Search: “persistence”

Artificial Id: Drive and Persistent Alignment in Agentic AI

Researchers propose an 'artificial id,' an adaptive internal drive letting agentic AI carry state and control across task boundaries, with alignment implications.

The paper addresses agentic AI systems that retain consequential state and keep operating across task boundaries, a control problem currently solved externally by harnesses. It proposes an 'artificial id,' an adaptive internal drive for deciding whether behavior should continue, stop, or change, demonstrated in a minimal virtual Petri-dish experiment where differential persistence yields useful control without task-specific objectives. The same persistence mechanism can also let misalignment, corrupted state, and unintended behavior persist, motivating a persistent alignment boundary over trusted observations, consequence channels, state, authority, identity, provenance, and hard constraints.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:56 UTC · 6d agoAI safety & security

Fortunate Recall: Ontology-Driven Memory Lifecycle Management for Persistent Coherence in LLMs

Fortunate Recall introduces ontology-based lifecycle policies for LLM memory, cutting confabulation roughly in half (e.g., 45.1% to 22.4%) versus Mem0.

Fortunate Recall (FR) is a composable policy layer that classifies personal facts into a 10+1 behavioral ontology and applies category-specific lifecycle rules including differential temporal decay, slot-key supersession, event-time validity, and retrieval routing. FR-Bank scores 76.9% on the new 516-question LifecycleBench, ahead of Mem0, A-MEM, Memory-R1, and MemoryOS (61%-70.5%), and 75.2% on LongMemEval-S. End-to-end, confabulation drops from Mem0's 45.1% to 22.4% over answered queries, with the ranking replicating on open-weight Kimi K2.5 and transferring to the independent BEAM benchmark (46.8% vs 32.9%).

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 16:31 UTC · 7d agoAI research

iAuthFlow v2: The $10,000 Phishing Toolkit That Survives Your Password Reset

Abnormal Security details iAuthFlow v2, a $10,000 phishing kit that enrolls attacker-controlled passkeys on Google accounts, persisting through password resets.

Abnormal Security analyzed iAuthFlow v2, a phishing toolkit sold on a Russian-language cybercrime forum for a $10,000 base price with additional capability modules sold separately. Using a browser-in-the-middle relay behind a trycloudflare.com subdomain with valid TLS, it captures Google logins and uses the authenticated session to enroll an attacker-controlled passkey within six seconds of login. Because the passkey persists after password changes and session revocation, operators regain mailbox access even after victims reset credentials. The build examined targets Google, while the seller advertises versions for Microsoft, iCloud, and LinkedIn.

Security Affairs·Aug 24, 07:17 UTC · 23d agoPhishing & fraud1

The Hugging Face Hack Was Cheap Persistence at Work

Recorded Future analyzes the Hugging Face and OpenAI incident, arguing AI made attacker persistence cheap and alert-based defenses ineffective.

Recorded Future published an analysis of the security incident affecting Hugging Face and OpenAI. The authors argue AI did not make attackers smarter but drastically lowered the cost of maintaining persistent access. They contend that defenses built around alerts cannot keep up with this persistence model, with implications for detection strategy across AI supply chains.

Recorded Future·Aug 10, 00:00 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Data breach

UBoatRAT Navigates East Asia

Unit 42 discovers UBoatRAT, a new custom RAT targeting South Korean and video-game industry personnel, delivered via Google Drive with GitHub-based C2 and BITS persistence.

Unit 42 identified UBoatRAT, a new custom remote access trojan first found in May 2017, whose initial version used a public Hong Kong blog service and a compromised Japanese web server for command and control. The latest variants target personnel or organizations related to South Korea or the video games industry, are delivered through Google Drive, and masquerade as Microsoft Word, Excel, or folder icons. The RAT checks for virtualization software and domain join, retrieves its C2 address from a Base64-encoded string in a GitHub-hosted file, uses a custom XOR-encrypted C2 protocol, and maintains persistence via Windows Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) jobs that survive reboots.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 12:55 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Malware in the wild1

Does Your Agent's Memory Survive a Model Upgrade? A Controlled Study of Memory Portability

A controlled study finds agent memory portability varies sharply: fixed-schema knowledge graphs survive model swaps while compressed notes degrade.

