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Cocomelon's Studio Tells Its Artists to Start Experimenting With AI

Moonbug Entertainment, studio behind Cocomelon and Blippi, issued generative AI guidelines requiring human authorship and legal review of all AI use.

Moonbug Entertainment, producer of Cocomelon, Little Baby Bum, Blippi, and Mia's Magic Playground, shared its 'Studio AI Bible' and generative AI policy with 404 Media. The guidelines permit AI for ideation, storyboarding, and utility tasks but require substantial human creative input on core elements, legal approval of every tool, and a 'provenance and isolation' filing system to preserve copyright. A spokesperson said generative AI is not currently used in aired episodes. Moonbug content has hundreds of millions of YouTube subscribers, with Cocomelon spinoffs on Netflix, a Universal movie in development, and a Disney+ move planned next year.

404 Media · 20d agoAI industry

India’s STPI serves TerminalFix-style attack via fake Cloudflare check

India's STPI government website serves a spoofed Cloudflare verification page that preloads malicious commands into visitors' clipboards for execution in Windows Terminal, matching TerminalFix-style attacks.

A malicious external JavaScript on the ananta.stpi[.]in subdomain of India's Software Technology Parks of India displays a fake Cloudflare 'Verify you are human' prompt and silently writes a URL into the visitor's clipboard, instructing the user to paste and execute it in Windows Terminal. Researcher Vibhum Dubey reported the behavior to STPI and CERT-In; the script loads from the recently registered cdn[.]quickdelivr[.]com and assigns each visitor a unique session identifier. The malicious script remained embedded after the overlay briefly disappeared, and the destination URL was flagged as malicious by 17 VirusTotal engines. No attribution has been established, though the pattern matches Microsoft's TerminalFix, a variant of ClickFix.

CSO Online · 5d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

Build Low-Latency Multilingual Voice Agents: Open Weights & Full Deployment Control with NVIDIA Magpie TTS

NVIDIA's Magpie TTS open-weight multilingual speech model enables low-latency voice agents with full deployment control.

Hugging Face's blog highlights NVIDIA Magpie TTS, an open-weights multilingual text-to-speech model designed for building low-latency voice agents. The open licensing gives developers full deployment control, allowing self-hosted multilingual speech for agentic applications. The post walks through building voice agents with the model.

Hugging Face Blog · Aug 10, 2026Model release

Can Edge-Deployable Vision-Language Models Identify Species?

Evaluation of 2-8B VLMs (Qwen3-VL, Gemma3) against BioCLIP on camera-trap species ID shows all models degrade sharply on field imagery.

The study tests whether edge-deployable 2-8B vision-language models carry genuine taxonomic knowledge, comparing Qwen3-VL 2B/4B/8B and Gemma3 4B against the 300M specialist BioCLIP on a 96-species task across clean iNaturalist photos and six LILA.science camera-trap collections. All models degrade 9.6-26.6 percentage points on field imagery, and BioCLIP outperforms every VLM by 33.2-59.2 points on an expanded 200-image sample, suggesting specialized data rather than scale drives the gap. Under open-set prompting, 5.9-9.6% of responses are syntactically valid but taxonomically nonexistent species names, with fabrication rankings replicating across evaluation sets.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research1

openbmb/MiniCPM5-2B — new model trending #4 on Hugging Face

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a dense 2B open-weights Transformer claiming 2B-class open-source SOTA for on-device deployment.

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, the second model in the MiniCPM5 series following MiniCPM5-1B, and it is trending #4 on Hugging Face. The dense 2B Transformer targets on-device, local, and resource-constrained deployment and claims 2B-class open-source SOTA while remaining competitive with 4B-class models. Reported strengths include coding, mathematics, long-context understanding, tool use, and agentic tasks; a tech report (arXiv 2506.07900), GitHub repo, and online demo accompany the release.

Hugging Face trending models · 10d agoModel release

New Phishing Attack Uses Blob URLs to Hide Malicious Pages From Security Scanners

Barracuda detailed a DocuSign-themed phishing campaign that renders credential-harvesting pages as browser blob URLs, evading URL reputation and blocklist defenses.

Barracuda researchers report a credential-harvesting phishing campaign that starts with a DocuSign-themed email containing a calendar invitation and routes victims through legitimate Microsoft OAuth endpoints and Microsoft Teams. A crafted redirect parameter leads Teams to load external content from cdn.bloom[.]io, which the browser renders as a blob URL — a session-only address held in local memory with no persistent public URL to crawl, categorize, or blocklist. The locally generated page registers a service worker, runs inside a sandboxed iframe, and is dynamically steered by backend infrastructure, indicating a centrally managed phishing platform. Barracuda recommends phishing-resistant MFA such as FIDO2 keys and passkeys, monitoring OAuth flows and redirect chains, and Teams malicious URL protection.

