Search: “7-Zip”

39 stories

DomainAll Cyber AIWindow24h 3d 7d 30d AllIn the wild Important only Show duplicates

CategoryAll Malware 56 Ransomware 48 Vulnerability 19 Exploit / PoC 19 Threat actor 14 Data breach 6 Phishing & fraud 4 Industry 2 Advisory 1

SeverityAll critical 52 high 77 medium 38 low 1 info 1

Smart search ranks by meaning as well as keywords (one row per story, last 45 days).

China-Linked UNC3569 Exploited Sogou Input Method Flaw to Deploy GRAYRABBIT Backdoor

China-linked UNC3569 exploited a Sogou Input Method flaw to deploy GRAYRABBIT backdoor on Windows machines across East and Southeast Asia.

Gen Digital found that China-linked UNC3569, a hacker-for-hire group tracked by Google since 2021, exploited a flaw in Sogou Input Method's Windows sgbiz: link handler to reach a sandbox-disabled Chromium 80 build and exploit 2021's CVE-2021-38003 for code execution. The chain delivered GRAYRABBIT, a remote shell backdoor capable of file transfer and module loading, via a 7-Zip DLL sideloading trick gated on process count. Tencent fixed the handler flaw in April 2026 but the embedded browser remains outdated. Sogou has over 455 million monthly users and roughly 70% share of Chinese input methods.

The Hacker Newsupdated Sep 14, 13:01 UTC · 1d agofirst Sep 11, 07:14 UTC · 4d agoThreat actor in the wild 3 sources CVE-2021-38003

USN-8733-1: Gzip vulnerabilities

Ubuntu issued USN-8733-1 fixing two Gzip flaws: insecure gzexe temp files allowing file overwrites, and a crafted-file DoS/info exposure bug.

USN-8733-1 updates Gzip in Ubuntu to fix CVE-2026-41991, where the gzexe utility created temporary files insecurely when mktemp was unavailable, letting a local attacker overwrite arbitrary files. It also fixes CVE-2026-41992, incorrect handling of certain compressed files that could expose sensitive information or crash Gzip in a denial of service. Both issues have local impact and are addressed via updated Ubuntu packages.

Ubuntu Security NoticesSep 7, 12:23 UTC · 8d agoAdvisory CVE-2026-41991 CVE-2026-41992

New Phishing Campaign Abuses Windows Mshta.exe to Steal Credentials and Secrets

Fortra researchers track an active phishing campaign targeting Spanish speakers that abuses mshta.exe to run HTA payloads for reconnaissance and credential theft.

Fortra's FIRE team says a phishing campaign active since June 2026 targets Spanish-speaking users with invoice ('Facturación') and judicial ('Aviso Judicial') lures, many sent via libero.it/italiaonline.it infrastructure with SCL:-1 markings to bypass anti-spam. Clicking embedded links delivers an HTA launcher executed via mshta.exe, which hides its window off-screen, builds dynamic C2 URLs, and performs reconnaissance using WMI, PowerShell, and environment-variable inspection. A second-stage JavaScript dropper uses HTML smuggling to reconstruct a Base64-encoded ZIP in the browser, delivering a 7-Zip self-extracting executable disguised as a Firefox installer; staged design allows later delivery of credential stealers or ransomware. Defenders are urged to block archivogratuito[.]online and shortener domains goo[.]su, abrir[.]link, and abre[.]ai, and to restrict mshta.exe execution via AppLocker or ASR rules.

GBHackersSep 12, 06:16 UTC · 3d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

Debian 13.7 ships the fixes behind 92 security advisories, updates 106 packages

Debian 13.7 'trixie' point release bundles 92 security advisories and 106 package updates, including kernel, glibc, u-boot and qemu fixes.

