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8 stories in the last 3d

What Breaks Local Watermarks? A Robustness Benchmark for Local Invisible Image Watermarking

First systematic robustness benchmark of five local invisible image watermarking methods across 55 transformations finds all are vulnerable, with inpainting and geometric misalignment completely breaking payload…

The paper presents the first systematic robustness benchmark for local invisible image watermarks, covering 55 image transformations across signal distortions, coordinate alignment changes, indirect local edits, and direct watermark edits. It evaluates five methods: MaskWM, WAM, OmniGuard, TrustMark, and PixelSeal, all supporting localization natively or with minimal adaptation. Results show every method is vulnerable to some transformation; MaskWM offers the strongest payload recovery and localization but the lowest clean-image quality, and synchronization further improves its recovery under geometric transformations. Geometric misalignment and generative local edits such as inpainting and outpainting can completely impair payload recovery, while signal distortions are often tolerated.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

What Zero-Day Response Should Be in the Post-Mythos Era

Picus Security outlines a zero-day response playbook where defenders simulate exploit technique chains before public PoCs exist.

The article uses PaperCut NG/MF's August incident — exploitation in the wild before any patch, with the first emergency fix bypassed the same day and a third landing September 1 — as the template for AI-accelerated vulnerability response. It walks through a hypothetical CVE-2026-1001 (explicitly made up) to argue defenders should map CVEs to ATT&CK technique chains and simulate them against NGFW, WAF, EDR, endpoint hardening, and SIEM controls within minutes of disclosure. It notes disclosure-to-exploitation time has fallen from 21.5 days to hours.

BleepingComputer · 1d agoResearch in the wildCVE-2026-1001

InceptionRAG: Stealthy Poisoning Attack Against Retrieval-Augmented Generation

InceptionRAG fragments malicious payloads into dormant passages that trigger LLMs to self-deduce misinformation via multi-hop reasoning, bypassing existing RAG poisoning defenses.

Researchers introduce InceptionRAG, a stealthy corpus poisoning attack against retrieval-augmented generation that splits a malicious payload into a chain of individually harmless dormant passages. When retrieved together, the passages induce LLMs to self-deduce target misinformation through multi-hop reasoning, achieving over 80% attack success rate across three datasets and three LLMs under rigorous adversarial constraints. A zeroth-order suffix optimization (ZOSO) method automates authoritative suffix generation in black-box settings. The authors also propose HODOR, a document isolation defense that decouples adversarial logical dependencies.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch1

Re: Retrospective by 'gpg.fail' authors

GPG exploitation talk author clarifies a format-string 0day enabling code execution via printf %n writes and a polyglot PEM certificate payload.

Lexi Groves, author of the gpg.fail talk, clarified on oss-security that the first finding was an actual zero-day: a classic printf injection using %n for memory writes, with multiple X.509 certificates in one PEM file to re-enter and defeat ASLR before calling execv@plt. The payload executed the certificate itself, a polyglot file made by inserting a shebang and bash command into the PEM. A second finding was hash-collided by another party before the author could exploit it.

oss-securityupdated · 8h agofirst · 1d agoResearch 9 sources

Analog Pin Directionality as an Exfiltration Attack Surface in Mixed-Signal ICs

Researchers demonstrate exfiltration through nominally input-only analog pins in mixed-signal ICs, recovering data at 10 kbps on a 55nm PPG front-end.

The paper identifies a directionality-based attack class in analog/mixed-signal (AMS) ICs where data-dependent circuit-offset modulation converts a nominally input-only pin into an outbound information channel. Three host conditions enable the attack: a closed-loop amplifier, an exposed amplifier input, and sufficiently high impedance at that pin. Silicon validation on a photoplethysmography analog front-end in 55nm CMOS showed exfiltration at up to 10 kbps with error-free PRBS recovery, under 0.001% area overhead, and only 0.03 dB SNR reduction.

arXiv cs.CR · 18h agoResearch

The modern attack chain: Rethinking Google Workspace security in the age of AI

Analysis of Vercel and Composio breaches shows stolen OAuth tokens, not phishing email, now open Google Workspace attacks — a path authorized AI agents follow.

The author analyzes the Vercel and Composio breaches as the same OAuth-first attack chain run twice: a stolen OAuth token, obtained via a compromised supplier, becomes the entry point rather than email. These tokens survive password resets, are hard to observe, and let attackers read Gmail and Drive data, take over accounts, and pivot laterally using stored credentials and password-reset magic links. The piece warns that authorized AI agents with overbroad OAuth grants can unintentionally traverse the same path — accessing inboxes, reading sensitive content, and exfiltrating data downstream — without any malicious actor or compromised credential.

Help Net Security · 1d agoResearch in the wild

6 Months on Alert: Get H1 2026 Cyber Risk Report for SOCs and MSSPs

ANY.RUN's H1 2026 report details 15 threat trends including 437% growth in fake CAPTCHA phishing and 90.7% rise in Adobe infrastructure abuse.

The report draws on interactive sandbox submissions from over 700,000 analysts and 16,000 SOC teams between January and June 2026. Attacks abusing Adobe infrastructure grew 90.7% versus H2 2025 while RMM-related attacks rose 26.5%, and custom fake CAPTCHA phishing grew 437% from Q1 to Q2 2026. ANY.RUN argues static IOCs are losing effectiveness as dead drop resolvers hide the final C2 until execution.

ANY.RUN · 2d agoResearch

Hackers Turn Windows Shadow Copies Into a Tool for Credential Theft and Ransomware

Attackers abuse Windows VSS shadow copies to delete recovery points before ransomware and to extract NTDS.dit/SAM credentials, demanding context-aware detection.

Threat actors are weaponizing the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for two purposes: destroying local recovery points via vssadmin.exe, wmic.exe, diskshadow.exe, wbadmin.exe, and bcdedit.exe before encryption, and accessing static copies of locked files such as NTDS.dit and SAM for credential theft. Ransomware families tied to shadow-copy removal include Akira, Black Basta, BlackCat, Conti, LockBit, Qilin, RansomHub, REvil, Ryuk, and WannaCry. Huntress's analysis of the Nightmare-Eclipse tool showed the BlueHammer technique chaining a Windows Defender timing issue with a VSS snapshot to dump the SAM database and decrypt NT hashes. Defenders should correlate VSS operations with parent process, hive access, and subsequent encryption activity, and maintain immutable off-host backups.

GBHackers · 2d agoResearch in the wild1