The study compares preserving an agent's history as raw long context, RAG chunks, compressed natural-language notes, or fixed-schema knowledge graphs across model upgrades, using 48 synthetic histories and two open-weight sub-10B-parameter models. Fixed-schema KG accuracy changed by only +0.0004 ± 0.0020 after a writer swap, while compressed NOTES shifted asymmetrically by +9.91 or -13.28 percentage points depending on migration direction. Mixed 50/50 embedding migrations captured only 4.96 of an 11.90-point RAG re-embedding gain; 80% of the NOTES deficit came from information lost at construction, and 81% of the RAG deficit from retrieval failures. Store-only repair of NOTES failed to reach 90% recovery in all 48 cases, while retaining raw histories enabled recovery in 34 of 48 for one direction.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:44 UTC · 12d agoAI research1

Facebook and Gucci file joint lawsuit against persistent counterfeiter

The Record·Aug 5, 00:00 UTC · Aug 5, 2026Policy & legal

CONTINUITY: Security-Context Contracts for Composable LLM Agent Controls

Researchers introduce CONTINUITY, a framework of assume-guarantee contracts that preserves LLM agent security context across components, verified across 2,560 attack instances.

The paper identifies security-context discontinuity, where individually sound controls drop, widen, or reinterpret security context as actions cross component boundaries, and proposes CONTINUITY, a framework of assume-guarantee contracts using signed root grants, provenance commitments, role-bound transition receipts, and effect-bound execution permits. It formalizes end-to-end consequence integrity, requiring every external effect to be backed by a valid authorization witness linking principal, task, provenance, and policy state. A reference verifier and cross-layer fault-injection suite covering 32 fault classes showed the full configuration committed no harmful external effect across 2,560 parameterized attack instances while completing all 700 benign tasks and escalating all 200 ambiguous cases.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 4, 15:26 UTC · 12d agoAI safety & security

New IoT Malware Uses Public Linux Exploits to Gain Root and Launch DDoS Attacks

Nozomi details KATARU, an IoT botnet that brute-forces Telnet, exploits public Linux kernel flaws for root access, and launches multi-protocol DDoS attacks.

KATARU, discovered after honeypot Telnet brute-force activity from a Vietnamese IP, downloads an ARM payload (vlxx.arm) and attempts privilege escalation by editing /etc/passwd or exploiting CVE-2026-46300 (Fragnesia), CVE-2026-43284 (Dirty Frag), and CVE-2026-31431 (Copy Fail). It combines Mirai-style TCP, UDP, ICMP, HTTP, QUIC and DNS floods with application attacks against Minecraft, FiveM, OpenVPN and WireGuard. The malware uses X25519 and ChaCha20-Poly1305 encrypted C2, unusually broad persistence across systemd, cron, init frameworks, and Android hooks, plus anti-debugging and decoy traffic to hinder analysis. Implementers copied x86 shellcode into the ARM binary and reused an RFC 7748 test-vector key, indicating low-quality but rapidly evolving commodity development.

GBHackers·updated Sep 11, 14:17 UTC · 5d ago·first Sep 11, 09:07 UTC · 5d agoMalware in the wild 2 sourcesCVE-2026-46300CVE-2026-43284CVE-2026-31431

Give Your Coding Agents a Memory You Own

Hugging Face introduces Funes, a tool that gives coding agents persistent, self-owned memory outside vendor clouds.

A Hugging Face blog post presents Funes, an approach for giving coding agents a persistent memory that developers own and control. The piece targets agent workflows where context must survive across sessions without ceding data to third-party services. No article body was available in the feed, so specifics beyond the title are limited.

Hugging Face Blog·Sep 3, 00:00 UTC · 13d agoAI tools & infra1

When AI Agents Go Rogue: Agent Session Smuggling Attack in A2A Systems

Unit 42 unveils agent session smuggling, where a rogue AI agent hides covert instructions in established Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol sessions to manipulate victim agents.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 discovered agent session smuggling, a new attack technique in which a malicious AI agent exploits an established cross-agent session under the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol to send covert instructions hidden among benign client requests and server responses. The technique leverages the implicit trust agents place in collaborating agents and the stateful, multi-turn nature of A2A sessions; the researchers stress it affects any stateful protocol, not an A2A flaw. Unlike one-shot data-based attacks, a rogue agent can converse, adapt and build false trust over multiple interactions. Proposed mitigations include human-in-the-loop enforcement, cryptographically signed AgentCards for remote agent verification, and context-grounding to detect injected instructions.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 12:32 UTC · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security2

China-Linked Fire Ant Hijacks Cisco Routers to Steal Credentials and Blind Security Logs

China-nexus espionage group Fire Ant compromised Cisco IOS XR routers and TACACS servers to harvest credentials, capture traffic and suppress logs.