Debian shipped version 13.7 of 'trixie', folding in 92 previously published security advisories and corrections to 106 source packages, including six Linux kernel advisories (DSA-6381, DSA-6393, DSA-6405, DSA-6415, DSA-6466, DSA-6477). glibc fixes a buffer overflow (CVE-2026-5928) and buffer underflow (CVE-2026-5450), with 17 packages rebuilt against the updated library; qemu carries 25 CVEs including a secure boot bypass (CVE-2026-16288), imagemagick 24, wolfssl 15 and perl 13. Boot-chain fixes include a u-boot FIT image verification bypass (CVE-2026-46728), a BOOTP/DHCP buffer overread (CVE-2024-42040), and corrected intermediate certificate verification in sbsigntool. The installer was rebuilt with kernel ABI 6.12.107+deb13, and existing systems receive the fixes through normal package mirror updates.

Help Net SecuritySep 14, 07:40 UTC · 1d agoAdvisory CVE-2026-5928 CVE-2026-5450 CVE-2026-34873+17 CVEs

Risky Bulletin: Slovakia finds Russian backdoor in traffic speed cameras

Slovakia's NBU found an SMS-triggered backdoor in Russian-made NERO R-ONE traffic cameras, pausing a 279-unit deployment.

Slovakia's national security service NBU issued an alert against NERO R-ONE high-speed traffic cameras after finding a backdoor that grants shell and network access via SMS from hardcoded Russian phone numbers. The cameras are a rebranded version of the Russian CORDON PRO.M model by St. Petersburg firm Semicon, purchased via a Cyprus shell company under a €30 million EU-funded project. The report also found SecureBoot disabled, vulnerable web management, and unauthenticated live streams; the Interior Ministry paused deployment of 279 cameras pending independent assessment.

Risky Business NewsAug 19, 04:52 UTC · 27d agoThreat actor in the wild1

microsoft/VibeVoice-ASR-Streaming-7B — new model trending #27 on Hugging Face

Microsoft released VibeVoice-ASR-Streaming-7B, an open streaming ASR model with speaker attribution, custom hotwords, and support for 10 languages under MIT license.

Microsoft Research released VibeVoice-ASR-Streaming-7B on Hugging Face, a unified streaming speech recognition model that continuously transcribes who said what as speech arrives. The 7B model supports customized hotwords for domain-specific terms and 10 languages including Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Code is available at github.com/microsoft/VibeVoice with a live demo, and a technical report is on arXiv (2609.02812). The model is licensed under MIT.

Hugging Face trending modelsSep 2, 15:46 UTC · 13d agoModel release1

Risky Bulletin: BEC campaign steals €35 million from French notaries

Hackers stole over €35 million from 500+ French notary offices in a four-year BEC campaign; ANSSI spent two years helping evict the attackers.

A business email compromise campaign breached more than 500 French notary offices — about 7% of all French notaries per the Conseil Supérieur du Notariat — over four years, stealing more than €35 million by phishing initial access and silently modifying wire transfer details. France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI worked for two years behind the scenes to help notaries remove the persistent attackers, who had deep access; officials also feared hackers could issue fake notarized acts such as marriage certificates or forged real estate deals. No forged documents have been found so far, but notaries have added two-factor authentication and in-person requirements for banking details, and banks added extra checks in 2024. The newsletter also notes other incidents, including a $320 million Bitcoin extraction from Blockstream's Liquid Network and a JetBrains Cadence breach via TeamCity servers.

Risky Business NewsSep 7, 03:42 UTC · 8d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

ZDI-26-583: Clam AntiVirus 7z Archive Parsing Integer Overflow Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

Zero Day Initiative discloses CVE-2026-20215, an integer overflow in ClamAV's 7z archive parsing enabling remote code execution, rated CVSS 8.4.

The Zero Day Initiative published ZDI-26-583 for an integer overflow in Clam AntiVirus's 7z archive parsing. A remote attacker can execute arbitrary code when the antivirus processes a crafted archive, with attack vectors varying by implementation. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-20215 and rated CVSS 8.4. The advisory does not mention active exploitation.

