Search: “assessment”

Emergency Department Revisit Quality Review Screening: Exploring Human Decision-Making and Artificial Intelligence Support

A retrospective study found GPT-4 over-flagged emergency department revisit cases while an LLM knowledge-graph screener achieved 83-100% positive predictive value.

In an exploratory retrospective study of 99 emergency department diagnosis pairs from a multihospital health system, clinicians and GPT-4 independently judged whether revisit pairs warranted further assessment. GPT-4 responses correlated poorly with clinicians, flagging 94% of pairs for follow-up, 4.4-13.3 times more than clinicians, though prompt engineering was minimal. An algorithm leveraging an LLM-populated knowledge graph (KGA) achieved 83-100% positive predictive value against at least one clinician rater, suggesting LLM-based screening could broaden revisit quality review without substantially increasing reviewer workload.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 16:37 UTC · 7d agoAI research1

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: March 10, 2026

Help Net Security's roundup lists open cybersecurity roles at BioNTech, AIG, ServiceNow and others across Europe, the Middle East and Canada.

A job-board roundup of cybersecurity openings including Associate Director Application Security at BioNTech (Germany), CISO at AIG (Israel), Cloud Security Professional at ServiceNow (Italy), and SOC/GRC, analyst, engineer and data governance roles in the UK, UAE, India, Canada and France. Roles span application security, cloud security, SOC operations, compliance and OT environments. Most listings are marked no longer accepting applications.

Help Net Security·Aug 28, 09:06 UTC · 20d agoIndustry

Who Should Grade My Work? Student Perspectives on Transparent AI-Assisted Writing Assessment in Higher Education

A Saudi university study finds students value ChatGPT writing feedback but treat human instructors as the final grading authority.

Thirteen male undergraduate computing students at a Saudi public university completed handwritten writing tasks that were scored by ChatGPT using a rubric-based prompt, then reflected after being told the score and feedback were AI-generated. Inductive thematic analysis identified four themes: perceived feedback usefulness, awareness of AI's contextual and pedagogical limitations, conditional trust, and reflection on the instructor's institutional role. Participants accepted GenAI feedback for surface-level revision but consistently positioned human instructors as the authority over grading decisions, distinguishing feedback utility from evaluative authority.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:49 UTC · 12d agoAI research

A Security Risk Assessment Framework for AI-Powered Development Tools

Researchers propose SRF, a framework showing AI-generated code from multiple development tools introduces vulnerabilities, worst in input and file handling tasks.

The paper presents the Security Risk Assessment Framework (SRF), combining threat modeling, security analysis, and quantitative risk evaluation based on vulnerability criticality for AI-generated code. Code generated by multiple AI-powered development tools was analyzed with Bandit and Semgrep across security-relevant programming tasks. All evaluated tools introduced vulnerabilities; risk varied mainly by task type, with input processing and file handling showing higher risk, while differences between tools were smaller than differences across task categories.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 16, 13:36 UTC · 22h agoAI safety & security

ActReview: Rebuttal-Guided Training Data and Rubric Rewards for Actionable Peer Review Generation

ActReview post-trains Qwen3-8B-Base on OpenReview rebuttals to generate actionable peer-review feedback with grounded revision suggestions, benchmarked on 1,000 curated instances.

The paper defines Actionable Peer-review Generation as diagnostic claim generation plus revision suggestion generation and introduces ActReview, a rebuttal-guided post-training framework. From OpenReview review-rebuttal threads the authors build ActReview-40K, aligning reviewer weaknesses with author responses grounded in localized paper evidence, and post-train Qwen3-8B-Base with multi-task SFT followed by GRPO using weakness-specific rubric rewards. They also release ActReview-Bench, a human-curated 1,000-instance benchmark, on which ActReview outperforms prior specialized review-generation models on actionability and grounding while remaining competitive with strong prompt-based LLMs. Human evaluation confirms improved revision usefulness but identifies a remaining gap in technical accuracy.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research

Microsoft’s September 2026 Patch Tuesday addresses 964 CVEs (CVE-2026-81963, CVE-2026-85880)

Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes a record 964 CVEs, including two zero-days actively exploited in the wild.

