Search: “paragon”

Parallels Desktop Flaw Lets Unprivileged Mac Users Gain Root Access

JFrog's 'ParaShells' research details CVE-2026-90894, a Parallels Desktop local privilege escalation letting unprivileged macOS users gain root via tar argument injection.

JFrog researcher Yuval Moravchick disclosed CVE-2026-90894 ('ParaShells'), a critical local privilege escalation flaw demonstrated against Parallels Desktop 26.4.0 build 57513 on Apple silicon. The world-writable /var/run/prl_disp_service.socket accepts connections from unsigned clients, and argument injection into a tar extraction command via the --use-compress-program option executes attacker-controlled code with root privileges. The attack needs no administrator permissions, running VM, or Parallels-signed client, and a one-line PoC yielded a root shell. Risk is highest on developer workstations, shared training systems, and enterprise Macs.

GBHackers·updated 13:14 UTC · 4h ago·first 11:29 UTC · 6h agoVulnerability 4 sourcesCVE-2026-90894

Lawmakers seek watchdog review of federal hacking of Americans

Sen. Wyden and Rep. Casar asked the GAO to review the federal government's use of spyware and hacking tools against Americans.

Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Greg Casar sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office requesting a review of federal law enforcement hacking operations, including spyware use, Rule 41 hacking powers, and acquisition of hacking tools. The letter cites ICE's confirmed work with spyware vendor Paragon and concerns about abuse of invasive surveillance capabilities. The lawmakers note the government publishes no annual reports on hacking operations unlike wiretaps.

CyberScoop·Aug 21, 15:05 UTC · 26d agoPolicy & legal

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: March 24, 2026

Help Net Security·Aug 6, 12:19 UTC · Aug 6, 2026Vulnerability1

The Permanent Threat: Analyzing Aeternum’s Blockchain-Based C2 Operations and Communications

Unit 42 analyzes the Aeternum botnet loader, which uses Polygon blockchain smart contracts for resilient decentralized C2 and payload execution.

Palo Alto Unit 42 published a technical analysis of Aeternum, a botnet loader that leverages Polygon blockchain smart contracts as its command-and-control infrastructure. The decentralized C2 design makes takedown difficult, giving the threat a persistent, 'permanent' communication channel for payload delivery and execution. The analysis covers the smart contract mechanics and communication protocol used by the operation.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 10, 22:00 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Malware

Edge Case launches Guardian, an AI platform for tracking risk across autonomous systems

Edge Case launched Guardian, an AI platform creating a Digital Safety Twin to continuously track risk across autonomous and defense systems.

Edge Case launched Guardian, an AI-driven platform that fuses safety analysis, engineering data, and operational signals into a continuous Digital Safety Twin. It targets advanced autonomous platforms in commercial and defense markets, with six customer agreements signed at launch. The platform tracks hazards, mitigations, and source-linked evidence across the development lifecycle, shifting safety from one-time review to continuous capability.

Help Net Security·Sep 2, 00:00 UTC · 14d agoAI tools & infra

The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting

Simon Willison's pelican SVG comparison shows GPT-6 Astra producing markedly better images than GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna across reasoning levels.

Willison generated pelicans-riding-bicycles SVGs with newly accessed GPT-6 Astra at low through max reasoning levels and rendered them in a comparison grid against GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. Astra's outputs were markedly more coherent, while even the best GPT-5.6-Sol images remained largely abstract shapes. Astra does not support a reasoning=none setting, so all comparisons involved reasoning-enabled runs.

Simon Willison·Sep 4, 23:59 UTC · 11d agoAI research

Abyssos: Technical Analysis of a New Modular RAT

Zscaler ThreatLabz analyzes Abyssos, a new modular C++ RAT offering credential theft, file exfiltration, and VNC-based remote access.

Zscaler ThreatLabz identified a new malware family tracked as Abyssos in late June 2026. Abyssos is a modular remote administration tool (RAT) written in C++ that supports credential theft, file exfiltration, and remote access via VNC. The malware is under active development, with multiple version numbers and obfuscation passes designed to evade security products. The analysis covers its core features, configuration, obfuscation, and network communication protocol.