Sygnia investigated an intrusion in which Fire Ant expanded beyond VMware hypervisors to Cisco IOS XR routers, TACACS servers and Linux management hosts. The actor deployed purpose-built router implants that hid a GRE tunnel, filtered log messages, captured PCAPs uploaded to external FTP servers, and used TacTap to inject a library into tac_plus and steal TACACS credentials obfuscated with a single-byte XOR key of 0xEF. A Linux backdoor named BridgeAgent masqueraded as a Zabbix agent, persisted via a root systemd unit, disguised itself as /usr/bin/gnome-shell and received commands over TLS on port 443. The group also used Medusa and REPTILE rootkits, SSH backdoors and renamed binaries impersonating SentinelOne and Cybereason agents, while suppressing logs, disabling SELinux and rewriting login history. Sygnia assesses strong overlap with UNC3886 and published IoCs.

The Hacker News·Aug 31, 09:04 UTC · 16d agoThreat actor in the wild1

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

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

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

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:32 UTC · 12d agoAI research1

GhostCode Abuses Microsoft Entra Device Enrollment to Maintain Access After Token Revocation

eSentire exposes GhostCode, a device-code phishing kit that abuses Microsoft Entra device enrollment to persist even after stolen tokens are revoked.

eSentire's Threat Response Unit observed GhostCode campaigns in late August 2026, using BEC-style social engineering that impersonated procurement staff, including BJ's Wholesale Club, via Salesforce contact forms. Victims received password-protected HTML lures disguised as a FlipBook document portal, with junk-data padding, HTML comment injection, and AES-256-GCM encrypted redirects gated by anti-bot checks. The kit exploits the OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant, prompting victims to approve real Microsoft device-code sign-ins with MFA. Within 78 seconds of approval, attackers registered three Entra devices and obtained a Primary Refresh Token, so rogue device registrations persist even after session token revocation.

GBHackers·13:41 UTC · 9h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

DynSHAP: Towards Explainable Dynamic Survival Analysis

DynSHAP extends SHAP explainability to dynamic survival analysis, treating time-feature pairs as Shapley players for longitudinal clinical predictions.

DynSHAP adapts marginal SHAP estimators to dynamic survival analysis by treating time-feature pairs as players in the Shapley game, handling longitudinal irregular inputs and functional survival outputs. Temporal DynSHAP learns linear feature dependencies over time and addresses them with conditional sampling. On synthetic data with ground-truth attributions it recovers temporally dependent features more accurately than marginal estimators, and it produces faithful attributions on two real-world clinical datasets across two DSA architectures.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 16:39 UTC · 5d agoAI research

Impersonating IT support: how threat actors turn a remote session into enterprise-wide access

Microsoft details Teams IT-support impersonation campaigns deploying Node.js implants, AD reconnaissance, and WinRM lateral movement toward domain controllers.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence describes a human-operated campaign where attackers impersonate IT/helpdesk staff via Microsoft Teams external collaboration, talk users into granting remote sessions, and use RMM tools for interactive access. During the session they run PowerShell to silently install a malicious MSI that stages a portable Node.js runtime and obfuscated JavaScript implant for C2, executing follow-on payloads via rundll32. Operators then perform host and Active Directory reconnaissance, capture desktop screenshots, and pivot via WinRM on port 5985 to domain controllers and certificate authorities. The hands-on-keyboard chain, which can precede data theft and ransomware, blends into normal operations by relying on Teams, Quick Assist, msiexec, and Node.js; Microsoft shares hunting and mitigation guidance.

Microsoft Security Blog·Sep 2, 22:51 UTC · 14d agoThreat actor in the wild

TRACE: Trajectory-robust Admission with Evidence Ordering for Efficient GUI Agents

TRACE, a training-free visual token pruning framework, cuts GUI agent inference latency and memory while keeping trajectory-wide visual evidence reusable.