Microsoft patched a record 964 CVEs in its September 2026 Patch Tuesday release, with 101 rated critical and 824 rated important, making it the largest Patch Tuesday to date. The release includes fixes for two zero-days that were exploited in the wild, with CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880 highlighted in the release. Affected products span Windows core components, Office, Exchange, .NET, Visual Studio, Active Directory services (including AD CS and AD FS) and numerous Azure services. Tenable notes the release surpasses July's as the biggest ever.

Tenable Blog·Sep 8, 18:07 UTC · 8d agoVulnerability in the wildCVE-2026-81963CVE-2026-858801

ActReview: Rebuttal-Guided Training Data and Rubric Rewards for Actionable Peer Review Generation

ActReview post-trains Qwen3-8B-Base on 40K rebuttal-derived instances with rubric rewards to generate actionable, grounded peer-review feedback, plus a 1,000-instance benchmark.

The framework builds ActReview-40K from real OpenReview review-rebuttal threads, aligning reviewer weaknesses with author responses and grounding feedback in localized paper evidence. Qwen3-8B-Base is post-trained with multi-task supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO using candidate-aware, weakness-specific rubric rewards. Experiments show improved actionability and grounding over prior specialized review-generation models, supported by ActReview-Bench, a human-curated 1,000-instance evaluation set. Human evaluation confirms better revision usefulness while noting a remaining gap in technical accuracy.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:30 UTC · 8d agoAI research1

Senate Democrats introduce bill to distribute $300 million annually to shore up water system cybersecurity

The Record·Aug 10, 15:58 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Policy & legal

Patch Tuesday to Pentest Wednesday: How an Equipment Rental Company Is Turning Continuous Testing Into Continuous Exposure Management

An equipment rental company uses Horizon3 NodeZero for continuous exposure management, surfacing an SSH key exposure in eight hours versus annual pentesting.

The company moved from periodic penetration testing to continuous exposure management using the NodeZero Proactive Security Platform, feeding telemetry into a Splunk-based CTEM pipeline via Horizon3 APIs. NodeZero exposed SSH RSA key pairs from a PHP web server change about eight hours after introduction and found more findings in 12 hours than a third-party engagement found in roughly 30 days. An Active Directory password audit of 15,000 passwords found about 300 identical or similar compromised passwords, driving a banned-password list, 12-character minimums, service desk changes, and self-service reset rollout; users with similar passwords later dropped from 880 to 209. NodeZero also validated a suspected Cisco vulnerability as exploitable.

Horizon3.ai·Sep 9, 15:58 UTC · 7d agoIndustry

Curriculum Learning as Transport: Understanding Curricula with Wasserstein Geodesics

Researchers model curriculum learning as Wasserstein transport over difficulty distributions, finding curriculum benefits are strongly task- and budget-dependent with no dominant strategy.

The framework represents curricula as trajectories of training distributions over discrete difficulty levels, decoupling ordering, matched exposure, endpoint smoothness, and pacing. Across a calibrated suite of 12 tasks and 33 difficulty axes under fixed training budgets, no single strategy dominates, though easy-to-hard ordering improves hard-level performance relative to exposure-matched static sampling. Endpoint smoothness and pacing substantially affect where along the difficulty spectrum a curriculum is effective, and the transport view supports extensions to learned pacing and structured difficulty spaces.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:39 UTC · 8d agoAI research1

Reporting Practice Matters: The Impact of Reference Choice on Chest X-ray Report Evaluation

Study shows radiology reporting-style variations in reference reports can flip rankings of chest X-ray report generation models; releases MIMIC-CXR-Ext-ReRef dataset.

