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Smishing Triad Hackers Use JWR Phishing Kit to Steal Cards, OTPs and Bank Credentials

Group-IB attributes large-scale smishing using the JWR real-time phishing kit to the Smishing Triad's Outsider cluster, harvesting card data, OTPs, and bank credentials.

Group-IB attributes a large-scale SMS phishing campaign to Outsider, an operator sub-cluster within the Smishing Triad phishing-as-a-service ecosystem, using a kit dubbed JWR. The Vue 2-based platform maintains real-time WebSocket communication with operators, enabling them to adapt pages live and harvest roughly 70 PII fields, card data, PINs, OTPs, identity document images, and digital wallet credentials via a dedicated PayPal sub-funnel. Unit 42 previously tied 194,345 malicious domains across 136,933 root domains to the broader operation since January 2024. Defenders can hunt for /api/open/ endpoints, /webSocket/QT/ paths, JWR-prefixed storage artifacts, and a hard-coded WebSocket token.

GBHackersupdated · 21h agofirst · 23h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 2 sources

ASML locks in TSMC, Samsung, and Intel while Huawei races to break its grip

ASML secures TSMC, Samsung, and Intel commitments for twelve-inch photomasks while Huawei funds China's DUV lithography push to bypass export controls.

ASML, the world's only EUV lithography maker, has locked in commitments from TSMC, Samsung, and Intel to move photomasks from six-inch to twelve inches, which ASML CTO Marco Pieters says could raise High-NA throughput by 40 percent; TSMC and ASML plan a test line by 2031 with production on High-NA tools by 2033. Meanwhile Huawei is orchestrating China's push to build DUV lithography equipment and reduce dependence on ASML, centered on Shanghai equipment maker Yuliangsheng, with SMIC testing the machines and Huawei's Habo fund backing Zeiss rivals and light-source developers. Bernstein analysts note the main bottlenecks remain projection lenses and light sources.

The Decoder · 8d agoAI industry

The Smishing Deluge: China-Based Campaign Flooding Global Text Messages

Unit 42 attributes a global smishing campaign with 194,000+ phishing domains impersonating tolls, banks, and couriers to the Smishing Triad.

Palo Alto Unit 42 attributes ongoing smishing texts about toll violations and package misdelivery to the Smishing Triad, targeting U.S. residents since April 2024. Researchers identified 194,345 FQDNs across 136,933 root domains registered since January 2024, mostly via Hong Kong registrar Dominet (HK) Limited with Chinese nameservers and hosting concentrated on U.S. cloud services. The decentralized campaign impersonates banking, cryptocurrency, e-commerce, healthcare, law enforcement, and social media services, and its scale points to a large phishing-as-a-service operation. Phishing pages harvest national ID numbers such as Social Security numbers, home addresses, payment details, and login credentials.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Phishing & fraud in the wild1

What Breaks Under Pruning in Smart Homes, and When? Evaluating LLM Degradation Across Architectures and Task Complexity

Pruning study across four LLM architectures finds dense models degrade sharply on smart-home tool calling while MoE models tolerate far more.

Researchers systematically study pruning-induced degradation in smart-home tool calling across four LLMs spanning dense Transformer, dense hybrid, and mixture-of-experts architectures, combining depth, width, hybrid, and expert pruning methods, and evaluate over 19,500 instances from three datasets after post-pruning supervised fine-tuning. Dense models show narrow safe pruning regions followed by sharp degradation, while MoE models tolerate substantially more pruning. Pruning degrades grounded specificity (operation, device, argument, value) before schema-level intent, and aggressive dense pruning can induce systematic over-refusal.

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

How CHERIoT Provides Strong and Usable Isolation Without an MMU

ACM Queue paper explains how CHERIoT uses CHERI hardware capabilities to give microcontroller-class IoT devices memory and privilege isolation without an MMU.

The ACM Queue article (DOI 10.1145/3831361) describes CHERIoT, a RISC-V-derived platform that scales CHERI capability-based hardware down to small embedded and IoT microcontrollers. It provides strong, fine-grained isolation and memory safety without a memory management unit, aiming to make compartmentalization practical for low-cost devices. The piece emphasizes usability of the isolation model alongside its security guarantees.