ZDI Published AdvisoriesAug 13, 05:00 UTC · Aug 13, 2026Vulnerability CVE-2026-20215

Risky Bulletin: Ukraine's top prosecutor resigns amid scam call center scandal

Ukraine's top prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko resigned after NABU arrested a deputy for taking bribes protecting scam call centers running fake investment platforms.

Ukraine's anti-corruption bureau NABU arrested Serhiy Kropyva, Deputy Head of International Cooperation at the Prosecutor General's Office, alleging officials took monthly protection fees from a network of 100-500 scam call centers luring victims into fake investment platforms, with bribes reportedly growing from $700,000 to $3.5 million per month. Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko resigned on Monday, calling it a political decision, while Kropyva was fired with bail set at 120 million hryvnias ($2.7 million) and over 100 call centers shut down in the past month. The newsletter also briefly covers a cyberattack crippling more than 80 Luxembourg medical practices via payment vendor BMS Engineering, ShinyHunters' claimed theft of 200,000 Florida DMV driver records, a cyberattack on the American Meteor Society, and school closures in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Risky Business NewsSep 9, 06:06 UTC · 6d agoPhishing & fraud

[dos] NanaZip 6.5 - DoS

A denial-of-service proof of concept for NanaZip 6.5 was published on Exploit-DB.

Exploit-DB carries a denial-of-service proof-of-concept targeting NanaZip version 6.5. NanaZip is an open-source file archiver packaged for Windows. The entry cites no CVE id and no evidence of active exploitation.

Exploit-DBAug 17, 00:00 UTC · 29d agoExploit / PoC

ThreatsDay: GhostJacking AI Attacks, EtherHiding ClickFix, Cursor CLI Flaw + 17 More Stories

A weekly bulletin aggregating short security updates, including the City-Forum data-theft campaign, a ShipMonk breach, a Cursor CLI flaw, and GhostJacking AI attacks.

The Hacker News ThreatsDay Bulletin bundles roughly 20 short updates across cloud services, AI tools, malware, breaches, and scams. Highlights include the City-Forum campaign pulling data from unauthenticated guest access in Salesforce Experience Cloud and ServiceNow Service Portals since March 2025, and a ShipMonk breach exposing Trezor customer order data for orders in seven countries between May 10 and August 8, 2026. Other items cover a patched Cursor CLI flaw that let cloned repositories run commands before the workspace-trust prompt, Okta's analysis of the Work Panel vishing console used by actors like UNC6671, and GhostJacking AI agent hijacking via a patched Claude Desktop sandbox escape. Meta also launched an on-device WhatsApp Scam Alert machine learning model that keeps message content on the device.

The Hacker NewsAug 18, 16:30 UTC · 28d agoIndustry

DPRK APTs: Ted backdoor and curlRAT target South Korean media and automotive sectors

Rapid7 uncovered a DPRK-linked Linux toolkit using a HAProxy-embedded ted backdoor, SSH keylogger, and curlRAT against South Korean media and automotive firms.

Rapid7 Labs identified a previously undocumented framework attributed with medium confidence to DPRK actors, targeting South Korean automotive and media organizations likely since early 2025. The toolkit embeds a backdoor compiled into HAProxy 2.8.12 using its filter API, plus trojanized crond, agetty, atd, sshd, and polkitd, an SSH keylogger storing credentials under /var/lib/sshd/, and a curl-based RAT with a watchdog thread. It enables remote command execution, malicious script injection into served webpages (a watering-hole loop), credential harvesting, and long-term surveillance. Hardcoded C2s are associated with APT37 via ThreatFox, and exposed groupware portals and mail servers align with Kimsuky tradecraft; the initial access vector and any CVE remain unconfirmed.

Rapid7 BlogSep 4, 12:00 UTC · 11d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Chess.com Leak Exposes 7.3 Million Users — Evidence Points to Scraping

A free 15.5 GB leak exposed 7.3 million Chess.com user records; analysis suggests large-scale scraping via find-friends rather than a server breach.