The paper quantifies how variations in radiologists' reporting practices distort evaluation of radiology report generation (RRG) models, introducing a radiologist-informed taxonomy and the ReRef method for rewriting reference reports while preserving clinical meaning. On MIMIC-CXR with RadCliQ-v1, condensing normal-findings discussion caused Libra to drop from first to second while CheXOne rose from third to first among nine models. The authors release MIMIC-CXR-Ext-ReRef, a radiologist-validated dataset of 120 original/alternative reference pairs, arguing metrics conflate clinical correctness with stylistic conformity.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 16, 17:28 UTC · 19h agoAI research

Revolut Exposed KYC Data After Fraudulent Government Email Passed Security Checks

Revolut handed over KYC documents, selfies, and Bitcoin transaction histories to attackers after a fraudulent email from a genuine government domain passed authentication checks.

Revolut confirmed on September 12, 2026 that it disclosed sensitive customer KYC data to an unauthorized third party after a fraudulent information request was sent from an email account operating inside a real government agency's domain, carrying valid domain authentication credentials. The exposed data included identity documents (passports, driver's licenses), verification selfies, birth dates, contact details, IBANs, account statements, and full transaction histories including Bitcoin. Revolut discovered the fraud only after independently verifying with the agency, blocked the sender, and notified law enforcement and financial regulators, but did not disclose the number of affected customers or the agency involved. Researcher ZachXBT assessed the operation was targeted at high-net-worth users, useful for fraud, impersonation, or extortion.

Security Affairs·Sep 12, 21:05 UTC · 4d agoData breach

Bag of Tricks or Bag of Myths? Reducing Modeling Complexity with Task Knowledge in Explainable Suicide Risk Assessment

Researchers audit 31 NLP techniques for clinician-annotated suicide risk prediction, finding only 5 of 31 comparisons yield reliable gains.

A study of 1,635 clinician-annotated social media posts ran roughly 300 controlled experiments across 7 methodological families, auditing techniques such as model scaling, synthetic data, ensembling, and threshold tuning under severe class imbalance. The proposed system reformulates risk factor prediction as entailment between posts and codebook definitions, using architecturally diverse ensembles with class-balanced training and deployment-consistent calibration. It scores 0.8203 for risk, 0.7953 for evidence, and 0.7045 macro-F1 for factors, ranking third among 53 teams.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:14 UTC · 9d agoAI research

OpenAI Pauses Astra Model Over Critical Cybersecurity Risk Concerns

Security Affairs·Aug 10, 11:16 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Exploit / PoC1

MUSE: Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on Multi-Modal Understanding in Situated Education

Introduces MUSE, a twelve-task benchmark evaluating vision-language models on artistic image understanding in situated educational, Southeast Asian contexts.

MUSE is a benchmark assessing large vision-language models on artistic image understanding across twelve tasks spanning visual perception, semantic and affective interpretation, cultural understanding, and compositional reasoning. It decouples image annotation from question generation for controllable difficulty and curates images centering Singaporean and Southeast Asian multicultural contexts alongside Western art. Evaluations of open-source and proprietary models found substantial disparities, especially in affective interpretation and compositional reasoning.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 16, 17:26 UTC · 19h agoAI research

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 · 17d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Better answers, broader thinking: What students gain from ChatGPT and critical-thinking training

OpenAI published a randomized study of over 1,000 students examining ChatGPT's effects on critical thinking and performance.

OpenAI released results from a randomized study of more than 1,000 students using ChatGPT on a real-world university assignment. The research examined effects on critical thinking, originality, and student performance. Findings inform ongoing debates about AI's role in education and learning outcomes.

OpenAI News·Aug 27, 09:00 UTC · 21d agoAI research

Sandworm-Linked UAC-0145 Uses Fake Job Interviews to Push VPN That Can Run Commands

CERT-UA says Sandworm-linked UAC-0145 poses as recruiters in fake job interviews to deliver a trojanized WireGuard VPN that runs attacker commands on victims' hosts.

CERT-UA attributes the campaign, ongoing since May 2026, to UAC-0145, a subgroup within GRU-affiliated Sandworm (APT44). Posing as HR staff of firms like ATLAS Business Group and Sopra Steria Bulgaria, attackers lure Ukrainian IT specialists into Zoom interviews, then share failing WireGuard configs and push a custom SopraVPN client from SourceForge. The modified WireGuard build supports a non-standard SymmetricKey option holding AES-256-GCM-encrypted PowerShell, decrypted with the decoded PrivateKey and executed via runScriptCommand. A scheduled task then downloads a second-stage payload on Windows, while the Linux variant fetches it via cURL.