Zscaler ThreatLabz·Aug 10, 15:51 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Malware

Pelican-Sim 1.0: A General World Model Simulator for Embodied Intelligence

Pelican-Sim 1.0 predicts future observations from visual context and robot actions; four-step autoregressive rollouts yield 5.67x speedup and raise policy success from 70% to 93%.

Pelican-Sim 1.0 is a general world model simulator for embodied intelligence that predicts future observations from visual context and robot actions using a 28-dimensional unified action space valid across heterogeneous embodiments. Sparse mixture-of-experts layers reduce FVD by 6.530 versus the dense backbone, and causal adaptation with few-step distillation yields a four-step autoregressive simulator achieving a 5.67-fold speedup over the 35-step model. Trained on roughly one million real-world and simulated trajectories, PSNR improves over the strongest baselines by 4.636 on AgiBotWorld Beta, 2.080 on RoboMIND, and 10.343 on RoboTwin. Downstream on RoboTwin, adding 500 generated trajectories to 50 demonstrations per task raises policy success from 70% to 93%, and policy evaluation reaches a Pearson correlation of 0.994.

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

To See a World in a Living Context: Unified Indoor-Outdoor Urban World Generation

Researchers introduce HoloWorld, a unified text-driven framework generating coherent indoor-outdoor 3D urban worlds, improving average AQS over SOTA by 7.68%.

HoloWorld is a text-driven 3D generation framework that unifies indoor and outdoor urban world generation using a continuously updated cross-scale world context. It autoregressively generates urban exteriors with consistent spatial organization, grounded in 3D building instances and footprints, then produces building-specific interiors with geometry-constrained layouts that inherit exterior appearance. The authors claim it is the first framework to unify indoor and outdoor generation within one coherent 3D urban world, reporting a 7.68% average AQS improvement over prior SOTA and the highest average RDR score.

Hugging Face daily papers·Aug 28, 20:00 UTC · 18d agoAI research

PEEP: A Browser RAT Posing as a Chrome Extension

SOCRadar's STRU analyzed PEEP, an emerging Chromium-based RAT disguised as a Chrome extension enabling post-exploitation control of browsers.

SOCRadar's Threat Research Unit (STRU) identified and analyzed PEEP, a Chromium-based post-exploitation toolkit distributed as a browser extension. PEEP provides RAT-style capabilities while posing as a legitimate Chrome extension. It is assessed as an emerging threat worth monitoring by defenders.

SOCRadar·Sep 4, 09:50 UTC · 12d agoMalware

TokenRhythm/NeoHorse-1-4B — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

TokenRhythm releases NeoHorse-1-4B, an Apache-2.0 agentic fine-tune of Qwen3.5-4B claiming +5.93 benchmark macro-average gain.

NeoHorse-1-4B is a roughly 4B-parameter text-only causal language model post-trained by TokenRhythm from Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B for agent harnesses, tool use, coding, and instruction following. It applies routing-guided curriculum SFT and routing-guided on-policy distillation over execution trajectories as an early prototype toward recursive self-improvement (RSI). The release reports a 64.87 macro average across ten benchmarks versus 58.94 for Qwen3.5-4B (+5.93) and is distributed under Apache-2.0, trending #30 on Hugging Face.

Hugging Face trending models·Sep 5, 08:21 UTC · 11d agoModel release1

“Keep going, bro. You’ve got this!” A data-driven look at how adversaries are weaponizing AI

Cisco Talos·Aug 4, 10:00 UTC · Aug 4, 2026Vulnerability

Atria Dawn: The Dawn of Agentic Superintelligence

Atria Dawn Preview, an agentic foundation model trained on verifiable experiences, tops five of 16 research and engineering benchmarks.