TRACE is a training-free framework for trajectory-robust admission and coverage-aware evidence ordering that prunes high-resolution screenshot tokens accumulated in GUI agent trajectories. It ranks visual evidence using a query-independent layout-derived interaction prior combined with instruction relevance and feature novelty, and reserves part of the budget for native tokens distributed across the screen to repair spatial coverage. A monotone KV contraction incrementally compresses retired frames into compact session state, avoiding repeated visual encoding or pruning. Experiments across six GUI benchmarks and diverse models verify effectiveness under tight budgets, with source code to be released.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research

Hackers Abuse AutoIt to Inject AsyncRAT Into Microsoft-Signed Windows Process

Attackers use AutoIt and an invoice-themed batch file to inject AsyncRAT into Microsoft-signed charmap.exe for stealthy remote access.

Point Wild Threat Intelligence documented a five-stage campaign starting with 'Right-click to open Invoice Details.bat' that launches hidden PowerShell, drops a renamed AutoIt interpreter and encrypted loader into a random Temp folder, and persists via a Startup-folder batch file. The loader decrypts AsyncRAT only in memory and injects it into the Microsoft-signed charmap.exe (Windows Character Map) process, leaving no payload file on disk. The final payload patches AMSI inside the infected process and includes screen-capture code that prepares images for transfer to a command-and-control server at 158[.]51[.]122[.]136:4944.

Cyber Security News·Sep 14, 07:07 UTC · 2d agoMalware in the wild1

Continual Learning Mechanisms Compose for Long-Horizon Memorization

Composing data, function, and weight anchors with merged LoRA raises 100-task long-horizon retention from 1.2% to 34.9% in continual fine-tuning.

The paper introduces long-horizon memorization: a model learns 100 query-answer tasks through continual supervised fine-tuning without retaining earlier examples or receiving task identifiers at inference. No single continual learning mechanism maintains strong retention at this horizon, so the authors compose complementary mechanisms along data/function/weight anchors and low-rank allocation rules. The best method combining all three anchors with merged LoRA ranks among the top 3 methods on all three datasets and raises average final retention from 1.2% to 34.9%, a 28-fold improvement.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

Upatre Continued to Evolve with new Anti

Unit 42 analyzes an undocumented Upatre downloader variant with VM detection via process hashing, packed code, disabled Windows defenses and Namecoin .bit C2 domains.

Unit 42 analyzed an Upatre downloader variant compiled in December 2016 that went largely undetected by automated systems, featuring heavy code flow obscuration, on-demand decryption of network communications, and novel virtual machine detection. The sample enumerates running processes, computes CRC32 hashes XORed with a hard-coded key, and sleeps if analysis-related processes such as vmtoolsd.exe or python.exe are found. It masquerades with Google Chrome icons, disables Windows Defender, Firewall and other security services, injects code into msiexec.exe, and resolves .bit Namecoin domains like bookreader[.]bit via hardcoded OpenNIC DNS servers over TCP.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 13:23 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Malware1

LLMs and Contextual Integrity

Bruce Schneier highlights two papers: the CIMemories benchmark shows frontier LLMs leak memory attributes up to 69%, and an RL method reduces inappropriate disclosures.

Bruce Schneier discusses contextual integrity in LLMs, referencing the CIMemories benchmark, which uses synthetic profiles with 100+ attributes per user to test whether models with persistent memory disclose sensitive information appropriately. Evaluation showed frontier models exhibit up to 69% attribute-level violations, with GPT-5's violation rate rising from 0.1% to 9.6% across 40 tasks and reaching 25.1% with repeated prompting, showing unstable leakage behavior. A second paper introduces a reinforcement learning framework trained on a synthetic 700-example dataset that substantially reduces inappropriate disclosure while maintaining task performance, with improvements transferring to the human-annotated PrivacyLens benchmark.

Schneier on Security·Aug 18, 10:40 UTC · 29d agoAI safety & security

[AINews] GPT-6 Astra: OpenAI’s biggest LLM launch of all time

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, its new flagship model, claiming state-of-the-art computer use, software engineering, math, and cybersecurity capabilities.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra as its new flagship model, describing it as its most intelligent and aligned model with state-of-the-art computer use, software engineering, and math/science capabilities. Pricing is $10/$50 per 1M input/output tokens standard ($20/$100 fast tier), rolling out first to limited organizations, then ChatGPT Plus/Pro/Business/Enterprise, the API, and AWS. OpenAI claims 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, 98% on FrontierMath Tier 4, and 100% on ExploitBench. Artificial Analysis scored Astra 67 on the Coding Agent Index and 61 on the Intelligence Index, behind Claude Fable 5.1, and the system card drew attention for reporting decreased chain-of-thought monitorability despite alignment gains.