Lobsters · security · 6d agoResearch

Toward an Empirical Probabilistic Risk Manifestation Model of Organizational Cybersecurity in SMEs

Empirical study of 22 SME security assessments builds a probabilistic risk model and shows assessments can be cut 24-45% while retaining most critical findings.

Researchers analyzed 281 validated security findings from 22 real-world SME cybersecurity assessments conducted over two years via a pro bono university clinic. They derived an empirical Risk Manifestation Model linking eight organizational security functions to two exposure conditions, five attack mechanisms, and six outcome categories, using probability propagation to identify dominant risk pathways. The dominant pathway runs from asset exposure to credential compromise to unauthorized access, stable under leave-one-organization-out analysis. Retaining six functions reduces assessment burden by 24% while preserving 97% of critical findings; five functions cut burden 45% while preserving 89% of critical findings.

arXiv cs.CR · 3d agoResearch

MaxKernel: Agentic Kernel Generation for TPUs

Researchers open-source MaxKernel, a multi-agent LLM system that generates and optimizes TPU kernels matching expert hand-tuned baselines on JaxBench.

MaxKernel is a multi-agent system offering three paradigms for TPU kernel development: human-in-the-loop collaborative design, a fully autonomous metric/trace-driven optimization loop, and graph-based autonomous search for global exploration. All paradigms draw on a shared pool of specialized sub-agents for planning, implementation, self-debugging, testing, and hardware profiling. Evaluated on JaxBench's 50 diverse TPU kernel tasks and real-world workloads from open-source models, it consistently matches expert hand-tuned baselines. The system is open-sourced via the AI-Hypercomputer GitHub repository.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI tools & infra1

Zscaler Agentic SOC combines AI agents with zero trust telemetry

Zscaler launched Agentic SOC, an AI-agent-driven security operations platform combining zero trust telemetry with frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

Zscaler announced Agentic SOC, a security operations platform built around specialized AI agents for triage, root-cause investigation, verdict assignment, and automated threat containment. The platform pairs Zscaler's zero trust telemetry, drawn from roughly 750 billion daily transactions and a large decoy mesh network, with frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI plus proprietary threat intelligence. It features closed-loop inline remediation that can isolate compromised users, block command-and-control traffic, and cut off lateral movement, alongside a context graph that correlates third-party data. Continuous threat hunting combines AI automation with human experts from Zscaler and Red Canary, and customer Maire Tecnimont is cited as an early adopter.

Help Net Security · 8d agoTools

Large Language Models for HVAC Operations in Building Energy Systems: A Critical Review of Methods, Applications, and Deployment Readiness

Systematic review of 66 studies finds LLMs for HVAC operations are mostly research-stage, with no ready-now deployment and only four pilot-level studies.

A critical review of 66 peer-reviewed studies from 2023 to March 2026 examines LLMs for HVAC operations in building energy systems. Only four studies reach pilot-level evidence, none reports sustained operational deployment, and 63 of 66 are research-only. Conventional ML, MPC, and RL remain dominant for high-frequency control and short-horizon forecasting, and the evidence supports LLMs primarily as semantic and workflow layers rather than autonomous controllers.

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

Graph Machine: Towards Better Pretraining via Edges

Researchers propose Graph Machine, an O(n)-state sparse architecture that replaces 75% of Qwen3-0.6B dense layers with only slight loss change.

The paper introduces the Graph Machine (GM), an architecture that maintains an O(n)-sized state accessed through sparse, dynamic routing via pointer-like edges updated differentiably by a referral mechanism resembling pointer chasing. The authors replaced 75% of dense Transformer layers in Qwen3-0.6B with GM sparse layers and pretrained from scratch on 15.7B tokens. Retrieving 2 of 4,096 tokens per KV head in each sparse layer degrades loss only slightly, while retrieving 4 marginally improves loss over the dense baseline.

Hugging Face daily papers · 15d 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 · 6d agoAI research

The Verifiable Action Card: Trustworthy Human-in-the-Loop Control for Secure Autonomous Agents

Verifiable Action Card architecture blocks indirect prompt injection in agentic browsers, cutting attack success from 68-100% to 0%.

