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18 stories in the last 30d

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12 Best Enterprise Browsers Compared (2026): Features & Pricing

2026 comparison of twelve enterprise browsers ranks Island and Palo Alto Talon as purpose-built leaders, with Chrome Enterprise and Edge free or bundled.

Guide compares twelve enterprise browser options across three models: purpose-built secure browsers (Island, Talon, Surf), layered controls on existing browsers (Chrome Enterprise, Edge for Business, LayerX, Seraphic), and streamed/isolated browsers (Kasm). Island and Palo Alto's Prisma Access Browser lead the purpose-built category for BYOD and contractor DLP. It also notes Mammoth Cyber has ceased operations.

GBHackers · 1d agoTools

One Symptom, Three Levers: A Critical Review of On-Policy Self-Distillation

A review paper frames on-policy self-distillation collapse as governed by three levers: token weighting, privileged information, and guidance decay.

The paper critically reviews On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), where a language model trains on its own generations scored token-by-token by a teacher conditioned on privileged information such as reference solutions or environment feedback. It identifies collapse, the progressive narrowing of producible reasoning paths, as the dominant failure mode and analyzes it through three levers: signal weighting, the nature of privileged information, and teacher dynamics. The review is restricted to mathematical reasoning, reports no new experiments, and offers a shared vocabulary separating settled findings from disputed ones.

Hugging Face daily papers · 22d agoAI research

When Should LLMs Abstain? Chain-of-Self-Questioning for Selective Risk Control

Chain-of-Self-Questioning prompting cuts LLM wrong-answer commitments 32% relative while raising answered accuracy, holding across eleven model families.

The paper introduces Chain-of-Self-Questioning (CoSQ), a prompt-only framework that makes LLM answer commitment conditional on an explicit assessment of the information required to answer. On an 817-item TruthfulQA multiple-choice set, Grounded-CoSQ at τ=0.90 reduced mean unconditional wrong-commitment rate from 13.1% under chain-of-thought to 8.9% (a 32.1% relative reduction), while raising answered accuracy from 86.9% to 89.7% at 87.6% coverage. Improvements held across eleven open-weight and hosted model families and at every evaluated threshold, with convergent evidence from a Natural Questions short-answer evaluation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

When the prompt becomes the payload: A practical pen-testing guide for GenAI, LLM and RAG applications

CSO Online publishes a practical penetration-testing guide for GenAI, LLM, and RAG applications, covering prompt injection, retrieval poisoning, and tenant isolation testing.

The guide frames LLM applications as attack graphs spanning prompts, retrieval layers, vector stores, tools, identities, and downstream APIs, arguing that conventional web testing misses instruction-vs-data channel risks. It builds on OWASP prompt injection guidance (direct vs. indirect injection) and NIST's 2025 adversarial machine-learning taxonomy, noting that RAG and fine-tuning do not remove injection risk. Recommended practices include documenting trust transitions across components, using canaries and synthetic records to avoid test side effects, running multi-turn and obfuscated injection campaigns, and verifying chains from poisoned documents to observable state changes. It also details testing RAG pipelines via controlled document poisoning across metadata, OCR layers, and code comments, plus cross-tenant isolation checks on retrieved document IDs.

CSO Online · 7d agoAI safety & security1

New AI Attack Hides Malicious Instructions in Normal-Looking Text to Evade Safety Filters

Check Point researchers show crafted prose hides policy-violating instructions that bypass all tested LLM gatekeepers, including GPT-4o mini and Llama Guard 3.

A new prompt-crafting technique embeds malicious payloads inside grammatical, natural-looking text without Base64, invisible Unicode, or obvious encodings, defeating lightweight pre-screening gatekeepers. In testing, all four evaluated gatekeeper models—gpt-4o-mini-2024-07-18, gpt-oss-safeguard:20b, claude-3-haiku-20240307, and llama-guard3:8b—classified the crafted wrappers as safe at a 100% bypass rate across 23 obfuscated prompts. GPT-5 Thinking in high-reasoning mode recovered and acted on the hidden instruction in 17 of 18 tests (~94.4%), often spending over a minute and multiple Python executions. Researchers recommend paraphrasing untrusted input, hardening gatekeeper policies, and applying defense-in-depth controls for agentic deployments.