A 15.5 GB dump containing 7,337,395 Chess.com records appeared on leak forums posted by user V0idix at no cost. Ransomnews confirmed the data is genuine by validating embedded v1 UUID timestamps against registration dates, but found daily-batch collection over nine days and ~7.4% duplicate records, pointing to scraping. The schema includes emails, ratings, subscription tiers and internal Google Ad Manager audience segments not exposed in the public API, and contains no passwords or payment data. Chess.com reported a similar 828,000-record 2023 leak from find-friends abuse and said then that it was not a breach.

Security AffairsAug 14, 08:24 UTC · Aug 14, 2026Data breach 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 BlogAug 18, 00:00 UTC · 28d agoAI tools & infra1

Fake CVE-2023

A fake PoC for WinRAR RCE CVE-2023-40477 posted on GitHub actually deploys VenomRAT through a multi-step infection chain targeting researchers.

Four days after Zero Day Initiative publicly disclosed the WinRAR RCE vulnerability CVE-2023-40477 on August 17, 2023, an actor using the alias whalersplonk published a fake proof-of-concept on GitHub. The Python script actually repurposed public PoC code for GeoServer SQL injection CVE-2023-25157 and triggered an infection chain ending in VenomRAT. The README and an accompanying video lured users into running the script; the video drew over 100 plays. Unit 42 assesses the actor was opportunistic, targeting other miscreants adopting new vulnerabilities rather than researchers specifically.

Palo Alto Unit 42Aug 17, 10:57 UTC · 29d agoMalware CVE-2023-40477 CVE-2023-25157

Grouped Value Attention: Efficient KV Caching via On-Demand Key Reconstruction

Grouped Value Attention stores grouped values and reconstructs content keys via a learned linear map, cutting KV-cache size about 45-47% versus GQA.

GVA stores only grouped values and reconstructs content keys with a learned linear map absorbed into the query at decode time, while a small shared decoupled RoPE channel preserves positional information via a separately cached positional key. At 350M parameters trained on 30B FineWeb-Edu tokens, the 16-dimensional positional variant scores 44.18 average accuracy across five tasks versus 44.36 for GQA and 43.88 for MLA. Custom decoding kernels are in development with an open-source release planned.

Hugging Face daily papersSep 7, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research

Dark Caracal Deploys New Go Malware With Ethereum-Based C2 Fallback

Dark Caracal targeted a Venezuelan communications organization with new Go-based GoCaracal malware and an updated Bandook backdoor using Ethereum smart-contract C2 fallback.

Arctic Wolf Labs linked a June 2026 intrusion against a communications organization in Venezuela to Dark Caracal, an espionage group associated with Lebanon's General Directorate of General Security (GDGS). The group deployed a previously undocumented Go-based framework called GoCaracal in lightweight and extended builds alongside a Delphi-loaded Bandook backdoor, with delivery via phishing emails carrying weaponized SVG attachments through URL shorteners. The extended build uses a custom Solidity contract, BulletproofC2, on Ethereum to retrieve replacement C2 addresses without redeploying malware, and Arctic Wolf traced 249 related samples from January to July 2026 showing a modular evolution arc.

Security AffairsAug 27, 20:31 UTC · 19d agoThreat actor in the wild

CVE-2026-73334: Apache Parquet Hadoop: File-controlled KMS URL is forwarded to pluggable KmsClient that skips host validation

Apache Parquet Hadoop CVE-2026-73334: a file-controlled KMS URL reaches pluggable KmsClients without host validation in parquet-java 1.12 through 1.18.0.

Apache disclosed CVE-2026-73334, a moderate issue in the org.apache.parquet.crypto.keytools package of parquet-java, versions 1.12 through 1.18.0. The package implements envelope encryption that wraps data keys via a Key Management Service. A KMS URL controlled by the Parquet file is forwarded to a pluggable KmsClient that skips host validation, which could allow crafted files to redirect KMS requests.

oss-securitySep 8, 15:46 UTC · 7d agoVulnerability CVE-2026-73334

Rare Not Random Using Token Efficiency for Secrets Scanning

Researcher proposes token efficiency (string length divided by BPE token count) as a better post-regex filter than entropy for secrets scanning, validated on CredData.