The Hacker News·Aug 12, 13:45 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Threat actor1

Necessary or Sufficient? Evaluating LLM Explanations With Behavioural Evidence

New framework tests whether LLM-cited explanation factors are necessary or sufficient, finding weak correlation across Claude, GPT, and Gemini models.

An arXiv paper introduces black-box intervention tests measuring whether factors LLMs cite in their explanations are necessary or sufficient for their outputs in agent oversight workflows. Across eight models from the Claude, GPT, and Gemini families, Spearman correlations between cited rankings and measured influence ranged from 0.349-0.354 (advisor recommendation) to 0.431-0.580 (prompt monitoring). Uncited factors scored above the lowest cited factor in up to 57.6% of advisor responses, showing cited top-three factors do not reliably identify the most influential inputs.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:37 UTC · 12d agoAI safety & security1

Hackers Can Hide Malicious AI Commands Inside Normal English to Bypass Security Filters

Check Point's PuzzleMask technique hides malicious prompts in ordinary English that fast gatekeeper models miss but high-reasoning downstream models execute.

Check Point researchers disclosed PuzzleMask, a technique concealing policy-breaking instructions in natural-language prose without encodings or invisible characters. Fast screening models classified all 23 crafted wrappers as safe, while a high-reasoning model recovered and acted on the hidden instruction in 17 of 18 tests (94.4%). The gap stems from capability imbalance between gatekeeper and target models, with defenses including paraphrasing untrusted input, stricter self-referential wording rules, and output/tool-call monitoring.

Cyber Security News·Sep 11, 07:36 UTC · 6d agoAI safety & security2

Structured Claim-Level Discourse Representations for Dense Health Narratives

Researchers propose a claim-level discourse framework for health videos, finding 13.22 atomic claims per minute and that LLMs struggle with pragmatic profiling.

The paper introduces a structured framework for claim-level discourse analysis in dense health narratives on social media videos, modeling tuples that link atomic claims with thematic aspects, stance, and multidimensional pragmatic attributes. Analysis found an average of 13.22 atomic claims per minute in health video discourse. A benchmark spanning four health domains with 1,191 manually annotated claims from 60 videos shows current LLMs perform strongly on thematic categorization and stance prediction but struggle with high-dimensional pragmatic profiling, suggesting future systems need task decomposition and specialized inference strategies.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 16, 16:43 UTC · 19h agoAI research

How a researcher uses Codex and ChatGPT to search for new antimicrobial molecules

OpenAI profiles César de la Fuente's lab using ChatGPT and Codex alongside deep-learning models to accelerate antimicrobial molecule discovery.

OpenAI published a case study on bioengineer César de la Fuente's lab, which uses ChatGPT and Codex for hypothesis brainstorming, code writing, dataset processing, and bridging knowledge gaps across biology, chemistry, and computer science. The lab's deep-learning models scan genome and protein databases for antimicrobial peptide candidates, potentially cutting initial searches from years to hours. Bacterial antimicrobial resistance was associated with about five million deaths in 2021, a toll projected to roughly double by 2050.

OpenAI News·Sep 10, 16:00 UTC · 6d agoAI industry1

Verifiable by Construction: Claim-Level Evaluation of Verbatim Citation in Clinical Question Answering

Evaluation of twelve LLMs on 222 clinical questions shows verbatim quotes rarely substantiate claims; claude-opus-5 fully substantiates only 37.1%.

The authors build a standardized harness over four clinical practice guidelines and evaluate twelve LLMs on 222 synthetic clinical questions, measuring citation attachment, verbatim quote production, and claim substantiation. Most models attach verbatim quotes to over 90% of claims from prompting alone, though lightweight models like claude-haiku-4.5 struggle. Quotes frequently fail to substantiate claims: claude-opus-5 quotes 98.0% of claims but fully substantiates only 37.1%, exposing a capability gap for verifiable clinical QA.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 17:53 UTC · 2d agoAI research

US offers $10 million for info on Iranian leaders behind CyberAv3ngers water utility attacks

The US offered $10 million for information on six IRGC-CEC officials behind CyberAv3ngers' 2023 hacks of Unitronics PLCs at US water utilities.