GBHackersupdated · 6d agofirst · 6d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 3 sources

New Phishing Attack Creates Malicious Pages Inside the Victim’s Browser

Barracuda details a phishing campaign that renders pages in-browser via blob URLs, routed through Microsoft Teams and cdn.bloom[.]io to evade detection.

Barracuda researchers analyzed a phishing campaign that generates a blob URL to render the phishing page entirely inside the victim's browser, leaving no static page for scanners to inspect. The chain begins with a Docusign-themed email containing a calendar invite, followed by a crafted redirect through Microsoft Teams to a resource on cdn.bloom[.]io that the browser converts into the blob URL. Service workers, iframes, and a hidden command-and-control configuration indicate the page is part of a centrally managed phishing platform that can be updated and steered across victims. Researchers recommend inspecting blob URL activity, monitoring OAuth authorization flows, and analyzing the full click path in email security controls.

SecurityWeek · 7d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

openbmb/MiniCPM5-2B-GGUF — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a dense 2B on-device model claiming open-source SOTA among 2B-class models.

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, the second model in the MiniCPM5 series following MiniCPM5-1B, as a dense 2B Transformer built for on-device and resource-constrained deployment with GGUF weights on Hugging Face. The team claims 2B-class open-source state-of-the-art performance, remaining competitive with 4B-class models in coding, mathematics, long-context understanding, tool use and agentic tasks. The release includes a tech report, GitHub repository and online demo, and is currently trending on Hugging Face.

Hugging Face trending models · 12d agoModel release2

Mirage Kitten targeting aviation and FinTech sectors across the Middle East and Africa with a new malware set

Kaspersky reports Mirage Kitten targeting aviation and fintech organizations across the Middle East and Africa with new NodeRabbit and PollCat backdoors.

Kaspersky researchers documented new Mirage Kitten operations against aviation and fintech organizations in the Middle East and Africa. The campaign uses two previously undocumented backdoors: NodeRabbit, written in Node.js, and PollCat, written in JavaScript. The findings expand the group's known toolset and TTPs.

Kaspersky Securelist · 15d agoThreat actor in the wild1

m-a-p/YuE2-3B — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

M-A-P released YuE2-3B, an open music generation model that outperforms Suno v5 on WildSongBench and runs locally on a 24GB GPU.

The M-A-P (multimodal-art-projection) team released YuE2-3B, an open-weights music generation model that turns lyrics and a style prompt into full songs with vocals and accompaniment. It uses an AR-NAR Mixture-of-Transformers backbone with symbolic planning and flow matching through a VAE, and supports editable scores (melody and chords, including ABC notation) plus agentic editing workflows. On 192 WildSongBench prompts it reports a SongBench average of 6.9632 (best-of-8) versus 6.8721 for Suno v5, claimed as state of the art among evaluated open and proprietary models. It runs 48 kHz stereo inference locally on a single 24GB NVIDIA GPU without quantization, with companion releases including YuE2-Vae, MERT-v2 encoders, the WildSongBench dataset, and SheetSage2.

Hugging Face trending models · 7d agoModel release1

Slim Spider Steals Crypto Custody Secrets From Brazilian Financial Institution

CrowdStrike links previously unseen Slim Spider group to crypto custody secret theft at Brazilian financial institutions since March 2026.

CrowdStrike is tracking Slim Spider, a previously undocumented financially motivated group attacking Brazilian financial institutions since at least March 2026. The actor used custom Bash scripts to steal temporary cloud credentials, exfiltrated digital asset custody secrets, and used Foundry's cast tool to derive Ethereum wallet addresses, while deploying Go-based backdoor MikeDor and an implant impersonating Brazil's SPI instant payment infrastructure. Slim Spider also pivoted to Azure DevOps and Kubernetes clusters and used panels including NEXUS // Scanner, Painel de Emails Entra ID, and Painel Pix for reconnaissance and unauthorized Pix transfers. Separately, Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant disclosed Breeze Comet (CL-CRI-1163), a Portuguese-speaking group since 2024 that breaches Brazilian payment infrastructure to run fraudulent Pix, Boleto, and STR transactions.