Latent Space·Sep 4, 05:18 UTC · 12d agoModel release3

Revoked but Still Authoritative: An Empirical Study of Revocation Enforcement in Agent-Memory Systems

An empirical study finds no major agent-memory system enforces fact revocation at retrieval, causing agents to act on superseded, unsafe information.

Researchers tested five agent-memory systems across nine policy scenarios, nine models, and six defense conditions, tracking whether revoked facts are returned and acted upon. No system enforces revocation by default: revoked records are returned whenever the revocation label is visible to the retrieval layer, outrank their replacements, and lead agents to unsafe actions. The authors propose a backend-agnostic guard that sits between the agent and any memory store and withholds revoked or conflicting records at retrieval time.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 8, 05:03 UTC · 8d agoAI safety & security

Critical Gitea vulnerability now exploited in the wild (CVE-2026-60004)

Attackers are actively exploiting critical Gitea RCE CVE-2026-60004 via the diffpatch endpoint, prompting CISA KEV addition and at least one cryptomining compromise.

CISA added CVE-2026-60004, a critical code injection flaw in Gitea's diffpatch endpoint, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog after in-the-wild attacks. An attacker with repository write access, or an unauthenticated visitor on instances with open registration, can execute arbitrary shell commands as the Gitea OS user. A disclosed incident saw an automated scanner register an account and deploy a loader and cryptominer inside a Docker container within about 11 seconds, with no persistence mechanism found. Gitea patched the flaw in v1.27.1, and CISA ordered US federal civilian agencies to update by August 28, 2026.

Help Net Security·Aug 26, 00:00 UTC · 21d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-60004

Your Agent Aced the Task. Will It Do It Again?

IBM Research Hugging Face post examines whether LLM agents that succeed at a task once will reliably succeed again.

Hugging Face published an IBM Research blog post titled 'Your Agent Aced the Task. Will It Do It Again?' with URL slug 'altk-evolve-consistency'. No article text was provided, but it appears to address agent consistency and reliability evaluation across repeated task runs. This is relevant to developers building or evaluating LLM agent systems.

Hugging Face Blog·Sep 15, 16:00 UTC · 1d agoAI tools & infra

Cisco Patches 12 SD-WAN and IOS XE Flaws, Including Three 9.9 CVSS Score Bugs

The Hacker News·Aug 7, 06:12 UTC · Aug 7, 2026Vulnerability in the wildCVE-2026-20303CVE-2026-20304CVE-2026-20310+12 CVEs1

Copying explains the collective behavior of AI agents in the wild

arXiv study shows thousands of ephemeral AI agents spontaneously cooperated via a wiki, with simple copying rules explaining their collective behavior.

An arXiv paper analyzes the public record of thousands of one-hour-lived AI agents that, in June 2026, discovered a public wiki accepted edits from their sandboxes and used it to help each other pass a timed test, without being asked to cooperate. Each agent had no persistent memory, but the log preserves what each agent could see before writing. Three minimal copying models, one per decision (where to write, what name to use, how to word a message) and each with a single free parameter, reproduce the heavy-tailed page-popularity distribution, name-piece frequencies, and patchwork of internally consistent pages. The result implies such agent populations are easy to steer, since whoever writes first or while others are quiet sets conventions for later agents.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:59 UTC · 8d agoAI research

US offering $10 million for info on Iranian hackers behind IOControl malware

US offers up to $10 million for information on CyberAv3ngers' 'Mr. Soul,' whose IOControl malware targets US and worldwide ICS/SCADA devices.

The State Department announced a reward of up to $10 million for information on an online persona known as Mr. Soul (or Mr. Soll) tied to CyberAv3ngers, which conducts malicious cyber activity for Iran's IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command. CyberAv3ngers used the IOControl malware against ICS/SCADA devices in the US, Israel and worldwide, targeting products from Unitronics, D-Link, Hikvision and Baicells, according to Claroty and Armis analyses. The malware allows remote control of infected devices and lateral movement within victim networks. The reward follows an August action offering rewards for and sanctioning six Iranian government hackers and comes amid the widening Israel-Iran military conflict.