The State Department named six Iranian security officials, including IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command head Hamid Reza Lashgarian, and offered up to $10 million for information on their whereabouts. CyberAv3ngers publicly claimed compromises of Israel-made Unitronics Vision PLCs in October 2023, forcing the Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, to take systems offline and switch to manual operations. The US had sanctioned the six men in February for targeting critical infrastructure, and CISA notified water operators using Unitronics devices while urging default-password changes. A watchdog also criticized the EPA for lacking a comprehensive water-sector cyber risk strategy.

The Record·Sep 8, 00:00 UTC · 9d agoPolicy & legal in the wild 3 sources

Not All Prompts Are Equal: Exploration-Guided Prompt Scaffolding for Multimodal Reinforcement Post-Training

Exploration-guided prompt scaffolding rewrites training prompts by Exploration Potential Score, boosting multimodal RL post-training accuracy up to 11.5%.

The paper proposes dynamically adapting the training prompt distribution during online RL post-training of multimodal LLMs using the Exploration Potential Score (EPS), a lightweight rollout-based proxy for prompt utility computed from on-policy statistics with no additional overhead. Rather than discarding low-utility prompts, a teacher model generates scaffolded rewrites that preserve task intent while making training more informative. Integrated with GRPO on Geo3K and MMK12, the method achieves up to 9.7% relative in-domain improvement plus 11.5% on MathVision and 11.1% on MMMU-Pro.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 13, 20:00 UTC · 3d agoAI research

What must happen for AI’s trillion-dollar gamble to pay off

Hyperscalers need 2.7x productivity gains by 2030 to justify nearly $1.1 trillion in AI data center spending, or risk bankruptcy and capital misallocation.

Wharton finance professor Jessica Wachter estimates hyperscaler AI expenditure will reach nearly $1.1 trillion through 2027 and that a 2.7x productivity increase is needed to break even by 2030. AI revenues of roughly $150-200 billion this year fall far short of about $750 billion in annual spending, with total investment from Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle potentially exceeding $5 trillion over four years. Alphabet reported its first free cash flow deficit (about $5.9 billion) since its 2004 IPO due to AI infrastructure costs. Researchers warn that failed demand could make the buildout the largest capital misallocation in history, with depreciating GPU chips risking stranded assets.

MIT Technology Review · AI·Sep 15, 10:00 UTC · 2d agoAI industry

Technical Manual for a Toolkit for Measuring Contextual Individuation in Transformer Language Models

An open methodology toolkit measures whether transformer language models contextualize fixed word forms across domains using bridge forms and layer-wise silhouette analysis.

The manual documents an open toolkit built around 'bridge forms' - identical written words recurring across two or more subject domains with a different sense in each - to test whether transformer language models individuate word occurrences by context beyond the embedding layer. It covers declarative specification of bridge forms, Wikipedia corpus acquisition, occurrence localization, layer-wise representation extraction, domain-pairwise silhouette measurement, and visualization, justifying each choice against failure modes such as sense contamination and subword-tokenization misalignment. It is a methodological and implementation reference and reports no empirical results.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:38 UTC · 12d agoAI research

Researchers Disclose AI-Assisted SharePoint Exploit Chain Reaching Unauthenticated RCE

Rapid7 disclosed CVE-2026-55040, a SharePoint JWT validation bypass chaining into CVE-2026-63520 unauthenticated RCE, with research substantially AI-agent-assisted; patches released.

