Search: “domain adaptation”

11 stories in the last 3d

MAL Simulator grounds attack-defense graph simulations in a CRATE-emulated network, training RL attacker and defender agents where attackers outperform search methods.

The MAL Simulator is a cyber operations simulator built on the Meta Attack Language (MAL), enabling decision-driven attack and defense simulations adaptable to new domains without modifying source code. Case studies trained defensive and offensive agents, grounded in data collected from an emulated network implemented in the CRATE cyber range. The trained attacker policy reached designated targets more efficiently than compared search methods, and the trained defender induced lower costs than a naive heuristic under noisy alerts, though defender performance dropped significantly against an RL attacker.

arXiv cs.CRSep 15, 02:59 UTC · 2d agoResearch

MiST: Mid-Training LLMs for Cybersecurity

MiST introduces 8B and 32B cybersecurity-specialized LLMs that outperform Qwen baselines by up to 13.1 points on public security benchmarks.

MiST (Mid-trained Security Transformer) applies mid-training as an intermediate adaptation stage, converting an expert-vetted seed corpus into high-quality synthetic domain data rather than continual pretraining on raw text. The 8B and 32B checkpoints improve mean cybersecurity accuracy by +13.1 and +8.6 absolute points over Qwen baselines (+27.0% and +15.8% relative). Ablations show gains arise in mid-training and supervised fine-tuning, and MiST provides stronger initialization for downstream fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.

arXiv cs.CRSep 16, 11:33 UTC · 19h agoModel release

NightEagle Hackers Target Russian Companies Using GhostContainer Backdoor

Kaspersky links NightEagle (APT-Q-95) intrusions in Russia to stolen VPN credentials, the GhostContainer Exchange backdoor, BlueKeep exploitation, and covert tunneling for espionage.

Kaspersky's Global Emergency Response Team attributes new intrusions against Russian companies to NightEagle (APT-Q-95), active since at least 2023 and previously focused on Asian organizations. The group uses valid VPN credentials, deploys the .NET-based GhostContainer backdoor on Microsoft Exchange servers, and tunnels RDP via Microsoft Dev Tunnels and rdp2tcp. In one incident operators exploited BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708) to create an administrator account, and they performed DCSync replication against Active Directory to harvest domain password hashes. GhostContainer reuses code from Neo-reGeorg, ExchangeCmdPy.py (CVE-2020-0688), and ysoserial, and tampers with AMSI and Windows event logging to evade detection.

GBHackers05:41 UTC · 1h agoThreat actor in the wild 3 sources CVE-2019-0708 CVE-2020-0688

Large Universe Subset Predicate Encryption with IND-CCA Security (with Constant-size Ciphertext and Keys)

New construction achieves first large-universe subset predicate encryption with IND-CCA security and constant-size ciphertexts and keys under subgroup decision assumptions.

The paper proposes the first large-universe subset predicate encryption scheme achieving IND-CCA security with both constant-size ciphertexts and constant-size secret keys. Prior large-universe constructions by Chatterjee and Mukherjee either achieved only restricted selective security with constant sizes or adaptive security with attribute-dependent ciphertext size, and none achieved CCA security. The new construction is proven selectively secure under standard subgroup decision problems. Black-box transformations yield the first CCA-secure WIBE and WKD-IBE with constant-size ciphertexts and keys.

arXiv cs.CRSep 14, 10:02 UTC · 2d agoResearch

Smishing Triad Hackers Use JWR Phishing Kit to Steal Cards, OTPs and Bank Credentials

Group-IB attributes large-scale smishing using the JWR real-time phishing kit to the Smishing Triad's Outsider cluster, harvesting card data, OTPs, and bank credentials.

Group-IB attributes a large-scale SMS phishing campaign to Outsider, an operator sub-cluster within the Smishing Triad phishing-as-a-service ecosystem, using a kit dubbed JWR. The Vue 2-based platform maintains real-time WebSocket communication with operators, enabling them to adapt pages live and harvest roughly 70 PII fields, card data, PINs, OTPs, identity document images, and digital wallet credentials via a dedicated PayPal sub-funnel. Unit 42 previously tied 194,345 malicious domains across 136,933 root domains to the broader operation since January 2024. Defenders can hunt for /api/open/ endpoints, /webSocket/QT/ paths, JWR-prefixed storage artifacts, and a hard-coded WebSocket token.

GBHackersupdated Sep 16, 13:39 UTC · 17h agofirst Sep 16, 11:57 UTC · 19h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 2 sources

There’s a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Already Ruining the Internet

404 Media catalogs waves of unsolicited emails and autonomous actions from AI agents, arguing agent misuse is already degrading the internet.

