Search: “skill extraction”

8 stories in the last 7d

CounterPersona appends targeted counter-persona evidence after data collection to block AI systems from distilling an individual's behavioral patterns into reusable skills.

CounterPersona defends against unauthorized persona skill distillation, where attackers extract recurring patterns from collected personal data to replicate an individual's behavior. Unlike perturbation-based defenses that require modifying data before collection, it works in an append-only setting where historical records cannot be altered or revoked. It constructs targeted counter-persona evidence, packs compatible behavioral states into compact realization units, and strengthens them via rationale-guided consistency rewriting. Experiments show strong effectiveness across lexical, semantic, and LLM-based measures, remaining robust across different distillers.

arXiv cs.CRSep 14, 06:19 UTC · 2d agoAI safety & security

Threat actors are coming for your AI assets to operationalize their use of AI

Google GTIG reports espionage and crime groups stealing AI models, prompts, and API credentials, plus distillation campaigns and agentic AI attack automation.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's quarterly AI Threat Tracker reports adversaries stealing proprietary models, source code, prompts, and API credentials from government, healthcare, and media targets, including China-based UNC6508 compromising clouds to run unauthorized LLM workloads. Distillation campaigns against Google's models exceeded 100 million prompts launched via thousands of stolen account credentials through proxy networks. Mandiant also observed a financially motivated actor deploy an autonomous multi-agent framework that harvested thousands of third-party credentials in under 6 hours, and a 'Recon' framework on a live C2 server managing over 23,000 stolen credentials including cloud and AI API keys.

CSO OnlineSep 15, 08:25 UTC · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

Context Engineering Inside the Harness: 4 Mechanisms That Beat Context Overflow and Goal Loss on Long-Horizon Tasks

Survey of four harness mechanisms—context budgeting, compaction, todo-state, and memory—that keep long-horizon LLM agents on task across 200+ tool calls.

The article details how agent harnesses, not larger context windows, solve context overflow and goal loss on long-horizon tasks, citing Chroma's Context Rot report showing 18 LLMs (GPT-4.1, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5, Qwen3) degrade on long inputs. Concrete implementations include LangChain Deep Agents offloading tool responses over 20,000 tokens to the filesystem and truncating old tool calls at 85% window usage, and Claude Code capping auto memory at 25KB while re-reading the 5 most recently modified files after compaction. OpenAI's Responses API now offers server-side compaction via context_management with a standalone /responses/compact endpoint, which Codex uses for long-running coding tasks. Manus reports a roughly 100:1 input-to-output token ratio per ~50-tool-call task, motivating todo.md state recitation to prevent goal drift.

MarkTechPostSep 13, 05:56 UTC · 3d agoAI research1

Hackers abused Claude to extract secrets from 1.8M Android apps

Anthropic reports ShinyHunters, Midnight Blizzard, and GTG-10007 misused Claude to automate credential theft, malware operations, and espionage against dozens of victims.

Anthropic's threat report details how ShinyHunters member 'frkoo' ran a credential-harvesting pipeline on ten AWS EC2 workers that mass-downloaded and decompiled 1.8 million Android APKs, scanning for hardcoded secrets with TruffleHog. In one AI-assisted operation, an actor extracted 2,100+ Azure AD authentication tokens across more than 40 Microsoft tenants in roughly 34 hours, and ShinyHunters affiliates also stole AI API keys and breached a SaaS provider affecting about 200 downstream customers. Russian espionage group Midnight Blizzard used Claude Code skills to automate malware development, phishing, C2, and exfiltration against 20+ government and defense entities, rebuilding malware automatically when detected. Chinese-linked GTG-10007 ran autonomous vulnerability research that uncovered zero-days in a major endpoint security product and hit roughly 50 organizations with confirmed compromises; Anthropic disrupted the abuse and banned the accounts.