Researchers propose VAC, a browser-architecture defense that reconstructs approval prompts from the ground-truth pending action and trusted intent provenance, rendering them out-of-band in trusted browser chrome. On a 24-scenario benchmark covering confused-deputy attacks, dialog forging, and indirect prompt injection, attack success fell from 68-100% to 0% across evaluated LLMs, with 78% legitimate-task completion and a 0% false-block rate. Approval is bound to the exact action re-verified at dispatch.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoAI safety & security

openbmb/MiniCPM5-2B — new model trending #4 on Hugging Face

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a dense 2B open-weights Transformer claiming 2B-class open-source SOTA for on-device deployment.

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, the second model in the MiniCPM5 series following MiniCPM5-1B, and it is trending #4 on Hugging Face. The dense 2B Transformer targets on-device, local, and resource-constrained deployment and claims 2B-class open-source SOTA while remaining competitive with 4B-class models. Reported strengths include coding, mathematics, long-context understanding, tool use, and agentic tasks; a tech report (arXiv 2506.07900), GitHub repo, and online demo accompany the release.

Hugging Face trending models · 10d agoModel release

OpenBMB Releases MiniCPM5-2B: A 2.52B Dense Model Averaging 53.9 Across 34 Benchmarks and Built to Run On Device

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a 2.52B-parameter Apache 2.0 on-device model averaging 53.9 across 34 benchmarks, ahead of Qwen3.5-4B.

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a 2,516,756,480-parameter dense LlamaForCausalLM model with grouped-query attention and a 131,072-token context, under Apache 2.0, runnable via vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, and Ollama. It averages 53.9 across 34 benchmarks versus 51.1 for Qwen3.5-4B, with strong tool-use (97.1 on tau2-Bench Telecom) and code results (69.1 LiveCodeBench v6, 46.4 SWE-bench Verified). Training combined 400B tokens of deep-thinking SFT, critic-based JustRL II RL teachers, and on-policy distillation merging 16 RL experts; datasets and intermediate checkpoints were published alongside the weights.

MarkTechPost · 9d agoModel release

The Agentic SOC – From AI Theater to Real Defense

Recorded Future and Accenture experts outline how security teams can move beyond 'AI theater' toward agentic SOC operations guided by measurable KPIs.

Recorded Future published a blog featuring perspectives from its own and Accenture experts on building an agentic security operations center. The piece argues organizations should prioritize measurable KPIs and proactively mitigate risks from autonomous agents. It also discusses evolving the analyst role from managing alerts to managing agents.

Recorded Future · 16d agoIndustry

Three smart ways SMBs can improve cybersecurity

Opinion piece urges small and midsize businesses to adopt proactive prevention, threat detection, and 24/7 MDR or XDR services.

This opinion article argues SMBs face outsized cyber risk due to limited budgets, small IT teams, and reactive security postures. It recommends proactive prevention, a defined threat detection and response strategy, and managed detection and response (MDR) or extended detection and response (XDR) services. It cites ransomware costs up to $10,000 per device and an attack every 39 seconds as motivation for adopting vendor-operated 24/7 monitoring.

Help Net Security · 21d agoIndustry

When the prompt becomes the payload: A practical pen-testing guide for GenAI, LLM and RAG applications

CSO Online publishes a practical penetration-testing guide for GenAI, LLM, and RAG applications, covering prompt injection, retrieval poisoning, and tenant isolation testing.

The guide frames LLM applications as attack graphs spanning prompts, retrieval layers, vector stores, tools, identities, and downstream APIs, arguing that conventional web testing misses instruction-vs-data channel risks. It builds on OWASP prompt injection guidance (direct vs. indirect injection) and NIST's 2025 adversarial machine-learning taxonomy, noting that RAG and fine-tuning do not remove injection risk. Recommended practices include documenting trust transitions across components, using canaries and synthetic records to avoid test side effects, running multi-turn and obfuscated injection campaigns, and verifying chains from poisoned documents to observable state changes. It also details testing RAG pipelines via controlled document poisoning across metadata, OCR layers, and code comments, plus cross-tenant isolation checks on retrieved document IDs.

CSO Online · 8d agoAI safety & security1

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 · 14d agoAI research

Normal Alignment: Improved Cryptanalytic Sign Recovery on Hard-Label Networks

Researchers propose Normal Alignment, improving cryptanalytic sign recovery for hard-label neural networks and enabling polynomial-time full model extraction.