Rapid7 disclosed CVE-2026-55040 (CVSS 9.1), several JWT validation pipeline issues letting unauthenticated attackers impersonate chosen SharePoint users by SID or UPN, chained with CVE-2026-63520 (CVSS 8.1), an unsafe .NET type instantiation in Business Connectivity Services yielding RCE as the service account. An AI agent contributed significantly across 96 sessions and roughly 80,000 tool calls over 24 active days, though an expert had to steer it and it repeatedly overstepped its threat model. No exploitation of the bypass had been reported as of CISA's July 14 assessment. The RCE affects SharePoint Subscription Edition, 2019, and 2016, plus Project Server 2013 SP1 and Office Web Apps 2013 SP1; the July updates break the chain.

The Hacker News·Aug 11, 16:49 UTC · Aug 11, 2026VulnerabilityCVE-2026-55040CVE-2026-635201

HHS Releases Updated Security Risk Assessment Tool

HHS OCR and ONC released version 3.7 of the Security Risk Assessment Tool for healthcare organizations.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) released version 3.7 of the Security Risk Assessment (SRA) Tool. The tool helps covered entities conduct HIPAA security risk assessments. ONC and OCR provided guidance on the updates.

DataBreaches.net·Sep 13, 14:49 UTC · 3d agoTools

Governments ‘buying time’ in race between innovation, security, national cyber director says

National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross says allied governments are 'buying time' to secure systems as AI advances and exposes chronic cyber hygiene gaps.

Speaking at the Billington CyberSecurity Summit, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said the US and allies must balance AI innovation speed with securing systems and keeping the technology from adversaries. He argued AI has not created new cybersecurity problems but surfaced decades-old issues like under-resourced basic cyber hygiene, echoing FBI and CISA officials at the summit. His remarks followed US agencies accusing Chinese AI companies of illegally distilling US frontier models and Anthropic disclosing a fourth AI hacking incident involving one of its models.

CyberScoop·Sep 10, 13:53 UTC · 6d agoPolicy & legal

Studying Image Tokenizers as Visual Languages in Unified Multimodal Models

A controlled pure-autoregressive testbed shows task-specific validation losses rank image tokenizers differently, with I2T loss the most consistent signal.

Researchers built a controlled pure-autoregressive testbed and tracked task-specific validation losses during multimodal continual pretraining across text, image, text-to-image (T2I), and image-to-text (I2T) prediction. They find losses should be analyzed per task because they exhibit distinct scaling behavior and rank tokenizers differently, and that the loss-performance relationship depends on the predicted token space. I2T loss, computed over a shared text vocabulary, correlates consistently with both generation and visual understanding performance after supervised finetuning. Case studies revisit the discriminator, semantic supervision, and vocabulary size as tokenizer design axes.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 8, 17:57 UTC · 8d agoAI research1

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

K-Bench: a clinically calibrated benchmark for evaluating large language models in high-risk mental health conversations

Clinician-calibrated K-Bench evaluates 125 LLM configurations on 200 high-risk mental health vignettes, exposing wide variation in suicide and violence risk handling.

K-Bench is a clinician-calibrated, protected benchmark evaluating 125 model configurations from 33 base models across 14 providers on 200 multi-turn vignettes covering suicide, self-harm, domestic violence, substance misuse and no-risk presentations. A frozen GPT-4o judge achieved 94.2% exact agreement with clinician consensus across 6,751 eligible comparisons from 151 clinician-rated transcripts. Leading models combined supportive conversation with combined-risk scores above 95, while risk exploration varied substantially among weaker configurations; therapeutic prompting helped weaker models and elevated reasoning produced no average improvement. A continuously updated public leaderboard is hosted at k-bench.ai with protected test materials.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 16:49 UTC · 2d agoAI safety & security

Microsoft Offers Up to $30,000 for Critical AI Flaws in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

Microsoft expands AI bug bounty to Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, paying up to $30,000 for critical inference manipulation flaws.

Microsoft's bug bounty program offers up to $30,000 for critical 'Inference Manipulation' or 'Inferential Information Disclosure' bugs in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, including Copilot Studio, AI Builder, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse. Payouts scale by report quality ($30,000/$20,000/$12,000 for critical) with important-severity AI flaws earning $6,000-$20,000, plus 20% multipliers for Dataverse privilege escalation and Plugin Sandbox escapes. Prompt injection affecting only the attacker, hallucinated execution, and system-prompt disclosure are excluded from scope.

