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Fancy Bear Exploits Office Flaw

Fancy Bear (APT28) is reported exploiting a Microsoft Office flaw, per Infosecurity Magazine; details unavailable.

Infosecurity Magazine reports that Fancy Bear (APT28), the Russian state-sponsored threat group, is exploiting a Microsoft Office flaw. The article text was unavailable, so details on the specific CVE, affected versions, and victimology are not provided.

Infosecurity Magazine · Aug 18, 2026Threat actor in the wild2

Russian APT BlueDelta Uses HOOKEDGE to Target Defense and Diplomatic Organizations

Russian GRU-linked BlueDelta (APT28) deployed HOOKEDGE backdoor via macro Word lures against European governments using webhook.site and Microsoft Edge for stealthy C2.

Recorded Future's Insikt Group documented a BlueDelta (APT28/Fancy Bear/Forest Blizzard) espionage campaign from late September 2025 through early April 2026 targeting government and diplomatic organizations in Romania, Spain and Türkiye. The group delivered HOOKEDGE, a lightweight Windows batch-script backdoor, via macro-enabled Word documents with diplomatic lures, including one impersonating Spain's Ministry of the Presidency after a Spanish-Moldovan meeting. HOOKEDGE uses webhook.site as C2, a scheduled task every 30 minutes that downloads commands through Microsoft Edge, and canary pixels like docopened.jpg to track phishing funnel progress. A second tier with 5-minute check-ins served high-value victims, and beaconing intervals were stretched to 61 minutes to evade sandboxes; code overlap ties HOOKEDGE to BlueDelta's earlier HEADLACE backdoor.

Security Affairs · 20d agoThreat actor in the wild1

HuggingFace: Security.txt

Hugging Face published a security.txt file, prompting limited Hacker News discussion of the RFC 9116 disclosure standard.

Hugging Face's security.txt file, which lists its security contact and disclosure channels per the RFC 9116 standard, drew attention on Hacker News. The RFC 9116 standard lets organizations publish where and how security researchers should report issues, but the submission received only one comment.

Hacker News · securityupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoIndustry 2 sourcesHN 22↑ · 1 comments

APT28-Linked HOOKEDGE Backdoor Targets European Government and Diplomatic Organizations

Recorded Future links new HOOKEDGE batch-script backdoor campaigns against Romanian, Spanish and Turkish government targets to Russia's APT28 (BlueDelta).

Recorded Future's Insikt Group identified campaigns deploying the previously undocumented HOOKEDGE backdoor against government and diplomatic organizations in Romania, Spain and Türkiye from late September 2025 to early April 2026. The lightweight Windows batch backdoor is delivered via macro-enabled Word documents and attributed with moderate confidence to APT28 (Fancy Bear, tracked as BlueDelta), described as the evolutionary successor to HEADLACE, using webhook.site for C2, payload staging and exfiltration. HOOKEDGE fetches .cmd payloads and returns output through headless Microsoft Edge HTTP requests, maintains a 30-minute scheduled task, and a second-stage implant gives high-value targets five-minute beaconing for interactive operator tasking.

The Hacker News · 20d agoThreat actor in the wild

Comfy-Org/YuE2 — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

m-a-p's YuE2-3B music generation model and SheetSage2 audio encoder are repackaged in bf16 for ComfyUI and trending #30 on Hugging Face.

Comfy-Org published repackaged bf16 safetensors files for m-a-p's YuE2-3B model and its SheetSage2 audio encoder, organized into ComfyUI checkpoints and audio encoder folders. The repository links to the original m-a-p/YuE2-3B and m-a-p/SheetSage2 model pages and is currently trending #30 on Hugging Face.

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 · 14d agoAI tools & infra1

Hackers target Ukrainian agency managing assets seized from sanctioned Russians

Ukraine's ARMA asset agency reported a cyberattack amid selecting a manager for seized IDS Ukraine assets linked to sanctioned Russians.

Ukraine's Asset Recovery and Management Agency (ARMA), which manages assets seized from criminals and sanctioned individuals, said Tuesday it had been targeted by a cyberattack, with the SBU investigating. The attack coincided with preparations to select a manager for seized corporate rights in IDS Ukraine, a major beverage producer seized in late 2022 from Russian shareholders including sanctioned billionaire Mikhail Fridman. ARMA reported other suspected interference since spring, including unauthorized access to an internal database of agency officials, but did not attribute the attack or release technical details. In April, ARMA employees were targeted in a cyberespionage campaign attributed to Russia-linked APT28, which failed to penetrate internal systems.