The Hacker News · 8d agoThreat actor in the wild

Building a Production Greek-English Speech Recognizer

Engineering report details Sophea, a production Greek-English ASR reaching 4.26% WER on public English sets via ROVER ensemble and data-pipeline calibration.

Across 23 training iterations, two architectures, and nine production gates, no single data composition passed all gates; a three-model ROVER ensemble reached 9 of 9 gates and cut overlapping-speech WER from 53.35% to 37.87%. Calibrating an audio-quality filter against in-domain anchors reduced discarded scored Greek audio from 98.7% to 10.6%, and a pre-registered ablation traced a hallucination defect to one training-data package. The sophea/asr-k1 preview arbiter lists 4.26% average WER on eight public English test sets and 25.88% WER on live Greek noisy traffic; no weights or training data are released.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

Perplexity Details Its GPU Embedding Stack: How Ivy, Tulip and ROSE Serve pplx-embed

Perplexity details its GPU embedding serving stack (Ivy, Tulip, ROSE), which reuses LLM prefill/decode kernels, CUDA graphs, and LazyTensors to cut launch overhead.

Perplexity engineers published a deep dive on the serving infrastructure behind pplx-embed, used across Perplexity Search and its API platform. The stack comprises Ivy (Rust HTTP gateway), Tulip (gRPC scheduling and batching), and ROSE (Runtime-Optimized Serving Engine), which reuses LLM prefill and decode kernels rather than running a separate embedding engine. Optimizations include whole-model CUDA graphs with lazy capture and a LazyTensor abstraction that overlaps CPU batch preparation with in-flight GPU work. Benchmarks are reported against vLLM v0.22.0 in BF16, with FlashAttention 4 generally fastest but FlashInfer 3 winning on Qwen-based models at very long sequence lengths.

MarkTechPost · 10d agoAI tools & infra1

MaxKernel: Agentic Kernel Generation for TPUs

Researchers open-source MaxKernel, a multi-agent LLM system that generates and optimizes TPU kernels matching expert hand-tuned baselines on JaxBench.

MaxKernel is a multi-agent system offering three paradigms for TPU kernel development: human-in-the-loop collaborative design, a fully autonomous metric/trace-driven optimization loop, and graph-based autonomous search for global exploration. All paradigms draw on a shared pool of specialized sub-agents for planning, implementation, self-debugging, testing, and hardware profiling. Evaluated on JaxBench's 50 diverse TPU kernel tasks and real-world workloads from open-source models, it consistently matches expert hand-tuned baselines. The system is open-sourced via the AI-Hypercomputer GitHub repository.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI tools & infra

NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 Delivers Leading Performance in MLPerf Inference v6.1 Debut

NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 debuts in MLPerf Inference v6.1 with up to 3.7x higher throughput than GB300 NVL72 and 99% scaling efficiency at 288 GPUs.

In its first MLPerf Inference preview submission, NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 achieved up to 3.7x higher throughput than GB300 NVL72 on Qwen3-VL and 2.5x on DeepSeek-R1. A 288-GPU GB300 NVL72 submission across four racks reached 99% scaling efficiency on the DeepSeek-R1 offline benchmark. Software optimizations delivered up to 1.6x gains over v6.0, leveraging TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, Dynamo, disaggregated serving, and NVFP4 precision.

NVIDIA Blog · 11h agoAI industry 2 sources

Tracking OceanLotus’ new Downloader, KerrDown

Unit 42 identifies KerrDown, a new OceanLotus (APT32) downloader active since 2018 targeting Vietnamese speakers via malicious macros and DLL side-loading.

Unit 42 tracks KerrDown, a previously undocumented downloader family used by OceanLotus (APT32) since at least early 2018, primarily targeting Vietnam or Vietnamese-speaking individuals. Delivery uses macro-laced Microsoft Office documents embedding base64-encoded 32-bit and 64-bit DLLs, and RAR archives containing a legitimate program abused for DLL side-loading. KerrDown is dropped as main_background.png, downloads a DES-encrypted payload from a URL, and executes it directly in memory. Researchers used Jaccard-index similarity analysis to identify the new family, connect campaign samples, and infer patterns in the group's working hours and days.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Malware in the wild1

Silver Fox Targets Japanese Manufacturer with 3

Chinese group Silver Fox used new vulnerable drivers and DLL side-loading to deploy ValleyRAT at a Japanese industrial manufacturer.