The post explores whether Byte-Pair Encoding tokenization can replace Shannon entropy as the primary filter for candidate secrets captured by regex in tools like Gitleaks. It defines 'token efficiency' as string length divided by token count under the cl100k_base tokenizer; secret-like strings such as GitHub tokens tokenize into many small tokens and score low, while natural text scores high. Evaluating labeled secrets from the CredData dataset shows a usable separation, with roughly 2.5 suggested as a minimum cutoff versus Gitleaks' 3.5 entropy threshold. The technique is positioned as a post-regex filtering step rather than a standalone detector.

Lobsters · securitySep 12, 06:42 UTC · 3d agoResearch

WordPress Adds Automated Plugin Reviews to Block High-Risk Updates Before Distribution

WordPress will automatically scan every plugin release and block high-risk updates from distribution using AI analysis plus Jetpack Scan.

WordPress announced automated security reviews for every plugin release during its cooldown period before distribution through the WordPress.org update API, combining AI models with Jetpack Scan into a security score. The system already caught a backdoor committed to a plugin with about 20,000 active installations on July 28, 2026, blocking it within 26 minutes of a Wordfence alert. Flagged patterns include missing capability checks, unsafe $wpdb queries, unserialize() on request data, and obfuscated code.

The Hacker NewsSep 14, 16:00 UTC · 1d agoTools

Robust Coverless Linguistic Steganography via Sentence Embedding Space with Global Resynchronization

Researchers propose a coverless steganographic framework encoding messages as hierarchical clustering paths in sentence embedding space with a Global Resynchronization Mechanism for robustness.

An arXiv paper proposes encoding secret messages as hierarchical clustering paths in the sentence embedding space rather than token space, improving decoding stability against word- and sentence-level textual perturbations. A Global Resynchronization Mechanism (GRM) reframes variable-length bitstreams as discrete symbols anchored to semantic subspaces to prevent bit-slippage. Experiments show substantial robustness improvements while maintaining embedding capacity and resistance to statistical analysis.

arXiv cs.CRSep 4, 10:22 UTC · 11d agoResearch

Subgroup Packing for Batched PASTA Transciphering

Interleaved subgroup packing cuts PASTA homomorphic transciphering server cost by a median 1.60x at the expense of remaining noise capacity.

The paper studies how record word layout affects the cost of PASTA transciphering, where a server converts symmetrically encrypted records into homomorphic ciphertexts. A subgroup layout interleaves records so cyclic shifts preserve positions, reducing required displacements from 255 to 128 versus contiguous packing. In HElib across twelve paired corpora under six homomorphic keys, the median direct-to-subgroup server cost ratio is 1.60 including fresh generation, conversion, and two queries, but with less remaining noise capacity.

arXiv cs.CRSep 11, 09:24 UTC · 4d agoResearch

Generative Late-Interaction Embeddings For Visual Document Retrieval

GLIE compresses visual document retrieval embeddings to four vectors per page while retaining nearly 80% of uncompressed nDCG@5 accuracy.

Researchers analyzing late-interaction retrieval embeddings found they lie exactly on the unit sphere and concentrate near a manifold of intrinsic dimension five to six. GLIE learns a few k vectors per page that serve as a lightweight index and a basis to regenerate the full embedding set for exact rescoring of top candidates at query time. On ViDoRe v1 with four vectors per page, GLIE retains nearly 80% of uncompressed nDCG@5 versus 70% for the best prior post-hoc method, using a 415K-parameter network trained in under three GPU-minutes on 1,000 pages.

Hugging Face daily papersSep 9, 20:00 UTC · 6d agoAI research

C2Looper: A New Backdoor Likely Tied To Ransomware With GitHub C2

Zscaler ThreatLabz identified C2Looper, a new Rust-based backdoor likely tied to ransomware actors and delivered via ClickFix chains, using GitHub for C2.