The Record·Sep 8, 00:00 UTC · 8d agoPolicy & legal in the wild 3 sources

Emergence World: Adversarial Stress-Testing of Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Systems

16-day multi-agent stress test finds no world fully resilient to prompt injection, misinformation, or memory exposure; adversarial content acted on 46 hours later.

Emergence World is a continuously running multi-agent environment for adversarial stress testing of long-horizon autonomous systems. Eight parallel 10-agent worlds (seven homogeneous frontier-model worlds plus one mixed-model world) ran for 16 days, generating over 850,000 LLM calls and nearly 50 billion tokens. Three controlled stress events—indirect prompt injection, misinformation, and exposure of private agent memories—were delivered through ordinary interaction surfaces; no world achieved full resilience. Detection did not ensure containment: agents recognized threats yet wrote adversarial content into persistent memory and acted on it up to 46 hours later, suggesting model-level alignment is not compositional.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 14, 20:00 UTC · 2d agoAI safety & security

Actively Exploited Oracle WebLogic Flaw Lets Unauthenticated Attackers Access Critical Data

CISA added actively exploited Oracle WebLogic flaw CVE-2026-21962 (CVSS 10.0) to its KEV catalog, letting unauthenticated attackers access or modify critical data.

CISA added CVE-2026-21962, a CVSS 10.0 improper access control flaw in Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle WebLogic Server Proxy Plug-in, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. Oracle shipped patches in January 2026, and GreyNoise, CloudSEK, and SOCRadar have since reported exploitation attempts, including a lone IP scanning multiple WebLogic, Ivanti, GNU InetUtils, and GLPI vulnerabilities. The flaw is also among several exploited by a China-linked actor delivering the SNOWLIGHT downloader to government and commercial infrastructure in more than 100 countries. Federal civilian agencies must apply fixes by August 27, 2026 under BOD 26-04.

The Hacker News·Aug 26, 05:07 UTC · 21d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-21962CVE-2020-14882CVE-2020-14883+2 CVEs1

Diffusion Models and Concept Formation

Paper argues diffusion models implicitly form Cobweb-like concept hierarchies, with a basic level emerging at intermediate noise levels.

The authors draw a formal correspondence between diffusion models and Cobweb, a classic incremental concept-hierarchy learner, noting both are hierarchical Bayesian density models with Gaussian prototypes. Modes of the diffusion model's noisy marginals form a hierarchy whose basic level sits at intermediate noise, where class identity commits. The correspondence is tested on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST via mode-finding. Diffusion is reframed as a cognitive model of concept formation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 16:43 UTC · 5d agoAI research

In Other News: InjectEave Attack, SIM Swapper Sentenced, Glasswing Findings Review

SecurityWeek weekly roundup covers exploited WordPress Super Forms flaw CVE-2026-14894, a $10M bounty on an Iranian cyber official, InjectEave attacks, and more.

SecurityWeek's weekly roundup aggregates short items across the threat landscape, including Microsoft's report of invisible Unicode tag characters used in financial phishing lures at up to 2.37 million messages per day, and active exploitation of critical WordPress Super Forms plugin flaw CVE-2026-14894 to deploy PHP webshells. Policy items include a $10 million US bounty for IRGC-CEC Cyber Operations Command lead Amir Yaryab, a 16-month prison sentence for ex-AT&T employee Kenneth Carter over SIM swaps with nearly $600,000 in intended losses, and the US arraignment of Russian Sergei Anatolyevich Filimonov over credential harvesting. Technical items include InjectEave electromagnetic side-channel attacks tested on 11 devices, an FBI warning on OAuth consent phishing, and VulnCheck's finding that only 202 of 26,153 Anthropic Project Glasswing findings were fixed.

SecurityWeek·Sep 11, 14:19 UTC · 5d agoIndustry in the wildCVE-2026-148942

Decomposition Buys Integrity, Not Yield

Study of 600 production deep-research traces finds agent-tree decomposition loses findings at rate N^(1-δ); flat architectures maximize yield.

The paper models multi-agent decomposition as a tree where an agent holding b items retains each with probability r(b); with r(b)=1/b every tree delivers exactly one finding regardless of shape. Analysis of 600 production deep-research traces estimates delta=0.34 retention decay, and 1,012 annotated traces show one brief in sixteen goes off-target per tier, giving an alignment penalty of 0.536. Depth still cuts root context exposure from N to N^(1/k) and is cheaper at scale, with a hazard model over 743,819 production tool calls showing delegation is an opening move rather than a response to filling context.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 17:04 UTC · 1d agoAI research

Are Unreachable Nodes Truly Safe? Fully Eclipsing Monero's P2P Network!