GBHackers · 5d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

Safety for Whom? Boundary-Aware Self-Distillation for Controlled LLM Safety Refusal

A self-distillation safety framework tunes narrow-boundary refusals in Qwen3-8B, raising target-domain refusal to 84.75% while cutting over-refusal from 15.20% to 5.20%.

The paper formulates narrow-boundary safety, where deployments need refusals within specific topics rather than whole subjects, and proposes an offline self-generated framework with controlled topic generation, escalating retries, and harmful-benign boundary pairs. On political persuasion with Qwen3-8B, the method raised target-domain refusal from 9.47% to 84.75% and cut the mean unsafe-response rate across three broader benchmarks from 26.26% to 0.14%. Verified target-model responses reduced over-refusal from 15.20% to 5.20%, and boundary-pair data cut comply-side over-refusal on held-out pairs from 32.94% to 4.16%. Results show data composition controls the safety-usability trade-off and alignment should be evaluated on both sides of the refusal boundary.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI safety & security1

Notes on gotchas while migrating 35kb preprompts from Opus to self-hosted Ollama

Opinion piece urges migrating 35KB preprompts from Anthropic/OpenAI to self-hosted Ollama, citing session privacy risks and safety filters blocking security research.

The author documents gotchas migrating 35KB preprompts from Claude Opus to self-hosted Ollama, motivated by fears that frontier providers train on user sessions, citing the OpenAI Navier-Stokes controversy. The piece argues inference providers cannot audit their own retention or training pipelines and that only self-hosted hardware offers verifiable privacy. It also criticizes frontier safety filters for refusing vulnerability research tasks and calls for models that support exploitability testing in CI/CD pipelines.

Negative Self-Distillation: Learning to Reason by Avoiding Flaws

Researchers propose Negative Self-Distillation (NSD), a label-free LLM self-improvement method that diverges from self-generated flawed reasoning rather than imitating privileged solutions.

The authors show On-Policy Self-Distillation can degrade complex reasoning by forcing imitation of artificially confident traces built on privileged information, suppressing uncertainty and self-correction. NSD instead generates a question-specific negative condition — such as acting as a 'careless reasoner' — and pushes the model's distribution away from it without ground-truth labels. A dynamic gating mechanism isolates reasoning-critical tokens so gradient updates fix behavioral flaws without damaging foundational linguistic capabilities. NSD consistently outperforms OPSD and other label-free, self-bootstrapping reinforcement learning baselines.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research1

19 Chrome and Edge Extensions Found With Wallet-Stealing and Crypto

Socket found 19 malicious Chrome and Edge extensions, active since February 2024, stealing wallet seed phrases and credentials and draining crypto from about 80,000 users.

Socket researcher Karlo Zanki documented a cluster of 18 Chrome and one Edge extensions with wallet secret stealing and cryptocurrency draining capabilities, tracked as campaign Superior and possibly active since February 2024. The actor created 14 extensions and bought five legitimate ones, later pushing malicious updates; the largest, Enable Right Click & Copy, has roughly 80,000 installs across both browsers. The extensions maintain WebSocket C2 connections with endpoint rotation, strip CSP headers, and load 16 modules including multi-chain wallet drainers, hardware-wallet seed-phrase harvesters, credential grabbers, and ClickFix-style lures.

The Hacker News · 19d agoMalware in the wild

You Can't Prefer Emotions You Don't Sample: Intensity Undershoot in DPO-Tuned LLMs

Study quantifies DPO-tuned LLMs undershooting requested emotional intensity, tracing the gap to candidate-pool extremity rather than conditioning format.

Conditioning an instruction-tuned LLM on continuous valence-arousal targets yields gain of only 0.26 for valence and 0.13 for arousal on Llama-3.1-8B, far below faithful control of 1.0. The authors attribute undershoot to neutral-heavy preference corpora like EmoBank and candidate pools lacking extreme affect, leaving DPO without extreme exemplars. Uniform target coverage with a hotter candidate pool raises valence gain to 0.40 on Llama-3.1-8B and 0.44 on Qwen3-8B, with modest in-distribution cost; arousal gains remain unstable across seeds.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research

Safety for Whom? Refusing the Right Subset of a Topic, Not the Whole Topic

Multiverse Computing's Hugging Face post argues language models should refuse only the relevant subset of a topic instead of over-refusing whole subjects.