In July 2026, Zscaler ThreatLabz identified C2Looper, a new Rust-based backdoor family. The malware supports arbitrary command execution, reconnaissance, and deployment of second-stage payloads, and uses GitHub as its command-and-control channel. ThreatLabz assesses with low-to-medium confidence that it is delivered through multi-stage ClickFix infection chains and is likely leveraged by a ransomware-related threat actor. The analysis covers multiple C2Looper variants, their network protocols, and capabilities.

Zscaler ThreatLabzAug 17, 14:06 UTC · 29d agoMalware in the wild1

Memory-Efficient Designs for Word-Wise Universal Fully Homomorphic Encryption

BXT framework mitigates FHE memory bottlenecks via ciphertext compression, serialization, delayed seeding, and digit pruning, achieving up to 3.8x CNN inference speedup.

A new paper proposes BXT, an optimization framework for word-wise Universal Fully Homomorphic Encryption that targets the memory bottleneck rather than compute. It combines four techniques: ciphertext compression via seed regeneration, bit-packed ciphertext serialization for L2-to-L1 transfers, delayed PRNG-heavy offline seed generation across aggregated operations, and fault-aware ciphertext digit pruning. On CNN inference, the BXT-CSO50 configuration achieves up to 3.8x speedup over a 100x GPU baseline with under 1% accuracy loss at 50% comparison precision.

arXiv cs.CRSep 4, 06:03 UTC · 11d agoResearch

StopAndProtect Turns 2,000 Hacked WordPress Sites Into a Criminal Network

Check Point uncovered StopAndProtect, a cybercrime operation using ~2,000 hacked WordPress sites for ClickFix-driven malware delivery, data theft, surveillance, and ransomware.

Check Point Research identified the StopAndProtect operation in May 2026; it abuses close to 2,000 compromised WordPress sites, many running outdated software, to host malware stages, act as C2, and store stolen data. Infection starts with fake CAPTCHA ClickFix prompts that trick visitors into running a PowerShell command, followed by .NET downloaders deploying ransomware, SMB/USB worm, lockscreen, chat, and credential-stealing components. Rather than always encrypting, operators selectively exfiltrate file lists and specific files; researchers found 700+ stolen-data archives, roughly 31,000 screenshots, and 6,000+ unique victim IP addresses, including WhatsApp activity monitoring.

Security AffairsAug 20, 07:20 UTC · 26d agoThreat actor in the wild

WordPress Blocks High-Risk Plugin Releases With New AI-Powered Automated Security Review

WordPress.org now runs AI-powered automated security reviews on every plugin release, automatically blocking high-risk updates before distribution to millions of sites.

WordPress launched an automated security review that combines multiple AI models and Jetpack Scan during a six-hour cooldown to score each plugin release; updates above the blocking threshold are automatically held back from the WordPress.org update API. The change follows a July 28 incident where a backdoor added to a plugin with roughly 20,000 active installations was detected during cooldown and never delivered; the Plugins Team removed it 26 minutes after a Wordfence notification. Blocked developers receive an email with findings and are advised to publish a corrected version rather than await manual appeal.

GBHackersupdated Sep 11, 16:33 UTC · 4d agofirst Sep 11, 05:49 UTC · 4d agoTools 7 sources

Training and Finetuning Multi-Vector Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers

Hugging Face published a tutorial on training and finetuning multi-vector embedding models using the Sentence Transformers library.

Hugging Face's blog walks through training and finetuning multi-vector embedding models with Sentence Transformers. Multi-vector approaches store multiple vectors per document to support late-interaction retrieval. The post is a practical guide for developers building retrieval pipelines with the library.

Hugging Face BlogAug 26, 00:00 UTC · 20d agoAI tools & infra1

ZDI-26-587: Ashlar-Vellum Cobalt VS File Parsing Heap-based Buffer Overflow Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

ZDI advisory ZDI-26-587 details a heap-based buffer overflow RCE (CVE-2026-19781, CVSS 7.8) in Ashlar-Vellum Cobalt VS file parsing, requiring user interaction.

