2026 incidents using a Quick Assist tech-support scam, a phishing-delivered MSI installer, and a fake Geek Squad refund form to install rogue ScreenConnect clients. Each client repeatedly spawned wscript.exe to run 1.vbs through 4.vbs, which profiled the host, enumerated installed security products, and downloaded stage-specific payloads from Dropbox. Depending on detected state, payloads included a user-level ScreenConnect backdoor, UAC-bypass privilege escalation tooling, or tunneling utilities with an XMRig cryptocurrency miner. Infected clients re-infected newly connected hosts, creating worm-like propagation, and ConnectWise issued an advisory about affected file transfer behavior in ScreenConnect.

The Hacker News · 9d agoMalware in the wild

Can your coding style predict whether your code is vulnerable?

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth researchers present VulStyle, a stylometry-based vulnerability detector that also exposes benchmark reliability problems.

VulStyle combines stylometric features with syntax-tree structure and source tokens, pre-trained on about 4.9 million functions across seven programming languages and fine-tuned on five vulnerability detection datasets. It beat token-only detectors on some benchmarks but its F1 drops sharply on DiverseVul, which the authors link to noisy labels inflating reported performance across popular datasets. The authors argue style-aware detection should be harder to evade but did not test this empirically, and they note that uniform LLM-generated code may strip away the individual developer style the model depends on.

Help Net Security · 23d agoResearch1

Vulnerability Localization Benchmark: Measuring Agentic Security Analysis at Repository Scale

VLoc Bench tests 27 language models at locating vulnerable files in 290 repositories; best system reaches 0.229 File F1 and 38.4% of tasks unsolved.

The Vulnerability Localization Benchmark (VLoc Bench) contains 500 real-world vulnerabilities from 290 repositories across six package ecosystems and 147 CWE categories, pairing pre-fix and post-fix repository snapshots. Agents receive only a CWE description and read-only terminal access to identify affected files, and must confirm absence on patched snapshots. The strongest of 27 language models and four static-analysis tools achieves just 0.229 File F1; 38.4% of tasks receive no correct localization, and effective localizers still report unsupported locations on patched repositories.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

ENCP: Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction for Vision-and-Language Navigation

ENCP calibrates conformal prediction per navigation episode, giving step-level coverage guarantees for vision-language navigation agents despite within-episode dependence.

Episode-Normalized Conformal Prediction (ENCP) rescales a nonconformity score by a VLN policy's residual confidence and calibrates one maximum score per episode, preserving step-level coverage of at least 1−α despite dependence among steps within an episode. Across four VLN policies and three nonconformity scores on R2R and REVERIE, ENCP meets all reported empirical step-coverage targets in seen-to-unseen evaluation. The model-agnostic uncertainty estimates can signal when an agent should defer to a stronger predictor or human assistance.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 20h agoAI research

Rogue ScreenConnect Installations Across Unrelated Hosts Suggest Worm-Like Activity

Huntress observed rogue ScreenConnect deployments with worm-like VBScript propagation across unrelated organizations, prompting a ConnectWise advisory on file transfer behavior.

Huntress identified multiple incidents in late August 2026 where social engineering led to rogue ScreenConnect remote access clients deployed on victim machines, which then spawned wscript.exe to run four VBScript payloads (1.vbs through 4.vbs) for profiling, telemetry collection, and persistence via a WindowsServiceHost Run key. Modified ScreenConnect clients propagated the VBScript chain to connected endpoints, creating worm-like spread. ConnectWise published an advisory on September 3, 2026, confirming an issue affecting file transfer behavior in both cloud and on-premises ScreenConnect deployments, with a CVE and fix expected within the week; partners were advised to review and disable TransferFiles permissions in the interim.

Huntress · 13d agoExploit / PoC in the wild1

VU#308749: Remote Code Execution and Arbitrary File Read Vulnerabilities in Kaltura Servers

Insecure deserialization in Kaltura's legacy HTML5 Player V2 (mwEmbed) allows arbitrary file read and remote code execution; Player V7 is unaffected.

CERT/CC issued VU#308749 for two flaws in Kaltura's HTML5 Player V2 library (mwEmbed/html5lib), both caused by the same insecure deserialization bug. The flaws enable arbitrary file read and remote code execution via the exposed mwEmbedLoader.php endpoint. Affected versions include html5lib v2.45, v2.103 and earlier, and other v2.x releases; the currently supported Player V7 is unaffected. No evidence of exploitation was cited.