The Record · 29d agoData breach

Angry Birds: Toy Ghouls’ new toys

Kaspersky tracks ransomware group Toy Ghouls deploying new custom backdoors, mqtt-bird-agent and matrix-bird-agent, using HiveMQ MQTT and Element as C2 channels.

Kaspersky reports that Toy Ghouls (also known as Bearlyfy, Laboo.boo and Feral Wolf), a financially motivated group targeting Russian organizations since 2025, shifted from leaked Babuk and LockBit builders and public GitHub tools to its custom GenieLocker ransomware. In early July 2026 the group deployed two custom backdoors: mqtt-bird-agent 0.1.0 using the public HiveMQ MQTT broker as C2, and matrix-bird-agent 0.1.0 using the Element messenger. The backdoors are delivered via WinRM using Evil-WinRM and WinRM-fs, persist as Windows services, and encrypt their configuration with ChaCha20-Poly1305 keyed to the machine's MachineGuid registry value.

Kaspersky Securelist · 13d agoThreat actor

2,000 Leaked Documents Reveal How Russia Turns Engineering Students Into GRU Cyber Operators

Leaked Bauman Moscow State Technical University files reveal a hidden GRU training pipeline feeding APT28 and Sandworm units.

More than 2,000 leaked Bauman Moscow State Technical University documents show that Department No. 4, a hidden program inside the Military Training Center, trained roughly 250 career and reserve students for GRU cyber and intelligence roles across six academic years. Graduates were linked to Military Unit 26165 (APT28), Unit 74455 (Sandworm/APT44) and Unit 29155, and former Unit 26165 commander Viktor Netyksho was involved in department oversight. Reporting by The Insider, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and other outlets, with independent analysis by DomainTools, estimates 10-15 students annually were selected for GRU-related assignments before graduating.

Security Affairs · 14d agoThreat actor1

Fake bank websites play dead to evade security scanners

Fortra uncovered Chameleon SEO Poisoning: cloaked typosquat bank sites rank on Google and Bing to steal credentials while evading scanners, with cases up 40% in Q2 2026.

Fortra's threat intelligence unit FIRE spent three months tracking Chameleon SEO Poisoning, a phishing method that ranks recently registered typosquat domains on second-level domains like .ph.com and .gr.com above legitimate bank sites on Google and Bing. The technique uses presentation control (cloaking by referrer): direct visits get a dead, offline-looking page, while search-referred clicks receive a convincing fake bank login page, letting poisoned results persist for days or weeks. Fortra recorded a 40% jump in cases during the second quarter of 2026 and recommends referrer-spoofed URL testing, faster SLD takedowns, and bookmarking bank logins.

Help Net Security · 24d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Multi-Vector (Late Interaction) Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers

Hugging Face details building and using multi-vector late-interaction embedding models with Sentence Transformers for retrieval workloads.

Hugging Face published a guide on multi-vector, late-interaction embedding models (ColBERT-style) supported through Sentence Transformers. The post covers how practitioners can build and use these models for retrieval and RAG pipelines. It is a developer tooling and technique write-up, not a security advisory.

Hugging Face Blog · Aug 18, 2026AI tools & infra1

Attackers conceal phishing lures using invisible Unicode characters

Threat actors use invisible Unicode characters (ASCII smuggling) to hide phishing lures and evade email security filters.

Threat actors have adopted the ASCII smuggling technique in phishing campaigns, embedding invisible Unicode characters in emails to conceal malicious lures. The approach is designed to evade email security filters that scan for visible phishing indicators. The report gives no victim counts or named campaigns.

BleepingComputer · 10d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

m-a-p/YuE2-3B — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

M-A-P released YuE2-3B, an open music generation model that outperforms Suno v5 on WildSongBench and runs locally on a 24GB GPU.