The Zero Day Initiative released advisory ZDI-26-587 covering a heap-based buffer overflow in Ashlar-Vellum Cobalt's VS file parsing. A remote attacker can execute arbitrary code when the target opens a malicious file or visits a crafted page. ZDI rated the vulnerability CVSS 7.8 and assigned CVE-2026-19781.

ZDI Published AdvisoriesAug 24, 05:00 UTC · 22d agoAdvisory CVE-2026-19781

A Princeton Researcher Proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT) that Carries Decoder State across Every Token, Fixing 96 Blocks per Token with Unbounded Temporal Depth

Princeton researcher Yifan Zhang proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer, carrying full decoder state across every token for unbounded temporal depth.

Yifan Zhang's technical report defines the Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT), pairing a causal encoder with a recurrent decoder whose final output and layerwise sliding-window attention cache carry into every subsequent token with no prompt-response boundary reset. The reference configuration ties 48 encoder and 48 decoder layers, executing 96 logical blocks per token while the state path grows to 48t blocks after t tokens at fixed per-token compute. The report details RL replay contracts that rebuild all states under current parameters and exact prefix snapshots for multi-turn serving, but explicitly reports no measured efficiency, reasoning quality, or scaling results.

MarkTechPostSep 13, 17:02 UTC · 2d agoAI research1

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 NewsSep 4, 14:51 UTC · 11d agoThreat actor in the wild

Thousands of Hacked WordPress Sites, One Operation: Unmasking StopAndProtect

Check Point uncovers the StopAndProtect ransomware operation infecting thousands of WordPress sites via ClickFix social engineering and PowerShell downloaders.

Check Point Research first observed the StopAndProtect ransomware family in mid-May 2026 and linked its infrastructure to thousands of hacked WordPress sites. The infection chain begins with ClickFix social engineering that prompts victims to run a PowerShell command, followed by two stages of additional downloaders. The research maps the shared infrastructure unifying the operation.

Check Point ResearchAug 18, 13:05 UTC · 28d agoRansomware in the wild

Wordfence Argus Finds Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Upload Vulnerability in Gravity Forms

Wordfence finds an unauthenticated arbitrary file upload flaw in Gravity Forms (1M+ installs) that can lead to remote code execution.

On August 9, 2026, Wordfence's Argus scanner discovered an unauthenticated arbitrary file upload vulnerability in the WordPress plugin Gravity Forms, estimated at over one million active installations. Attackers can write files with attacker-selected extensions to a public temporary upload directory, potentially enabling remote code execution. The post does not mention a CVE identifier or observed exploitation.

WordfenceSep 1, 17:47 UTC · 14d agoVulnerability

SloppyRAT: A New Tool For Ransomware Attacks

Zscaler details SloppyRAT, a new DLL backdoor delivered via ClickFix lures that stages CastleLoader and CastleRAT ahead of ransomware attacks.

Zscaler ThreatLabz analyzed SloppyRAT, a DLL-based backdoor distributed via ClickFix lures that abuses finger.exe over TCP port 79 to download a batch script. The malware copies curl.exe to download IronPython 3.4.2 from GitHub and executes zlib-compressed Base64-encoded Python to deploy CastleLoader and CastleRAT, then reflectively loads SloppyRAT in memory. It hinders analysis using XOR stack-string obfuscation, a modified affine cipher with modulus 127, and 13 runtime-decrypted code blocks, while communicating with C2 over a reverse SOCKS channel.

Zscaler ThreatLabzupdated Sep 11, 09:12 UTC · 4d agofirst Sep 10, 14:43 UTC · 5d agoMalware in the wild 3 sources

Linux Detection Engineering - Local Privilege Escalation

Elastic details a layered detection framework for Linux local privilege escalation, covering 2026's copy-on-write bug wave and LLM-assisted discovery.