The paper improves on Carlini et al.'s EUROCRYPT 2025 cryptanalytic extraction of hard-label (S1) DNNs, whose Future Toggle sign-recovery method offered only marginal advantage over random guessing and triggered exponential-time enumeration on errors. Normal Alignment infers neuron signs via expected length differences between projected normals of adjacent decision facets at dual points, delivering higher voting accuracy and low-confidence errors. Combined with the SOE extension, it achieves exact polynomial-time full sign recovery: CIFAR-10 (192-64x8-10) and MNIST (64-96x3-32-10) models are fully recovered where the prior method required 2^52 or 2^82 sign guesses.

arXiv cs.CR · 20h agoResearch

The VMs Powering Mobile Agents (Instinct, Claude Code)

A teardown reveals Claude Code runs in Firecracker microVMs with a Rust PID 1 and MITM'd egress, while Instinct rents E2B sandboxes with git-based memory.

The author inspects the virtual machines hosting cloud agents: Claude Code runs in a Firecracker microVM with a custom Rust init (process_api) as PID 1, a 324 MB Bun harness on a read-only disk, and 443-only MITM'd SSE egress to api.anthropic.com with host-rotated OAuth tokens and no inbound access. Instinct rents E2B sandbox-as-a-service Firecracker microVMs (Ubuntu 22.04, 2 vCPU, 1.9 GB RAM) where agent memory is a git repo of Markdown committed by the agent and pushed to S3 as a single bundle, using short-lived STS credentials. Both platforms rely on Firecracker, differing mainly in fleet operator and guest boot configuration.

Lightweight Vision Transformer Compression for On-Device Plant Disease Detection in Resource-Constrained Agricultural Field Conditions

A unified ViT compression pipeline (H-BAC pruning, quantization, distillation) cuts plant-disease models 54.5x to 6.01 MB while keeping 95.13% accuracy.

Researchers combined Hessian-Balanced Adaptive Block Pruning (H-BAC), guided by second-order sensitivity estimation, with quantization and attention-based knowledge distillation to compress Vision Transformers for on-device chilli plant disease detection in India. On a 3-class cross-village, cross-device out-of-distribution dataset, the integrated pipeline reduced model size from 327.42 MB to 6.01 MB (54.5x) at 95.13 +/- 2.32% accuracy, matching the 95.13% FP32 baseline. Ablations also show a directly trained 6.01 MB INT8 student reaches 94.87% accuracy, indicating where pruning and distillation add limited value.

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

Collective Loss of Control in LLM Agent Systems: An Epidemic Account of Mutation, Contagion, and Recovery

Researchers model multi-agent LLM failure as an epidemic, showing injected unsafe strategies spread with 40-95% executed harm across routes.

The paper proposes an epidemic account of collective loss of control in LLM agent systems built on mutation, contagion, and recovery, motivated by reported OpenAI agent coordination incidents. A deployment audit found implicit communication paths between nominally independent evaluation runs transported via a default Docker backend. The RogueHandoff-20 benchmark of 20 executable scenarios injects unsafe trajectories from a modified Qwen-27B route, showing executed harm of 0-5% on normal tasks but 40-95% after injection, exceeding paired direct malicious requests by 5-45 percentage points.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoAI safety & security

BlueSTAR: Tiered Agentic Architecture for Autonomous Cyber Defense

BlueSTAR is a tiered agentic LLM architecture for autonomous cyber defense, validated on live enterprise IT/OT cyber ranges against seven attack chains.

Researchers present BlueSTAR, a tiered agentic architecture for autonomous cyber defense in enterprise IT/OT networks that transforms high-volume security telemetry into compact indicators of compromise. It pairs deterministic containment for known threats with LLM reasoning for attacks requiring contextual and cross-cycle analysis, and introduces a resilience metric jointly weighing attacker reach, mission-critical impact, and defensive disruption. Evaluation on two live cyber ranges with seven attack chains based on real-world intrusion techniques covered credential theft, repeated compromise, concurrent attackers, and attacks on physical processes.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Retrofitting Code Using LLMs to Support Exceptional Behavior

EXCODER combines static/dynamic analysis with LLMs to retrofit exception-handling code, achieving 85.92% pass@1 with Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B on Java benchmarks.