CERT/CC Vulnerability Notes · 21d agoVulnerability

2026-010: Critical Vulnerabilities in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway

Citrix patched NetScaler ADC/Gateway: auth bypass CVE-2026-19490 (CVSS 9.3) on Gateway/AAA configs and memory overflow CVE-2026-19489 (CVSS 8.8) requiring SIP ALG.

On 19 August 2026 Citrix published an advisory fixing two critical-severity issues in NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway versions 14.1 before 14.1-73.32 and 13.1 before 13.1-63.21, plus FIPS/NDcPP builds. CVE-2026-19490 (CVSS 9.3) is an authentication bypass via alternate path, exploitable when the appliance is configured as a Gateway (SSL VPN, ICA Proxy, CVPN, RDP Proxy) or AAA virtual server, with a SAML action condition on newer builds. CVE-2026-19489 (CVSS 8.8) is a memory overflow causing unpredictable behaviour or denial of service, requiring SIP ALG enabled on a Large Scale NAT group. CERT-EU recommends applying updated builds as soon as possible.

CERT-EU Advisoriesupdated · 11d agofirst · 28d agoVulnerability 3 sourcesCVE-2026-19489CVE-2026-19490

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 · 11d agoAI research

Augustinian BabyLM: What Ostensive Definition Can and Cannot Teach a Small Language Model

Study shows visually grounded token embeddings in a small masked LM persist through training and improve object-property knowledge, but escape standard BabyLM benchmarks.

The paper implements ostensive definition for a small DeBERTa masked language model trained on 10M words, seeding visually grounded tokens with embeddings derived from labeled image regions before training. Visual initialization leaves a persistent, seed-replicated advantage on object-property knowledge (COMPS) and a corpus-tailored Visual-Property Swap benchmark covering color, material, size, and shape, but has no effect on most BabyLM grammar benchmarks. Synthetic grounding of previously unseeded words causally transfers the advantage to exactly those words.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

DataFlex-RL: An Evaluation Platform for RLVR Data Policies

DataFlex-RL benchmark of 13 RLVR data policies on Qwen2.5-7B finds none reproducibly beats uniform sampling under matched GRPO training.

DataFlex-RL is an evaluation platform comparing rollout-selection, reweighting, and mixture data policies for RLVR under a common GRPO recipe. Across 13 configurations and 12 matched seeds with Qwen2.5-7B-Base on 12 math, logic, and science benchmarks, uniform GRPO improved domain-balanced accuracy by 7.76 points, but no alternative policy achieved a statistically significant improvement. A corrected 12-seed Llama-3.1-8B-Base extension found no consistent winner, and math-heavy evaluation summaries were negatively correlated (-0.33) with domain-balanced summaries.

Hugging Face daily papers · 11d agoAI research

Modified ScreenConnect Clients Used in Worm-Like Campaign

Huntress warns of worm-like attacks using modified ScreenConnect clients to spread VBScript payloads; ConnectWise issued an advisory.

Campaigns starting in late August use social engineering, including Quick Assist abuse, to install rogue ScreenConnect clients that spawn wscript.exe and deploy four VBScript files for reconnaissance, staging, and PowerShell execution. The attackers persist via User Run Keys, attempt UAC bypass, install UltraViewer, and propagate the VBScript chain to other connected ScreenConnect endpoints. ConnectWise published an advisory about a file transfer behavior issue affecting cloud and on-premises ScreenConnect, with a CVE identifier and fix expected within a week; it recommends disabling file transfer meanwhile.

SecurityWeek · 9d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

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.

USN-8736-1: Perl vulnerabilities

Ubuntu issued USN-8736-1 fixing two Perl regex flaws that could cause denial of service, code execution, or security-restriction bypass.

Ubuntu released a security notice addressing two Perl vulnerabilities in regular expression handling. CVE-2026-15534 involves mishandling of large inputs during regex matching, enabling out-of-bounds heap reads or writes that could lead to denial of service or arbitrary code execution. CVE-2026-19487 involves incorrect matching for regexes with alternative branches, allowing security restrictions to be bypassed. Users are advised to apply the updated packages.

Training a coding model to paint watercolours with TRL and OpenEnv

Hugging Face tutorial trains a coding model with TRL and OpenEnv to paint watercolours through generated code.

A Hugging Face blog walkthrough uses the TRL reinforcement learning library and the OpenEnv environment framework to train a coding model. The target task is generating code that produces watercolour-style drawings, serving as a hands-on reinforcement learning training example. No article body was available in the feed, so specifics are limited to the title.