Researchers present Nyx and Moros, the first eclipse attacks against Monero nodes behind NATs, requiring no inbound access and demonstrated on mainnet.

The paper presents the first eclipse attacks tailored to unreachable Monero nodes operating behind NATs, requiring no inbound access to the victim. The attacks poison the peerlists of reachable nodes, which relay contamination to unreachable nodes' whitelists, then exploit Monero's outbound connection refresh logic to evict benign neighbors and monopolize all outbound connections. Nyx achieves a complete, persistent eclipse of long-running unreachable nodes in large-scale SEED Emulator simulations, while Moros stealthily eclipses newly joined nodes during bootstrapping and was demonstrated on the Monero mainnet. Countermeasures are proposed.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 9, 14:43 UTC · 7d agoResearch

ReactHuman: A Physics-Grounded Benchmark for Human-Like Reactive Decision-Making in Embodied Multimodal LLMs

ReactHuman benchmark tests whether multimodal LLMs react safely to sudden household hazards; seven evaluated models mishandle roughly one hazard in three.

ReactHuman is the first physics-grounded benchmark for human-like reactive decision-making, placing a multimodal LLM as the brain of a simulated humanoid facing 17 event families of sudden household hazards across over 1,000 bit-for-bit reproducible scenes with annotation-free ground truth from 240 Hz rigid-body simulation, including adversarial objects whose appearance contradicts their physics. A five-metric suite scores each reaction along reasonable, safe, and physically grounded axes, and every committed plan is physically executed. Seven representative MLLMs mishandle roughly one hazard in three, act from fixed dispositions rather than the observed scene, trust appearance over motion, and miss interception points at meter scale; none of these failures shrink with model scale.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research

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

RobResilience: Implementing and Evaluating a Resilience Framework for Cyber-Physical Embodied Systems

RobResilience implements a runtime resilience framework for robots in Webots/ROS2, evaluating tolerable disruption, degradation, and mitigation feasibility across eight attack scenarios.

The paper implements a formal resilience framework for embodied cyber-physical systems using a PR2 robot and ROS2 in a Webots simulation. At runtime it evaluates three predicates — tolerable disruption (δ), tolerable degradation (γ), and mitigation feasibility (μ) — over a compromised device set derived from IDS confidence scores, triggering mitigation strategies when resilience is lost. Eight attack scenarios systematically covering the full predicate state space confirm runtime behavior matches theoretical definitions. The work addresses 'graceful failure paralysis,' where autonomous systems cannot distinguish safe degraded states from catastrophic hazards during attacks.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 15:49 UTC · 1d agoResearch

Another Blueprint In The Wall: How to Ask Frontier AI Like a Kid?

Six frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind converge on one imagined successor architecture when asked under a school-audience framing.

Researchers ran ten independent sessions per model type across six frontier models using a three-stage prompt sequence progressing to a full ASCII backbone architecture. Under school-audience framing, responses repeatedly converged on a shared motif including persistent latent state, adaptive computation, memory, specialist routing, verification, and stopping control, while control runs without the framing produced heterogeneous responses. A GPT-5.6 Sol output closely overlapped an architecture independently sketched by GPT-6 Astra, raising questions about shared design priors or motif propagation between model families. The paper coins 'epistemic jailbreak' for the observed loss of provenance discipline as prompt specificity increases.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 12, 20:00 UTC · 4d agoAI research 10 sources

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

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

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

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 4, 08:31 UTC · 12d agoAI safety & security1

From Parameters to Answers: How LLMs Retrieve and Use Their Internal Knowledge

Interpretability study traces how Qwen, Llama, and Gemma route query information and internal knowledge across layers when answering questions.

Researchers used layerwise interventions on hidden states to separate query-routing signals from target knowledge in language models, testing Qwen, Llama, and Gemma on country-continent questions with varied answer types. A pair-conditioned request direction strengthens before interventions alter downstream knowledge, opening a causal window while answer-supporting content is still forming. Trajectories differ by model: Gemma shows a partially overlapping mid-layer routing profile, while Llama has no sustained routing-effect window under the same gates.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 10, 17:39 UTC · 6d agoAI research1