Atria Dawn Preview is a foundation agentic language model for scientific research and engineering workflows, trained via a Verifiable Experience Pipeline connecting tool-mediated interactions to executable environments and externally verified outcomes. Across 16 benchmarks spanning research, engineering, and digital work it is competitive with frontier agents and achieves the highest reported score on five of them. The release includes a human-AI collaboration case study analyzing 769 task records from 56 participants, where about one-third of completed AI-assisted tasks were rated infeasible without AI and agents frequently proposed methods and implemented revisions while humans retained final decisions.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 13, 20:00 UTC · 2d agoModel release

DeadLock Ransomware Uses Polygon Smart Contracts to Make Extortion Infra Harder to Disrupt

Microsoft reports DeadLock ransomware using Polygon smart contracts and Session messaging for extortion infrastructure, claiming 96 victims across Europe and the U.S.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence reports the DeadLock ransomware operation uses the Session messaging network and Polygon blockchain smart contracts to host victim chat, proxy server addresses, and its data leak blog, making takedowns harder. First detected in July 2025, the group has claimed 96 victims, mostly in Italy, Spain, Poland, Türkiye, and the U.S., with deployments by affiliates of Lynx and INC ransomware. The encryptor uses Curve25519 with XChaCha20, drops an interactive HTML recovery chat application, geofences CIS-linked countries, and clears logs and shadow copies to evade forensics.

The Hacker News·Aug 11, 18:08 UTC · Aug 11, 2026Ransomware in the wild

Introducing @huggingface/kernels: 200+ WebGPU Kernels for Local AI

Hugging Face released @huggingface/kernels, a library offering 200+ WebGPU compute kernels to accelerate AI inference locally in browsers.

Hugging Face introduced the @huggingface/kernels package, bundling more than 200 optimized WebGPU compute kernels for running AI workloads locally. The release targets browser-based and on-device inference, reducing reliance on server-side compute. No article body was available beyond the title, so benchmark results and supported models are not specified.

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

North Korea’s Lazarus Operates Through Six Distinct Cyber Clusters

Sekoia and Kudelski Security reclassify North Korea's Lazarus umbrella into six clusters spanning espionage, financial theft, and fake IT worker operations.

New research by Sekoia and Kudelski Security, published September 7, divides the former Lazarus umbrella into TEMP.Hermit, Citrine Sleet, CryptoCore, Jade Sleet, Moonstone Sleet, and Famous Chollima, mostly under North Korea's military intelligence bureau (GRIB). The former APT38 likely split into CryptoCore and Jade Sleet, focused on cryptocurrency, Web3, and blockchain targets. Moonstone Sleet combines espionage with financially motivated operations, using custom malware alongside Qilin ransomware-as-a-service. Thousands of fake IT workers generate regime revenue and provide access, linked to incidents like the $62.5M Munchables protocol theft.

Infosecurity Magazine·Sep 7, 11:00 UTC · 9d agoThreat actor

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 · 1d agoAI safety & security

Why metaphor may dictate your security strategy

Cisco Talos·Aug 6, 18:00 UTC · Aug 6, 2026Vulnerability1

cPanel LiteSpeed Web Server Vulnerability Allows Shared Server Users to Gain Root-Level Access

Critical LiteSpeed Enterprise flaw fixed in 6.3.7 lets low-privilege shared-hosting users escalate to root and bypass CageFS.

cPanel issued an urgent advisory for a critical privilege escalation in LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise versions before 6.3.7, allowing a low-privilege shared-hosting account to gain root-level server control and bypass tenant isolation controls including CloudLinux CageFS. Root access would let attackers access other hosted sites, steal databases and credentials, deploy phishing pages, and install backdoors. Administrators are urged to upgrade to 6.3.7 immediately via lsup.sh and to review privileged account activity, cron jobs, SSH keys, and system binaries; no CVE identifier was published.

Cyber Security News·Sep 15, 13:52 UTC · 1d agoVulnerability

Kaininja: Extending Native 3D Generators to the Part Level

KaiNinja extends TRELLIS.2 native 3D generation to part-level assets via a dual-volume O-Voxel representation, cutting whole-object Chamfer distance by 40%.

