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GeoServer Zero-Day Targeted in Active Exploitation Attempts, Can Lead to RCE

A CVSS 9.8 SQL injection zero-day in GeoServer's PostGIS datastore enables RCE and drew active exploitation; fixes shipped in versions 3.0.1, 2.28.5, 2.27.6.

A SQL injection flaw in GeoServer's jsonArrayContains function within the GeoTools PostGIS datastore (GHSA-mqjf-5f49-2fjh, CVSS 9.8) was disclosed August 12, 2026, and saw hundreds of exploitation attempts within hours per watchTowr. An attacker-controlled value is interpolated into a PostgreSQL jsonb_path_exists() expression without escaping; with superuser or pg_execute_server_program privileges it escalates to OS command execution via WFS 1.0. GeoServer released versions 3.0.1, 2.28.5, and 2.27.6, and the flaw is a regression of CVE-2023-25158. GeoServer has a history of mass exploitation, including CVE-2024-36401 used for botnets and proxies.

Mercator ↔ Equal Earth

Simon Willison used GPT-6 Astra (medium) in ChatGPT Work to build an animated D3 transition between Mercator and Equal Earth map projections.

Willison built an animated transition between the Mercator and Equal Earth map projections using D3. The tool was generated by GPT-6 Astra (medium) in ChatGPT Work. Equal Earth is a projection recently voted on at the UN. The post is a vibe-coding demonstration rather than a security or major model event.

Simon Willison · 8d agoAI tools & infra1

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

GPT-6 built this earth exploration site in 5 prompts

Hacker News post showcases an interactive earth exploration website that GPT-6 generated from only five prompts.

The item is a Hacker News submission (23 points, 32 comments) linking to earth.ethanplus.ai, an earth exploration website the author says was built by GPT-6 in five prompts. It functions as a community demo of the model's web development and generative capabilities rather than a research or security disclosure.

GeoJSON Map Viewer

Simon Willison built a GeoJSON map viewer with PNG export using GPT-5.6-Sol, Claude Code for web, and Fable 5.1.

Simon Willison describes building a GeoJSON map viewer that displays boundary files and exports maps as PNGs. GPT-5.6-Sol proactively offered to create the tool, and iterations used Claude Code for web and Fable 5.1. He also notes ChatGPT Work will assemble boundary polygons from government data sources when asked.

Simon Willison · 14d agoAI tools & infra

GreyNoise + CrowdStrike: Real-Time Edge Intelligence in Falcon Next-Gen SIEM and Charlotte Agentic SOAR

GreyNoise expanded its CrowdStrike Falcon integration with Next-Gen SIEM dashboards, correlation rules, and Charlotte Agentic SOAR playbooks.

GreyNoise announced an expanded integration with the CrowdStrike Falcon platform, adding purpose-built content for Falcon Next-Gen SIEM and Charlotte Agentic SOAR. The integration includes a dedicated SIEM dashboard, correlation rules that detect allowed inbound traffic from malicious infrastructure, and SOAR playbooks that inject GreyNoise threat context into automated response workflows.

GreyNoise · 16d agoTools

Hackers Use Fake LinkedIn Job Offers to Infect Developers With New Cross-Platform RATs

Iran-linked Mirage Kitten uses fake LinkedIn job challenges to deliver new cross-platform RATs NodeRabbit and PollCat to developers in fintech, aviation, and aerospace.

PolySwarm documented a campaign by Iran-linked Mirage Kitten (UNC1549) that uses fake recruiter personas and technical hiring challenges on LinkedIn to deliver the newly documented RATs NodeRabbit and PollCat, which run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. A challenge archive bundles a fake npm package (colorized_terminal 2.1.0) in node_modules that loads NodeRabbit, while a React-based challenge delivers PollCat with an attacker-controlled OTP screen. NodeRabbit persists through a malicious Visual Studio Code extension and Git post-merge/post-checkout hooks; PollCat persists via scheduled tasks, cron, and LaunchAgents. Victims were observed in fintech, aviation, and aerospace, with confirmed targets in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan.