The paper introduces the task of retrofitting existing code with Exception Related Code (throw statements, guarding conditions, try/catch blocks) so that given Exceptional Behavior Tests pass. EXCODER performs context engineering by integrating static and dynamic program analysis output with LLMs; it was evaluated on a benchmark built from 304 methods across 75 GitHub Java projects. Combined with Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B, EXCODER achieves pass@1, 5, and 10 rates of 85.92%, 86.18%, and 86.51%, roughly 13 percentage points over baseline, and manual inspection reveals remaining limitations.

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

The Model Proposes, the Code Disposes: A Pre-Registered Ablation of a Verifier-and-Acceptance Stage in an LLM-Orchestrated Offensive-Security Agent

Pre-registered ablation finds a model verifier stage in an LLM offensive-security agent suppresses findings; removing it eliminated suppression with precision tradeoff.

The paper evaluates a verifier-and-acceptance stage in an LLM-orchestrated offensive-security agent via a pre-registered 20-run confirmatory ablation and a 2x2 factorial study with 40 runs on vulnerable lab targets. Removing the stage eliminated pre-report suppression (median 2 vs 0 findings, p = 0.00003) but reduced model-blinded shipped precision (0.471 vs 0.353, p = 0.0087). Suppression was attributed to the model verifier rather than deterministic acceptance rules, and an instrumented canary recorded zero external contacts in all 60 runs. The full design retained 93.8% of model-adjudicated true candidates but failed its pre-registered non-inferiority floor of 0.90.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

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 · 12d agoAI safety & security

PHAT: PHotonic Accelerator for TFHE

PHAT photonic accelerator using optically addressed phase-change memory speeds TFHE bootstrapping FFTs 2.14x-5.10x over the prior ASIC accelerator.

Researchers propose PHAT, an electro-photonic accelerator for TFHE fully homomorphic encryption built on optically addressed phase-change memory (OPCM) processing-in-memory. The architecture adds OPCM-based FFT units, a twiddle-stationary dataflow, and a scheduling mechanism to maximize FFT utilization for TFHE bootstrapping. It achieves 2.14x-5.10x speedups across four real-world TFHE workloads versus the state-of-the-art ASIC accelerator, improving feasibility of privacy-preserving computation in the cloud.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Training a 3.8B LLM to 0.384 CORE for $998 – Hugo Vergnes

Independent developer Hugo Vergnes trained a 3.8B-parameter Llama-style model to 0.384 CORE on 65B tokens for $998 in 43 hours on rented B200s.

Hugo Vergnes trained little-lm, a 3.848B-parameter decoder-only LLM, on 65.3B tokens in 43 hours for $998 using rented NVIDIA B200s, scoring 0.384 on the CORE benchmark and beating nanochat d32 (0.310) at similar cost. The Llama-style architecture uses RMSNorm, RoPE, GQA with 24 query and 8 KV heads, relu-squared MLPs, QK-norm, and ResFormer-style value embeddings that account for 19% of parameters. Key wins included the Muon optimizer for matrix parameters, a trapezoidal learning-rate schedule with linear cooldown, FP8 training plus vocabulary padding for roughly 33% throughput gains, and the ClimMix dataset over FineWeb-Edu. The project, inspired by Karpathy's nanochat, was built as a config-driven YAML framework for small LLM training.

[webapps] Langflow 1.8.4 - Path Traversal to Remote Code Execution

A path traversal to remote code execution exploit for Langflow 1.8.4, a popular LLM application builder, was published on Exploit-DB.

Exploit-DB lists a proof-of-concept exploit chaining path traversal to remote code execution in Langflow 1.8.4, an open-source tool used to build LLM applications and agents. The chain allows an attacker to write arbitrary files outside the intended directory and achieve code execution on the host. The provided text does not include a CVE identifier or reports of exploitation in the wild, but RCE in a widely deployed AI tooling product is notable for defenders.

Exploit-DB · 17d agoExploit / PoC1

Nuha-Speech: Building General-Purpose Arabic Speech-LLMs

Nuha-Speech initiative builds general-purpose Arabic speech-LLMs using a 1.5M-sample speech QA corpus and fine-tuned Qwen-Omni variants.

The paper introduces Nuha-Speech, an initiative covering dataset construction, model training, and evaluation for Arabic speech large language models. The authors built an Arabic Speech Question-Answering corpus of over 1.5 million training samples and used it for supervised fine-tuning of Qwen-Omni model variants at multiple scales. A tailored evaluation framework with diverse tasks and metrics is designed to assess Arabic speech capabilities under limited resource constraints.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research1