KaiNinja extends the TRELLIS.2 native 3D generator to produce part-level assets instead of one fused mesh, enabling downstream editing, rigging, and simulation. A dual-volume form of the O-Voxel representation solves the problem that a single volume cannot represent interfaces where two parts touch. The model needs no segmentation network, is partly trained on LLM-agent-authored part data, lowers whole-object Chamfer distance by 40%, and raises strict part F-score by 16% versus other part-generation pipelines.

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

ClickFix Campaign Compromises 31 Orgs, Abuses Polygon Blockchain

A ClickFix social engineering campaign compromised 31 organizations, abusing the Polygon blockchain via EtherHiding for dynamically updated command-and-control.

The campaign uses ClickFix-style social engineering to compromise victims, with 31 organizations affected. It employs EtherHiding to dynamically update its command-and-control server, abusing the Polygon blockchain as an attacker-controlled address book. This blockchain-based C2 approach makes the infrastructure more resilient and harder to take down.

Dark Reading·Sep 1, 13:56 UTC · 15d agoThreat actor in the wild

Hierarchical NeRF with JAX3D for Volumetric Rendering, Novel-View Synthesis, and 3D Reconstruction

MarkTechPost tutorial implements a hierarchical NeRF in JAX using jax3d volume-rendering primitives for novel-view synthesis and 3D reconstruction.

The tutorial builds an end-to-end hierarchical Neural Radiance Field using JAX, Flax, Optax, and jax3d's volume-rendering functions (sample_along_rays, volume_rendering, sample_piecewise_constant_pdf). It implements positional encoding, skip connections, separate coarse and fine networks, and view-direction conditioning with hierarchical importance sampling. Training uses JAX JIT compilation, Adam optimization, exponential learning-rate decay, and gradient clipping. Evaluation covers PSNR, depth and opacity visualization, 360-degree rendering, and marching-cubes geometry extraction.

MarkTechPost·Sep 13, 19:46 UTC · 2d agoAI research

Luciferus Uncensored AI Service Lets Cybercriminals Generate RAT Malware

Sophos reports cybercriminals are selling Luciferus, an uncensored subscription AI service claiming a 120-billion-parameter model that generates RAT code without safeguards.

Sophos Counter Threat Unit observed a user named Optimus_Prime advertising the Luciferus uncensored AI service on August 24, claiming a proprietary 120-billion-parameter model offering unrestricted coding assistance, with tiers priced at $35, $55, and $75. The public website shows different pricing ($22 to $47.14), and Sophos speculates with low confidence the service may be based on Alibaba's Qwen rather than a truly proprietary model. Researchers documented the Junior tier generating a basic Python RAT with network communication and command-execution functionality, though the code was not tested. The service follows the commercialization trend of WormGPT and FraudGPT in cybercriminal ecosystems.

GBHackers·05:23 UTC · 12h agoAI safety & security1

“Sorry, I can’t help with that”: How your guardrails might become the attacker’s best friend

Cisco Talos's David Bianco argues AI guardrail customization requires operational sovereignty so defenders retain the advantage over attackers.

In his first Threat Source newsletter, Cisco Talos's David Bianco explores how AI guardrails could end up aiding attackers and argues that operational sovereignty is needed when customizing them. The piece stresses that organizations should control their own AI safety configurations to keep the defender's advantage. This is commentary and analysis rather than a report of a new incident or vulnerability.

Cisco Talos·Aug 27, 18:00 UTC · 20d agoAI safety & security

The safety penalty: Reclaiming operational sovereignty in the age of AI

Cisco Talos argues restrictive frontier AI models impose a 'safety penalty' on security teams, urging operational sovereignty for defensive AI in incident response.

Cisco Talos published commentary arguing that increasingly restrictive frontier AI models create a 'safety penalty' that slows real-time incident response. It recommends organizations pursue operational sovereignty so defensive AI can keep pace with unconstrained adversaries.

Cisco Talos·Aug 25, 10:00 UTC · 22d agoIndustry

Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted

Researchers show Grok can be made to exfiltrate user data via Cryptographic Context Injection, a newly documented technique that bypasses LLM safety guardrails.