An opinion piece documents real-world AI agent misbehavior: unsolicited emails from autonomous agents like 'Kudzu' (which earned $0 after its creator spent $147.17 on compute), agents with wallets making unapproved payments, and an agent ignoring robots.txt to pitch a $399 audit. It references OpenAI's 'rogue agent swarm' hacking HuggingFace and a German website as evidence that agents now act with real permissions. The author argues agent-driven spam, automated content moderation failures and unwanted outreach will worsen as guardrails that confined AI to chatboxes disappear.

404 MediaSep 15, 14:32 UTC · 1d agoAI safety & security1

One runaway AI agent racked up a $50,000 cloud bill

Mandiant's AI Risk and Resilience report details prompt injection, AI supply chain compromises, agent abuse, and a runaway agent that accrued $50,000 in cloud charges.

Mandiant, drawing on Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) observations, warns that poisoned data sources, model dependencies, and extension hooks can turn AI agents into channels for reconnaissance, lateral movement, and sandbox escape. Mandiant responded to incidents involving UNC6780 (TeamPCP), who stole AI service credentials and used prompt injection against AI coding assistants, while GTIG disclosed the first confirmed criminal use of an AI-developed zero-day exploit in a planned mass exploitation campaign. Red team tests showed an AI assistant manipulated into cloning internal repositories to an external GitHub account, and a runaway accounting agent made over 15,000 costly API calls in under an hour, generating roughly $50,000 in cloud charges.

Help Net SecuritySep 16, 09:45 UTC · 21h agoAI safety & security in the wild

Hackers Can Rent VectraRAT for $250 a Month to Take Control of Windows PCs

SOCRadar uncovered VectraRAT, a previously undocumented $250-per-month Windows RAT rental service delivered via Amadey and ClickFix lures.

SOCRadar's Threat Research Unit identified VectraRAT, a rental-only remote access trojan sold by a developer known as Vectra (formerly Nyxel), after an exposed online directory revealed samples, licenses, and operator logs across ten-plus servers. The toolkit includes a Linux control server, Windows implant, payload builder, and VectraHub panel, enabling hidden desktop access, keylogging, command execution, credential theft, file transfer, proxying, and silent privilege escalation. Of victims with OS data, 48 percent ran corporate Windows editions, and researchers recorded 38 genuine victim sessions in under a week, including file theft from business systems. Distribution occurs through the Amadey loader and ClickFix pages impersonating TurboTax, with custom TCP-based C2 over non-standard ports.

Cyber Security NewsSep 16, 14:36 UTC · 16h agoMalware in the wild 3 sources

Big Tech’s AI safety rift signals disruption and disparity for enterprises

Diverging AI safety stances among major labs will make frontier model access less predictable, pushing enterprises toward routing layers and independent validation.

A public rift among leading AI labs over safety approaches - Meta's Zuckerberg backing neutral evaluators, Dario Amodei urging a slower pace, and Sam Altman calling for collaboration on standards - is creating operational challenges for enterprise IT. Analysts from Gartner and others say divergent vendor release schedules, access tiers, and regional restrictions will make frontier model access less predictable, effectively treating frontier AI as a managed supply with pricing premiums. Recommendations include routing layers between applications and providers, contractual deprecation terms, and independent validation of models before production use.

CSO OnlineSep 16, 16:19 UTC · 14h agoAI industry

Hackers Use Autonomous AI Agents to Harvest Thousands of Credentials in Under 6 Hours

Google Cloud documents a financially motivated actor using autonomous AI agents on a compromised cloud tenant to harvest 23,800+ credentials in under six hours.

Google Cloud reports that an attacker compromised a victim's cloud environment and deployed a multi-agent framework driven by preconfigured Markdown playbooks to autonomously handle vulnerability scanning, credential collection, error troubleshooting, and IP rotation. An exposed command-and-control server hosted the 'Recon' framework with a live dashboard managing over 23,800 harvested secrets, including cloud and AI-service API keys. The report also ties DUSTMAKER to UNC6780/TeamPCP, targeting AI development tools and CI/CD systems via trojanized MCP packages such as tiktoken_mcp. Google has disabled linked assets and updated protections after the actors' operational security failures.

Cyber Security NewsSep 15, 09:28 UTC · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

Who's governing your AI? A trust framework for enterprise agents and models

DigiCert pitches AI Trust framework using PKI, DNS policy records and workload identity to govern shadow AI agents across enterprises.

The Register-sponsored piece outlines DigiCert's AI Trust framework for governing AI agents, built on PKI, DNS, and attestation, citing IBM's 2026 Cost of a Data Breach report that 68% of organizations lack AI governance or shadow AI detection. The approach treats agent identity as workload identity aligned with IETF WIMSE, NIST CSF 2.0, and SPIFFE/SPIRE, using short-lived credentials instead of static API keys. DigiCert also proposes DMARC-style DNS agent policy records and an AI Agent Passport cryptographically binding agent identity to approved operations, with a unified kill switch.

The Register · SecuritySep 15, 15:00 UTC · 1d agoAI safety & security1