A Hugging Face blog post by Multiverse Computing examines refusal granularity in language models, arguing models should refuse the relevant subset of a topic rather than the entire topic. No full article text was available for additional technical detail.

Hugging Face Blog · 8d agoAI safety & security

The AI Kill Switch Act is repeating the Clipper Chip’s mistakes

Op-ed argues the AI Kill Switch Act repeats the Clipper Chip's mistake by mandating backdoors into frontier AI systems.

The op-ed criticizes the AI Kill Switch Act, sponsored by Reps. Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran, which would let CISA require frontier AI labs to build the ability to throttle, suspend, or shut down their systems. The author compares this to the 1993 Clipper Chip, whose Law Enforcement Access Field was found flawed in 1994, and argues mandated kill switches would create deliberate weaknesses in AI agents embedded in banking, power grids and other critical infrastructure. It also flags the bill's exemption of red-teaming incidents and CAISI's incomplete agent security standards, recommending mandatory red-teaming and liability frameworks instead.

CyberScoop · 16d agoAI policy

Hiding Prompt Injection in Legal Filing

A judge banned a plaintiff from electronic court filings after hidden prompt-injection text was discovered planted in legal documents.

Bruce Schneier's blog discusses an incident in which hidden prompt-injection instructions were planted inside a legal filing, apparently targeting AI systems that might process court documents. Judge Walter Spader Jr. responded by banning the plaintiff from electronic filings, requiring all future submissions as printed hard copies. Commenters debate whether the tactic could affect future AI-based processing of court records and whether plain-text formats will regain favor.

Schneier on Security · 16d agoAI safety & security in the wild

Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs

An arXiv paper claims a method that breaks the 1.58-bit barrier for ternary large language models.

The arXiv preprint 2609.16338, titled 'Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs,' presents research on ternary-weight large language models, which use roughly 1.58 bits per weight. The source text contained only the title and Hacker News engagement data (56 points, no comments), so further technical details are not available.

MFA's Weakest Link: Account Recovery Is the New Attack Path

Help desk account recovery is increasingly the weakest link in MFA-protected identities, as Scattered Spider's impersonation-driven Marks & Spencer attack demonstrated.

As MFA, conditional access, and phishing-resistant factors raise the cost of direct account takeover, attackers increasingly target the recovery process, convincing service desk staff to reset passwords or re-register MFA on attacker-controlled devices. CISA, FBI, and partner advisories describe Scattered Spider posing as employees to trigger such resets; the 2025 Marks & Spencer attack began this way and led to ransomware with an estimated £300 million profit impact. Microsoft now describes Entra ID account recovery as a high-assurance process, and the article promotes Specops Secure Service Desk for verified identity workflows.

BleepingComputer · 7d agoPhishing & fraud

Meta makes AI glasses slightly less creepy with limit on nonconsensual recording

Meta updated its AI glasses to stop recording whenever users cover the safety light, addressing nonconsensual-recording complaints while broader privacy risks remain.

Meta released a change to its AI glasses that halts recording whenever users physically cover the device's safety light, closing a loophole that allowed nonconsensual capture. The tweak follows criticism that bystanders could be recorded without consent. Ars Technica notes the fix reduces but does not eliminate the privacy risks posed by AI-enabled eyewear.

Ars Technica · AI · 19d agoAI industry

Decoy Direction Optimization: A Post-Hoc Defense Against LLM Abliteration

Researchers introduce Decoy Direction Optimization, a cheap weight-editing defense that blinds refusal-direction ablation attacks against open-weight LLM safety guardrails.

Refusal Feature Ablation bypasses safety guardrails in open-weight LLMs by projecting out a linear refusal direction, often with high attack success rates. Decoy Direction Optimization injects a high-magnitude nonlinear decoy into MLP neurons so attackers' contrastive estimators ablate a harmless orthogonal feature instead. Evaluated across six model families, DDO keeps ASR below 10% under standard RFA and on Llama-3-8B-Instruct reduces Heretic weight-level attack ASR from 88.7% to 18%. It costs 30 to 450 times less per configuration than trained defense baselines.