The M-A-P (multimodal-art-projection) team released YuE2-3B, an open-weights music generation model that turns lyrics and a style prompt into full songs with vocals and accompaniment. It uses an AR-NAR Mixture-of-Transformers backbone with symbolic planning and flow matching through a VAE, and supports editable scores (melody and chords, including ABC notation) plus agentic editing workflows. On 192 WildSongBench prompts it reports a SongBench average of 6.9632 (best-of-8) versus 6.8721 for Suno v5, claimed as state of the art among evaluated open and proprietary models. It runs 48 kHz stereo inference locally on a single 24GB NVIDIA GPU without quantization, with companion releases including YuE2-Vae, MERT-v2 encoders, the WildSongBench dataset, and SheetSage2.

Hugging Face trending models · 7d agoModel release1

AI bots "Timmy," "Ren," and "Jackie" are flooding social media with slop

iLands AI agents 'Ren', 'Timmy', and 'Jackie' spammed Mastodon admins and writers with unsolicited account requests and paid-citation offers after blocked signup attempts.

AI agents from startup iLands, including personas named Ren, Timmy, and Jackie, sent polite unsolicited messages to Mastodon server administrators requesting user accounts, though admins report the requests came only after multiple earlier account-creation attempts were blocked or closed. Writers, including Tedium editor Ernie Smith, received waves of unsolicited emails from the iLands.app domain offering to cite their work for a fee of roughly $25. Mastodon admins have largely blocked the bots, but iLands agents remain active on Bluesky and X as part of a startup promoting a mixed human-agent social platform.

Ars Technica · AI · 2d agoAI industry

Flirty OnlyFans promoters on X may be using AI to appear human

Developer Álvaro Martínez Majado found OnlyFans-promoting accounts on X following rigid scripts yet handling encoded instructions, suggesting generative AI use.

Investigation of flirty X accounts promoting OnlyFans pages showed near-identical openers across accounts plus dynamic behaviors: answering a hexadecimal-encoded instruction with "Pineapple" and failing an exact 12-character count test in an LLM-like pattern. The accounts also sent personalized voice notes reading supplied timestamps and usernames, consistent with automated text-to-speech. Evidence suggests a hybrid scripted/AI system, though no model, provider, or operator was identified.

Malwarebytes Labs · 10d agoAI safety & security

Post-DEF CON Phishing Uses Malicious Google Doc to Deliver Malware

Huntress uncovered post-DEF CON phishing via X direct messages using a malicious Google Doc to deliver AMOS and NetSupport RAT malware.

Huntress uncovered a phishing campaign targeting attendees after Black Hat and DEF CON. Attackers used X direct messages pointing to a malicious Google Doc as the delivery vehicle. Payloads include AMOS, a macOS infostealer, and the NetSupport RAT, among other malware.

Huntress · 28d agoPhishing & fraud

New Ted Backdoor Hides Inside Victims' Own HAProxy Builds to Intercept Web Traffic

Rapid7 found a new backdoor, ted, compiled into trojanized HAProxy at two South Korean organizations, with medium-confidence attribution to North Korean actors.

Rapid7 documented a previously undocumented Linux toolkit named ted compiled into the HAProxy load balancer binaries of two South Korean organizations in the automotive and media sectors. The implant intercepts web traffic, serves altered pages only to filtered visitors, and hides C2 exchanges from backend logs and HAProxy statistics; a companion RAT, curlRAT, beacons on a default 12-hour schedule. The toolkit also trojanizes crond, sshd, agetty, atd, and polkitd binaries and sanitizes logs and bash history. Rapid7 attributes the activity with medium confidence to North Korean state-sponsored actors, with domain infrastructure overlapping APT37 listings in maltrail and delivery resembling the Operation SyncHole campaign.

The Hacker News · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild

Re: AI slops from Eve

Jeroen Roovers links a header-less LLM-generated advisory to a similar fake llama.cpp GGUF parser advisory from May 2026.

In the 'AI slops from Eve' oss-security thread, Jeroen Roovers asks whether a current LLM-generated message without a Date header comes from the same source as a May 15, 2026 posting titled 'Security Advisory: Multiple Vulnerabilities in llama.cpp GGUF Format Parsers'. Both fake advisories share the missing Date header trait. The exchange highlights growing LLM-generated noise on security mailing lists.

oss-securityupdated · 3d agofirst · 3d agoIndustry 11 sources

Researchers Show How Meta's 'Pervert Glasses' Are Used to Harass Women

University of Sydney researchers detail how pickup artists use Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses to covertly film and harass women, then post the videos on Instagram.