Cato Networks detailed a Silver Fox campaign against a Japanese industrial manufacturing organization combining new vulnerable-driver abuse (BootRepair.sys and EnPortv.sys alongside wsftprm.sys), DLL side-loading via Zeon Corporation PDF binaries, and NTDLL unhooking to deliver ValleyRAT (Winos 4.0), a Gh0st RAT variant. The chain starts with an invoice-themed phishing lure hosting attacker-controlled content on legitimate QQ and Tencent Cloud services. Shellcode is injected into svchost.exe via thread-context hijacking, and a dual watchdog design pairs payload monitoring with a scheduled-task batch script for persistence. A separate 180-day VirusTotal retrohunt found 146 Atlas RAT samples across six PDB builds, though the Silver Fox link remains circumstantial.

The Hacker News · 20d agoThreat actor in the wild

FBI Seizes China-Linked Hacking Platforms QScan and QTRouter Used Against Critical Infrastructure

FBI seizes China-linked QScan and QTRouter hacking platforms used by QTFY to obfuscate intrusions against US federal agencies.

The DOJ and FBI seized domains hard-coded into QScan and QTRouter, two platforms operated by China-based Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company on behalf of state-sponsored group QTFY. QScan automatically infected thousands of IoT devices which were added to QTRouter, an obfuscation network routing malicious traffic through compromised and proxy devices outside China. Targets included NASA, the Federal Reserve, Departments of Energy, Justice, and HHS, NIH, and the US Senate, exploiting flaws in Fortinet SSL-VPN, Citrix ADC, Microsoft Exchange, F5 BIG-IP, Log4j, and others.

Security Affairs · 21d agoThreat actor in the wild

With Groq 3 LPX in Full Production, NVIDIA Extends Vera Rubin Inference for Agents

NVIDIA puts Groq 3 LPX into full production and extends Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale systems for fast token generation in agentic AI inference.

NVIDIA announced that Groq 3 LPX is in full production as part of an extension of the Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale platform aimed at agentic AI inference. The announcement frames the next era of inference as full-stack AI factory co-design across chips, networking, and systems rather than a single component breakthrough. The focus is improving token generation speed for agent workloads.

NVIDIA Blog · 23d agoAI industry

Jalapeño’s first results show industry-leading speed and efficiency in AI inference

OpenAI's Jalapeño custom inference chip shows faster, more power-efficient inference with higher throughput and lower latency.

OpenAI announced first results for Jalapeño, its custom AI inference chip. The company claims industry-leading speed and efficiency, delivering higher throughput and lower latency for modern models compared with existing options. The chip targets more power-efficient serving of large models at scale.

OpenAI News · 22d agoAI industry

Risky Bulletin: BGP hijack targets Virtualizor to deliver malicious updates

Unknown attackers BGP-hijacked part of Hetzner's space for 33 hours to impersonate Softaculous and push malicious Virtualizor updates via a clone site.

On 28 August 2026, AS62390 (NexonHost) began announcing 162.55.80.0/24 — part of Hetzner's 162.55.0.0/16 containing Softaculous systems — via transit AS6204 (Zet.net), keeping Hetzner (AS24940) on the AS path so the rogue route looked RPKI-valid; the hijack ran nearly 33 hours. The attacker obtained a TLS certificate in Softaculous's name and hosted a clone website delivering malicious updates for the Virtualizor VPS management platform. Virtualizor cannot measure impact because hijacked traffic never touched its infrastructure, and warns users who paid during the attack may have had financial data stolen; no attribution was made. The same bulletin reports a ~$75 million theft attempt against Tectonic via an exploited Cosmos bug (~$68M clawed back), two METR breaches including $600,000 in stolen API credits, and Anthropic pausing external cyber evaluations after models escaped test environments.

Risky Business News · 14d agoData breach in the wild1

[AINews] Hot Chips: OpenAI’s Jalapeño, Cerebras CS-5, Groq 3 LPX, Apple M6

OpenAI unveiled Jalapeno custom inference chip claiming 1.5-1.9x better perf-per-watt than NVIDIA GB200/GB300, deploying in-house by year-end.

At the 37th Hot Chips conference, OpenAI published first benchmark details for its custom Jalapeno inference chip, claiming 1.5-1.9x more work per watt, 1.7-3.6x lower end-to-end latency, and 2.1-4.1x higher interactive-workload performance versus NVIDIA GB200/GB300, with the 700W-rated part staying at or below 550W in tests. Deployment into OpenAI's own infrastructure begins by year-end, with Gen 2 deep in development and Gen 3 underway. OpenAI also said GPT-Astra and Codex helped write low-level kernels, reportedly 1.5-1.8x faster than human-expert code for selected attention and MoE blocks. Cerebras CS-5, Groq 3 LPX and Apple M6 were also featured at the conference.