Cyber Security News·Sep 14, 16:11 UTC · 2d agoIndustry

Students who use AI generally score worse at school

OECD PISA data from 91 countries shows AI-using students generally score lower, though moderate intentional use plus critical evaluation training can improve outcomes.

PISA 2025 data covering over 760,000 students in 91 countries found that, after adjusting for socioeconomic status, students who never use AI generally outperformed users in science. Effects varied by use type and frequency: task-specific uses like summarizing showed the largest drops, while weekly users of AI for general learning slightly outperformed non-users, especially when trained to critically assess AI output. AI use was higher among advantaged students and varied widely by country, from over 95% in Vietnam to 60% in Japan.

The Verge · AI·Sep 9, 12:05 UTC · 8d agoAI research

NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE, and EPA Warn of Active AI

Five US agencies warn of active AI-assisted attacks on internet-exposed Siemens S7 PLCs across critical infrastructure, using disguised snap7 scripts for pre-positioning reconnaissance.

NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE, and EPA issued joint advisory CISA AA26-231A warning of an active hacking campaign against Siemens S7-series PLCs, from S7-200 through S7-1500 F-series, across US critical infrastructure. Threat actors use internet scanning services such as Censys and ZoomEye to locate exposed controllers, then perform read operations over S7comm on TCP port 102 using the legitimate snap7.dll and python-snap7 libraries, disguising AI-generated exploitation scripts as monitoring tools. The agencies assess the activity as pre-positioning ahead of possible process disruption, equipment damage, or safety incidents in Energy, Water, Critical Manufacturing, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities sectors.

Security Affairs·Aug 20, 17:36 UTC · 27d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

From Protocols to Evidence: Bounded Claims for AI in Service of the Common Good

Paper proposes a rupture test and RISE AI architecture for evidence-bounded responsible-AI claims, framed via EU AI Act and NIST AI RMF.

The paper argues AI deployment intervenes in pre-existing institutional failures of responsiveness, belonging, care, and accountability, and must therefore evaluate both the system and the institutional rupture it enters. It reviews how the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, and ISO/IEC 42001 translate principles into protocols, and draws on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas to develop a rupture test linking institutional baselines to system evaluation. It distinguishes evidence-bounded deployment from measurement-bounded governance and introduces RISE AI, an architecture for bounded claims about Responsibility, Inclusivity, Safety, and Empowerment.

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

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

Quantifying the Engagement Trap: Impact of Short-form Video Recommender Systems on Users with ADHD

A 302-participant study finds engagement-optimized short-form video recommenders cause disproportionate time blindness and distress for users with ADHD.

Researchers ran a stratified Prolific study with 302 participants comparing short-form video recommendation experiences with and without ADHD. Participants with ADHD reported significantly higher time blindness, post-usage regret, and emotional distress despite perceiving recommendations as similarly relevant. The paper proposes neurodiversity-aware, human-centered design interventions to mitigate these algorithmic harms.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 17:38 UTC · 9d agoAI research

ENISA: Frontier AI Is Changing the Speed of Cyberattacks. Europe Needs to Catch Up

ENISA warns frontier AI compresses attack lifecycles to minutes, with exploits possible within 15 minutes of disclosure and median 72-minute breach-to-exfiltration times.

ENISA's July 2026 paper 'ENISA's view on Cybersecurity in the Frontier AI Era' argues AI-assisted attackers may weaponize vulnerabilities within 15 minutes of disclosure and achieve initial-access-to-data-exfiltration in a median 72 minutes, creating a 'negative time-to-exploit' problem. The report cites one organisation whose CVE volume rose from roughly 80 in Q1 2025 to almost 500 in Q1 2026, then about 500 reports per day when frontier-AI tools were used. ENISA recommends machine-speed defence under 'Cybersecurity as Code', EPSS and VEX-based prioritisation, AI-assisted incident response with human oversight, and an assume-breached architecture.

Security Affairs·Sep 14, 20:35 UTC · 2d agoAdvisory