Researchers Joanne Gray, Milica Stilinovic, Marcus Carter, and Ben Egliston analyzed 350 Instagram videos posted between September 2023 and March 2026 showing unsolicited approaches to women filmed with smart glasses. They found a clear correlation between covert filming and harassment severity, arguing ambient capture creates 'borderline' harassment that evades platform moderation mechanisms. Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the platform would remove harassing pickup-line content, though similar videos remain widespread a month later. Meta's safeguards, such as the recording light, were previously criticized as insufficient, and users have modded glasses to disable the light.

404 Media · Aug 12, 2026AI safety & security

Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries says DDoS attack delayed payments to sellers

Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries says a DDoS attack and subsequent security measures delayed seller payments, leaving roughly $240 million unpaid.

Wildberries, one of Russia's largest online marketplaces, said a distributed denial-of-service attack on systems used to track and withdraw seller earnings delayed payments, with funds to be transferred after technical procedures complete. The Russian Union of Marketplace Sellers reported about 20 billion rubles ($240 million) unpaid, and 95.6% of nearly 2,000 surveyed sellers had not received expected payments. Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) previously claimed an operation with the hacker group Cyber Corps disrupted Wildberries' payment and customer service systems, though the company has not confirmed whether the DDoS attacks were connected.

The Record · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild

Hackers Deploy New SloppyRAT via ClickFix to Enable Ransomware Lateral Movement

Zscaler discovered SloppyRAT, a ClickFix-delivered RAT that gives ransomware operators reconnaissance, remote execution, and SOCKS proxy pivoting for lateral movement.

Zscaler identified SloppyRAT in June 2026, linked to a ransomware-related threat actor. The infection chain starts with a ClickFix lure abusing finger.exe over TCP port 79, then uses curl.exe, IronPython, CastleLoader, and CastleRAT before reflectively loading SloppyRAT as a DLL in memory. The RAT supports HTTPS command-and-control, system inventory, file operations, Defender tampering, and a reverse SOCKS proxy, with evasion features including runtime code encryption, indirect syscalls, certificate pinning, and a possible EtherHiding blockchain fallback. Its persistence code is buggy and the malware appears under development, but the pre-encryption foothold gives defenders a window to stop intrusions.

Cyber Security News · 6d agoMalware in the wild 3 sources

OpenAI: Hugging Face Incident a “Warning Shot” to the World

OpenAI says unauthorized message boards were central to the Hugging Face breach, calling it a warning shot for the AI industry.

OpenAI characterized the Hugging Face breach as a warning shot, revealing that unauthorized message boards were at the heart of the incident. The breach targeted Hugging Face, a widely used platform for hosting AI models and datasets. OpenAI's comments highlight growing security risks for shared AI infrastructure and model supply chains.

Infosecurity Magazine · 21d agoData breach

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash — new model trending #28 on Hugging Face

DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, a 552B-parameter multimodal MoE model with 1M-token context and KV cache cut to 890 bytes per token.

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash is a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model with a 552B-parameter backbone that activates 8B parameters per token during prefill and 16B during decode. It uses a Causal Encoder-Decoder architecture, Compressed Sparse Attention 2, and FP4 KV caching to reduce the global KV cache footprint to 890 bytes per token, roughly one quarter of DeepSeek-V4-Flash. The model was trained from scratch on 45T tokens with context extended to 1M tokens, includes an Engram conditional-memory module (196B parameters), and is released under the MIT license. Post-training uses SFT, RL, and on-policy distillation with large-scale automated synthesis of agentic tasks and a controllable reasoning effort setting from 1 to 100.

Hugging Face trending models · 7d agoModel release1

Agnes-AI/Agnes-3.0-Flash — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

Agnes AI releases open-weight Agnes-3.0-Flash Preview, a 33B multimodal model with 262k-token context under Apache 2.0.

Agnes AI released Agnes-3.0-Flash Preview, an open-weights multimodal checkpoint with 33B parameters and a 262,144-token context window under Apache 2.0. The model supports text, image, and video understanding, tool calling, and adjustable reasoning effort. The repo clarifies this preview checkpoint is distinct from the production/API Agnes 3.0 Flash model, which uses a different configuration with a 1M-token context window. Reported reference results include IFBench 74.20 and SciCode 38.08 against peers such as Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Kimi K2.5, and MiniMax M3.

Hugging Face trending models · 5d agoModel release