Hugging Face Blog · 13d agoAI tools & infra1

Training-Free Speech-Centric Omni Understanding with Frozen VLMs

Audio-visual understanding remains challenging because models must jointly interpret spoken content, visual events, and their temporal relationships. Existing omni models typically introduce dedicated audio encoders and rely on expensive audio-video-text training, tightly coupling omni capability to specific VLM backbones and potentially weakening their existing visual and reasoning abilities.…

Hugging Face daily papers · Aug 6, 2026AI research

From Hypervisor to Container: Cloud Security Vulnerabilities, Defense Mechanisms, and Open Challenges

Survey of 120+ cloud security papers (2008-2025) reviews hypervisor and container isolation attacks, scoring defenses with the ADPO framework and CIA impact scale.

This survey reviews over 120 security publications from 2008 to 2025 on breaches of cloud isolation boundaries via virtual machines and containers. Threats examined include VM escape, VM hopping, CPU cache side-channels, container breakouts, vulnerable container images, and DDoS attacks. The authors introduce ADPO, a 0-3 scoring framework rating defenses on accuracy, deployment ease, performance impact, and operational overhead, plus a 1-5 CIA severity mapping for attack impact.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

VU#369611: ExLlamaV3 contains Denial of Service vulnerability via insufficient bounds checking on kernel dispatch index

CERT/CC details CVE-2026-84286, an out-of-bounds memory access in ExLlamaV3's CUDA extension causing denial-of-service crashes; fixed via merged pull request.

CERT/CC published VU#369611 for CVE-2026-84286, an out-of-bounds memory access in the exllamav3_ext CUDA extension of the ExLlamaV3 LLM inference library. A crafted input with kernel parameter K set to 0 produces a negative index into a fixed 24-entry kernel dispatch array, causing a CUDA illegal memory access and denial-of-service crashes. The vendor fixed the issue in the main repository via pull request #310, and maintainers of 49 downstream projects, including ezexl3 and MawDiscord, are advised to rebuild against the patched version. The issue was reported by Nathan Keys and impact is limited to crashes and instability, not code execution.

Three Critical VMware Flaws Allow Auth Bypass, Code Execution, and VM Escape

Broadcom patches three critical VMware flaws, including vCenter auth bypass CVE-2026-59309 and an ESX VM escape, urging immediate updates.

Broadcom issued emergency updates for VMware ESX, vCenter, Workstation and Fusion, fixing five flaws including CVE-2026-59309 (CVSS 9.8 authentication bypass in vCenter) and CVE-2026-59310 (CVSS 9.8 directory traversal allowing code execution). CVE-2026-47876 (CVSS 9.3) is an out-of-bounds write in the ESX VMXNET3 adapter that permits a virtual machine escape to the host. Broadcom found no evidence of exploitation, but Defused Cyber reported a spike in vCenter scanning on August 11, 2026 consistent with exploitation attempts against CVE-2026-59309 (VMSA-2026-0006). No workarounds are available.

Grouped Value Attention: Efficient KV Caching via On-Demand Key Reconstruction

Grouped Value Attention stores grouped values and reconstructs content keys via a learned linear map, cutting KV-cache size about 45-47% versus GQA.

GVA stores only grouped values and reconstructs content keys with a learned linear map absorbed into the query at decode time, while a small shared decoupled RoPE channel preserves positional information via a separately cached positional key. At 350M parameters trained on 30B FineWeb-Edu tokens, the 16-dimensional positional variant scores 44.18 average accuracy across five tasks versus 44.36 for GQA and 43.88 for MLA. Custom decoding kernels are in development with an open-source release planned.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Expert-Space Exploration in MoE Reinforcement Learning

ESRL explores MoE expert-routing space during RL, lifting Qwen3-30B-A3B Pass@1 by 3.2 points over GRPO at no extra cost.

ESRL (Expert-Space Exploration Reinforcement Learning) is an architecture-aware framework that treats expert routing in Mixture-of-Experts models as an additional source of rollout diversity. It preserves high-confidence experts as anchors, restricts stochastic routing to a plausible candidate pool, adapts perturbation strength to router entropy, and replays recorded expert paths during policy optimization. ESRL achieves the best performance across top-K, top-1, and shared-expert routing backbones on mathematics, science, and code tasks; on Qwen3-30B-A3B it improves average Pass@1 and Pass@8 over GRPO by 3.2 and 4.5 percentage points respectively, without additional sampling or compute.