BleepingComputerupdated Sep 16, 13:01 UTC · 14h agofirst Sep 11, 20:19 UTC · 5d agoThreat actor in the wild 18 sources1

BambooToken Malware Uses MQTT to Control Windows and Linux Systems

Lumen uncovers BambooToken, a stealthy multi-platform malware using MQTT C2 and Tendyron DLL sideloading to compromise Asian and South American organizations.

Lumen Black Lotus Labs disclosed BambooToken, a previously undocumented malware family active since at least February 2023 that controls Windows and (since December 2025) Linux hosts via the MQTT protocol for C2. The malware sideloads a rogue OnKeyToken_KEB.dll via Tendyron's OnKey PKI token software, gathers host details, and uses a WMI-based plugin to enumerate installed antivirus products and exfiltrate them to C2 domains proxied through Cloudflare. A dozen compromised entities were detected across Asia and South America, and DLL sideloading plus SoftEther VPN usage suggests a China nexus.

The Hacker NewsSep 15, 15:23 UTC · 1d agoMalware in the wild 2 sources

[AINews] AEF-1 standard emerges for Third Party Evaluators, as Xai, OpenAI, and Anthropic all cosign

xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic cosign the AEF-1 third-party evaluation standard while Dario Amodei proposes embedded evaluators for safety verification.

The AI Evaluator Forum published AEF-1, a baseline standard for independent third-party AI evaluations covering access, conflicts of interest, funding relationships, recusal, and transparency, cosigned by xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Dario Amodei wrote a rare personal blogpost proposing embedded evaluators such as METR with desks, badges, company laptops, and internal-risk-team-level access to verify safety commitments, plus democratic and global coordination frameworks. The roundup also covers the pacing debate: Bilal Chughtai left Google DeepMind arguing progress may outrun alignment, while critics including Aidan Gomez and Cohere push back against slowdowns and lab gatekeeping. Additional items include Cline Desktop's launch with open-weight model support.

Latent SpaceSep 15, 04:50 UTC · 1d agoAI safety & security

Anthropic: AI Misuse Is Entering a New Phase: From Cybercrime to Surveillance, Propaganda and Weapons

Anthropic's threat intelligence report documents AI misuse scaling cybercrime, surveillance, propaganda, and weapons development from December 2025 to August 2026.

Anthropic's September 2026 threat intelligence report covers malicious activity disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026, spanning cyber operations, influence campaigns, surveillance, fraud, and weapons. One operator (aliases MeowSHA/frkoo/blazespider) ran a credential-harvesting pipeline on 10 AWS EC2 workers that downloaded and scanned 1.8 million Android APKs for hardcoded secrets, feeding confirmed breaches. Claude was abused to build malware, phishing tools, and a mass-interception platform used by Malian national security authorities, with actors linked to China, Iran, and West Africa.

Security AffairsSep 12, 16:46 UTC · 4d agoAI safety & security1

Hackers Use LLMs to Generate Exploit Scripts and Automate Post-Exploitation Across Latin America

Unit 42 says Latin American attackers used LLMs to automate post-exploitation in campaigns hitting Mexican government, water utilities, and Brazilian financial firms.

Unit 42 identified two campaigns in Latin America whose operators used commercial LLMs (Claude, GPT-4.1) behind a self-hosted NextChat interface to generate and debug post-exploitation scripts. Cluster CL-CRI-1131 compromised a transportation organization, Mexican federal ministries, and water utilities in Mexico and Ecuador, using native Windows tools and Volume Shadow Copies to dump the SAM registry hive and NTDS.dit. Cluster CL-CRI-1163 targeted Brazilian financial organizations with job-themed phishing, custom RATs, and a Go-based reverse SOCKS5 tunneling utility called SockTz, with nine versions deployed within roughly two hours. Trend Micro tracks related AI-augmented activity as SHADOW-AETHER-040 and SHADOW-AETHER-064.

GBHackersupdated Sep 10, 08:06 UTC · 6d agofirst Sep 10, 06:02 UTC · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild 2 sources1