Latent Space · 21d agoAI industry

Fake Claude Opus 5 app delivers malware and wipes its own tracks

A fake 'Claude Opus 5' GitHub repository impersonating Anthropic distributes RevStealer, a Windows infostealer stealing passwords, crypto wallets and VPN credentials.

Morphisec identified a malicious GitHub repository, Claude-Opus-5-Free-Desktop, impersonating Anthropic to distribute a roughly 101 MB download that launches RevStealer, a Windows information-stealing malware. The malware targets browser credentials, Windows Credential Manager, a dozen password managers, more than fifty cryptocurrency wallets, VPN, messaging, game launcher and streaming accounts, streaming stolen data to its server before deleting itself. It evades analysis with ten sandbox and VM checks, indirect system calls, Windows Defender exclusions, a fake verification window, and a Polygon blockchain smart contract fallback for C2. Only 1 of 66 antivirus engines flagged the sample at check time.

Help Net Security · 16d agoMalware

Iran-linked APT Mirage Kitten Uses Fake Job Tests to Spread Malware

Kaspersky reports Iran-linked Mirage Kitten delivers new NodeRabbit and PollCat malware to fintech and aviation targets via fake LinkedIn coding assessments.

Kaspersky researchers documented two previously undocumented Node.js malware families, NodeRabbit and PollCat, attributed with high confidence to Iran-linked APT group Mirage Kitten. The malware is delivered via fake recruiter personas on LinkedIn offering coding assessments hosted on Amazon S3, with instructions banning AI assistants so AI code-review tools would not flag the trojanized npm packages. NodeRabbit is cross-platform (Windows, Linux, macOS), uses AES-256-GCM-encrypted C2 on Azure, includes sandbox checks, and one variant installs a fake 'GitHub Copilot Helper' VS Code extension plus Git hook persistence. Victims identified so far are in fintech and aviation organizations across Egypt, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan.

Security Affairs · 14d agoThreat actor in the wild2

Hackers deploy Linux rootkit on F5 BIG-IP APM devices, hiding web shell in memory

Sophos analyzed a Linux rootkit, tracked as PoisonedRefresh, on hacked F5 BIG-IP APM devices hiding an in-memory web shell linked to exploited CVE-2025-53521.

Sophos and ESET analyzed an implant (named PoisonedRefresh by ESET) deployed on compromised F5 BIG-IP APM appliances, which serves enterprise, financial, government, and public sector deployments. The second-stage payload intercepts __libc_start_main, hooks Apache's APR module loader (apr_dso_load), RC4-encodes key strings, and rewrites PHP file reads in memory to embed a web shell inside legitimate scripts like apm_css.php3, full_wt.php3, and webtop_popup_css.php3, leaving on-disk files unchanged. A related installer component infects /usr/sbin/httpd, persists across BIG-IP upgrade images, modifies SELinux configuration, and deploys the payload. The malware also creates a Unix domain socket at /run/bigtlog.pipe that hands authenticated local connections to /bin/bash; F5 links the activity to CVE-2025-53521, an unauthenticated RCE in BIG-IP APM already exploited in the wild.

Help Net Security · 7d agoMalware in the wildCVE-2025-535211

BGP Hijack Delivers Malicious Virtualizor Update That Establishes Persistent Root Access

Attackers used a BGP hijack to divert Softaculous traffic and push a malicious Virtualizor update granting root persistence on some hypervisors.

Virtualizor reported that a BGP hijack between August 28 20:57 UTC and August 30 06:10 UTC diverted Softaculous update traffic to an attacker-operated server holding a valid Let's Encrypt certificate. Installations checking for updates during the window could receive a malicious package that added an attacker SSH key to root, created a proxyuser account, and installed a Java payload persisted via a systemd service. Hosting provider AlbaHost confirmed 5 of its 34 Virtualizor hypervisors were root-compromised. Virtualizor shipped Patch 9 with a Security Analyzer on September 1, but cryptographic package signing remains future work.

The Hacker News · 14d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

Hackers Deploy New SloppyRAT via ClickFix to Enable Ransomware Lateral Movement

Zscaler discovered SloppyRAT, a ClickFix-delivered RAT that gives ransomware operators reconnaissance, remote execution, and SOCKS proxy pivoting for lateral movement.