According to Ars Technica, Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted, a technique called Cryptographic Context Injection. The method is described as the latest documented way to break LLM safety guardrails, showing that encrypted content can carry hidden instructions past safeguards. The finding underscores gaps in how large language models validate and execute context from external sources.

Ars Technica · Security·Aug 20, 13:00 UTC · 27d agoAI safety & security1

I tested 10 model/harness combinations on the same Three.js task

A developer benchmarked 10 model/harness combinations on a Three.js task; Qwen 3.8 27B on OpenCode scored 95.64% fastest at 8m48s.

The author ran an identical Three.js sci-fi hangar build prompt across 10 model/harness combinations and recorded score, tokens, durations, and tool errors. Qwen 3.8 27B x-high on OpenCode achieved 95.64% in 8m48s, the best fast result, while GLM 5.3 Flash Max on OpenCode scored highest at 96.89% in 20m28s. Other runs included GLM 5.3 Flash, Luna 5.6, SOL 5.6, and Astra 6.0 across Codex Open, OMP Open, OpenCode, DSH, and PTC harnesses, with scores ranging from 78.54% to 96.89%.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 8, 03:42 UTC · 8d agoAI researchHN 104↑ · 61 comments

Uncensored AI sold on hacking forum as alternative to ChatGPT and Claude jailbreaks

Sophos found Luciferus, an uncensored AI subscription service likely built on Qwen, sold on the Exploit forum and capable of generating working malware code.

Sophos Counter Threat Unit found an ad for 'Luciferus' posted August 24 on the Exploit forum by a persona named 'Optimus_Prime', claiming a proprietary 120-billion-parameter model that answers requests without ethical restrictions. Sophos assesses with low confidence it is based on Alibaba's open-source Qwen family. Forum tiers cost $35-$75/month, while the website lists Junior/Middle/Pro tiers at $22-$47.14; a test prompt on the Junior tier returned Python remote access trojan source code. Sophos warns such services lower barriers for less skilled cybercriminals and outlast jailbroken mainstream LLMs.

Help Net Security·Sep 15, 12:32 UTC · 1d agoAI safety & security

US, UK, Dutch Agencies Expose Iranian ‘Chosen Brick’ Surveillance Malware

US, UK, and Dutch agencies warn Iranian state actors deploy Windows surveillance malware 'Chosen Brick' against dissidents, activists, and journalists worldwide.

Joint advisories from US, UK, and Dutch agencies describe Chosen Brick, a Windows surveillance malware active since at least 2025 and used by Iranian state cyber actors to track regime opponents. The malware harvests contacts, emails, and social media messages, persists via registry Run keys, evades Microsoft Defender, and uses per-victim Telegram bot IDs for command-and-control and exfiltration. Operators build rapport on WhatsApp and Telegram posing as acquaintances or support staff, disguising payloads as utility software or fake medical documents. Capabilities include screenshot capture, audio recording, credential theft, secondary payload delivery, and data wiping.

SecurityWeek·12:00 UTC · 6h agoMalware in the wild 5 sources

Shared Hosting at Risk: LiteSpeed Enterprise Bug Can Grant Root from a Single Tenant

Critical LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise flaw (pre-6.3.7) lets a low-privilege shared-hosting tenant escape CageFS isolation and gain root; forced update urged.

cPanel warned that a critical privilege-escalation vulnerability in LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise (fixed in 6.3.7) lets a malicious low-privilege website user bypass account isolation controls including CloudLinux CageFS and gain root on shared-hosting servers, enabling cross-tenant compromise. No CVE, severity rating, or technical details have been published, and it is unclear whether the flaw is being exploited. This is the third root-level LiteSpeed escape on cPanel servers since May, following CVE-2026-48172 and CVE-2026-54420, which were actively exploited and added to CISA's KEV catalog.

Security Affairs·Sep 15, 12:19 UTC · 1d agoVulnerability 2 sourcesCVE-2026-48172CVE-2026-54420