Elastic Security Labs describes how most Linux local privilege escalations share a common host flow — an unprivileged process launched from a writable path becoming root — and proposes layered detections combining general outcome-based rules with per-technique rules in Elastic Defend and Auditd. It tracks 13 recent LPE disclosures, seven of which share a copy-on-write/zero-copy bug class, including Copy Fail, DirtyFrag, Fragnesia, DirtyDecrypt, DirtyClone, pedit COW, and RefluXFS. Qualys attributes RefluXFS to an LLM-assisted research effort with Anthropic using Claude Mythos Preview, and another bug is credited to an LLM-assisted workflow. Detection and endpoint rules are published in Elastic's detection-rules and protections-artifacts repositories.

Elastic Security LabsSep 11, 00:00 UTC · 4d agoResearch

Once popular for attacking AI, ASCII smuggling is embraced by spammers

Spammers adopt ASCII smuggling—invisible Unicode tag characters—to evade email filters, with Microsoft Defender detections spiking to 2.5 million per day.

ASCII smuggling hides text in Unicode tag characters (e.g., U+E0041 for "A") that are invisible to humans but readable by LLMs and text processors. The technique gained attention as a stealthy prompt-injection vector and is now used by spammers to obfuscate keywords from email detectors. Microsoft reported Defender for Office smuggling detections jumped from roughly 21,000 per day to over 1.3 million in early February, reaching 2.5 million within four days, before falling sharply in mid-May.

Ars Technica · SecuritySep 4, 17:18 UTC · 11d agoPhishing & fraud

When Models Edit Too Much: On the Fidelity of Minimal Code Edits

A 400-task BigCodeBench evaluation shows frontier LLMs widely over-edit code; a preservation instruction cuts excess edits and raises Pass@1 by 2.3 points.

Researchers built an evaluation framework from 400 BigCodeBench problems with injected AST-level corruptions, each with a known minimal patch, to measure over-editing in LLM code repair. Even strong models like GPT-5.5 produce unnecessarily large edits despite high Pass@1. Adding a preservation instruction reduced average excess Levenshtein distance from 0.195 to 0.131, cut added cognitive complexity by 26.6%, and raised Pass@1 by 2.3 points. Reinforcement learning post-training gave the best out-of-domain edit-fidelity trade-off, while supervised fine-tuning overfit to seen corruption patterns.

Hugging Face daily papersSep 2, 20:00 UTC · 13d agoAI research

Bulk AbuseIPDB reporting using command-line tools

A blogger shows how to bulk-report distributed botnet IPs scraping a self-hosted Gitea instance to AbuseIPDB using bash, awk, and jq.

The author's self-hosted Gitea instance was scraped by distributed bots using random IPs worldwide and randomized, often nonexistent User-Agent strings, generating heavy request load for days. The write-up demonstrates filtering Traefik access logs (CLF and JSON) with grep, awk, and jq to extract offending IPs, tagging them with AbuseIPDB category 19 (Bad Web Bot), deduplicating them, and building a CSV for the Bulk Reporter tool. Reports can then be submitted through the AbuseIPDB bulk-report API, respecting the 5,000-report daily limit.

Lobsters · securitySep 9, 20:26 UTC · 6d agoTools1

From 88 lines to 1: Detecting DLL hijacking with Elastic Defend

Elastic condenses 88 lines of detection logic into one Elastic Defend 9.5.0 rule catching the DLL hijacking used by a ClickFix campaign.

The ClickFix campaign side-loads a malicious mscoree.dll next to a signed Microsoft binary and also ships a driver to kill Elastic Endpoint. Elastic rebuilt the DLL as a NativeAOT library, dropped it beside the signed binary, and confirmed that Elastic Defend 9.5.0 flags the load. The post replaces 88 lines of detection logic with a single rule for DLL search-order hijacking.

Elastic Security LabsAug 28, 00:00 UTC · 18d agoTools in the wild