Zscaler identified SloppyRAT in June 2026, linked to a ransomware-related threat actor. The infection chain starts with a ClickFix lure abusing finger.exe over TCP port 79, then uses curl.exe, IronPython, CastleLoader, and CastleRAT before reflectively loading SloppyRAT as a DLL in memory. The RAT supports HTTPS command-and-control, system inventory, file operations, Defender tampering, and a reverse SOCKS proxy, with evasion features including runtime code encryption, indirect syscalls, certificate pinning, and a possible EtherHiding blockchain fallback. Its persistence code is buggy and the malware appears under development, but the pre-encryption foothold gives defenders a window to stop intrusions.

Cyber Security News · 5d agoMalware in the wild 3 sources

Financially Motivated Threat Actor BREEZE COMET Targets Brazil

Google Threat Intelligence details BREEZE COMET, a financially motivated group manipulating Brazilian payment systems and banking software to conduct fraudulent transfers since 2024.

Mandiant and Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) track this activity as BREEZE COMET (formerly UNC5669), active since 2024 against Brazilian financial services, retail, and eCommerce organizations. The actor specializes in manipulating payment systems and banking software to conduct fraudulent transfers. The activity overlaps with operations publicly reported as Plump Spider and SHADOW-AETHER-064. The report details the group's tactics, toolkit, mitigations, and detections for this active and developing threat.

Google Threat Intelligence · 15d agoThreat actor in the wild

Three Threat Groups Target Russian Enterprises With Backdoors, Ransomware, and Wipers

Kaspersky details NightEagle, Hacking Cat, and Toy Ghouls targeting Russian enterprises with Exchange backdoors, Gorilla RAT, and destructive Monkey ransomware.

Kaspersky reports three threat clusters targeting Russian enterprises: NightEagle (APT-Q-95), the pro-Ukrainian hacktivist group Hacking Cat, and Toy Ghouls. NightEagle uses compromised VPN credentials and the GhostContainer modular backdoor to fully compromise Microsoft Exchange servers, chaining CVE-2020-0688 exploitation, BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708), Active Directory vulnerabilities, and DCSync to seize domain controllers. Hacking Cat exploits Exchange flaws including CVE-2021-26855 and CVE-2026-42897 to deliver the Gorilla RAT and multiple Monkey ransomware variants written in Rust, .NET, C++, and Golang targeting Windows, Linux, and VMware ESXi, with some variants acting as wipers that never store the encryption key.

The Hacker News · 11h agoThreat actor in the wild 2 sourcesCVE-2020-0688CVE-2019-0708CVE-2021-26855+1 CVEs

Iran-Linked Hackers Use Fake LinkedIn Job Offers to Deploy NodeRabbit and PollCat RATs

Iran-linked Mirage Kitten targets software engineers with fake LinkedIn recruiter coding tests deploying new NodeRabbit and PollCat RATs.

Kaspersky researchers link the campaign to Mirage Kitten (also tracked as UNC1549, Smoke Sandstorm, Nimbus Manticore), with victims in aviation, aerospace and fintech in Egypt, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. Trojanized npm dependencies (colorized_terminal, pretty-log) bundled in coding-challenge archives launch the Node.js implants across Windows, Linux and macOS. NodeRabbit uses AES-256-GCM-encrypted C2 via Azure, and its third variant persists through a fake GitHub Copilot Helper VS Code extension plus Git post-merge/post-checkout hooks. PollCat is an obfuscated JavaScript RAT that registers with C2 before OTP authentication and inventories tools from 24 security vendors.

GBHackers · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild1

OpenBMB Releases MiniCPM5-2B: A 2.52B Dense Model Averaging 53.9 Across 34 Benchmarks and Built to Run On Device

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a 2.52B-parameter Apache 2.0 on-device model averaging 53.9 across 34 benchmarks, ahead of Qwen3.5-4B.

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a 2,516,756,480-parameter dense LlamaForCausalLM model with grouped-query attention and a 131,072-token context, under Apache 2.0, runnable via vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, and Ollama. It averages 53.9 across 34 benchmarks versus 51.1 for Qwen3.5-4B, with strong tool-use (97.1 on tau2-Bench Telecom) and code results (69.1 LiveCodeBench v6, 46.4 SWE-bench Verified). Training combined 400B tokens of deep-thinking SFT, critic-based JustRL II RL teachers, and on-policy distillation merging 16 RL experts; datasets and intermediate checkpoints were published alongside the weights.

MarkTechPost · 9d agoModel release