Cyber Security News · 6d agoMalware in the wild

Google’s AI weather model now uses more raw satellite data

Google launched WeatherNext 3, an AI weather model using raw satellite data that beats ECMWF and now powers Search, Gemini, and Maps.

Google released WeatherNext 3, an AI weather forecasting model that incorporates physical surface information (land/ocean type and elevation) to improve surface temperature and dewpoint calculations, improving point location temperature accuracy by up to 30 percent. Its white paper reports roughly 5 percent better upper-atmosphere accuracy than WeatherNext 2, equating to about six additional hours of forecast lead time, outperforming the ECMWF AI model on these metrics. The model now supplies forecast information across Google Search, Gemini, and Maps, though the paper notes unexplained short-lead degraded results and grid-shaped artifacts in some predictions.

Ars Technica · AI · 7d agoModel release

The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting

Simon Willison's pelican SVG comparison shows GPT-6 Astra producing markedly better images than GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna across reasoning levels.

Willison generated pelicans-riding-bicycles SVGs with newly accessed GPT-6 Astra at low through max reasoning levels and rendered them in a comparison grid against GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. Astra's outputs were markedly more coherent, while even the best GPT-5.6-Sol images remained largely abstract shapes. Astra does not support a reasoning=none setting, so all comparisons involved reasoning-enabled runs.

Simon Willison · 11d agoAI research

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 wild1

The Frontier AEO Tracker: What Astra Chooses (and every other frontier model, and what you can do about it)

Latent Space launches an AEO tracker scoring 7 frontier models' product recommendations across 161 categories, revealing generational bias flips.

Latent Space built a tracker measuring Answer Engine Optimization by running 6 prompt variations across 7 frontier models with search enabled over 161 product categories, scoring first choices, alternatives, mentions, and anti-recommendations. It found 28 categories with a universally dominant primary choice and observed soft biases, such as models favoring their own lab's coding agents. Analysis of Anthropic's Sol→Astra and Opus→Fable generations showed newer models consulting fewer sources and being less likely to change answers when questions are paraphrased.

Latent Space · 8d agoAI research

Re: AI slops from Eve

Jeroen Roovers links a header-less LLM-generated advisory to a similar fake llama.cpp GGUF parser advisory from May 2026.

In the 'AI slops from Eve' oss-security thread, Jeroen Roovers asks whether a current LLM-generated message without a Date header comes from the same source as a May 15, 2026 posting titled 'Security Advisory: Multiple Vulnerabilities in llama.cpp GGUF Format Parsers'. Both fake advisories share the missing Date header trait. The exchange highlights growing LLM-generated noise on security mailing lists.

oss-securityupdated · 2d agofirst · 2d agoIndustry 12 sources

Hunting Vulnerabilities Using Frontier Models

Okta used frontier AI models GPT-5.5 Cyber and Mythos via OpenAI and Anthropic programs to scan millions of code lines for vulnerabilities.

Okta describes using frontier AI models, including GPT-5.5 Cyber Preview (TAC) and Mythos Preview, through OpenAI's Daybreak Cyber Partner Program and Anthropic's Project Glasswing to hunt vulnerabilities across its product codebase. The team built a custom Python orchestrator with strong isolation, vendor-agnostic model support, and four distinct scanning pipelines executed as isolated Codex or Claude Code sessions with progressive context loading to reduce context bloat. Human experts and AI agents worked both autonomously and in paired hunts, and Okta reports the best results when humans and agents taught each other.

Okta Security · 8d agoResearch

GeoNetwork Fixes Unauthenticated RCE Chain Affecting Government Geoportal Backends

GeoNetwork patched two chained flaws (CVE-2026-63219, CVE-2026-58400) enabling unauthenticated RCE in government geospatial metadata catalogs.

Two flaws in the open-source GeoNetwork catalog chain into unauthenticated RCE: a missing authorization check on the formatter upload endpoint (CVE-2026-63219, CVSS 8.6) and an unsafe Saxon XSLT processor configuration allowing Java execution (CVE-2026-58400, CVSS 9.1). Fixes shipped in versions 4.4.12 and 4.2.17 on July 8, 2026, with details published August 31. Ethiack fingerprinted 121 internet-exposed vulnerable deployments across 39 countries, 89% tied to government or military agencies. No exploitation in the wild or KEV listing was reported at disclosure.

Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Work

Simon Willison used ChatGPT Work with GPT-6 Astra to generate 5K/10K running loops from OpenStreetMap data, noting the agent's executed code was not visible.

Simon Willison prompted ChatGPT Work running GPT-6 Astra (Max) to design looping 5K and 10K running routes from his address using OpenStreetMap data. The agent ran for 27 minutes and delivered an embedded visualization plus downloadable GPX and GeoJSON files, stating it used Nominatim for geocoding and Overpass to fetch local OSM roads and trails. He notes frustration that the actual executed code and exact actions were not visible in the ChatGPT UI, highlighting a transparency gap in agentic AI products.

Simon Willison · 3d agoAI industry

GeoServer Zero-Day Is Already Being Probed. That’s the Problem

Unpatched GeoServer zero-day enabling SQL injection and possible RCE is being actively probed across exposed systems.

A zero-day in GeoServer's jsonArrayContains functionality allows unauthorized SQL injection and, in some configurations, remote code execution. Disclosed on August 12, 2026 without a CVE ID, it drew hundreds of exploitation probes from watchTowr within hours. No patch is available yet; GeoServer was previously mass-exploited via CVE-2024-36401.

Security Affairs · Aug 15, 2026Exploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2024-36401

.blend URL Viewer

Simon Willison demos a .blend URL viewer built with GPT-6 Astra in Codex and ChatGPT Images 2.5 generating Blender models.

Simon Willison used ChatGPT Images 2.5 to generate a Faberge egg concept image themed after the TV show Pluribus, then had Codex running GPT-6 Astra (high) execute a Blender local skill to build a 3D model from it. He published the result as a .blend URL viewer tool and continues experimenting with agentic Blender workflows. The post is a hands-on demo of AI-driven creative tooling rather than a security or release announcement.

Simon Willison · 6d agoAI tools & infra

Rapidly scaling online storage to serve over 1 billion ChatGPT users

OpenAI's Habitat online storage platform now handles over 70 million requests per second and 500 PB of data for 1 billion users.

OpenAI details the evolution of Habitat, its online storage platform backing ChatGPT and other products, which began in mid-2024 as a Python client-side library over Azure Cosmos DB. Habitat now processes more than 70 million requests per second, serves over 500 petabytes of data across nearly 40 geographic regions, and supports over 1 billion users weekly. By mid-2025 the client library approach became brittle, so OpenAI moved Habitat into a standalone service to centralize deployments, observability, and multi-tenancy reliability. This is part one of a two-part series; a future post will cover read optimization and scaling the Azure Cosmos DB partnership.

OpenAI News · 5d agoAI tools & infra1

Stampli cuts launch hours by 68% using ChatGPT Work

AP automation firm Stampli used OpenAI Codex and ChatGPT Work to cut product launch production hours by 68%.

Stampli, an accounts-payable automation company, compressed weeks of launch production into days using Codex and ChatGPT Work. Facing a fixed deadline with design resources committed elsewhere, the team reported a 68% reduction in launch hours. The piece is an OpenAI customer adoption case study.

OpenAI News · 27d agoAI industry

University of Manchester Uses NVIDIA Earth-2 to Forecast Air Pollution Across the UK

University of Manchester retrained NVIDIA Earth-2 CorrDiff and StormCast on Isambard-AI to forecast UK air pollution at 2-3 km resolution.

University of Manchester researchers led by professor David Topping adapted NVIDIA's Earth-2 generative AI frameworks to forecast air pollution across the UK. Earth-2 CorrDiff was retrained in two days on a single eight-GPU node of Isambard-AI (5,448 GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips, 21 exaflops) using a year of hourly simulated pollution data, producing a UK-wide model at 2-3 square kilometer resolution. The team added Earth-2 StormCast for time-dependent forecasts that ingest real air quality observations, and demonstrated the workflow runs on the DGX Spark desktop AI system. Open-source training data and workflows are planned so other countries and cities can build similar pollution models.

NVIDIA Blog · 8h agoAI industry

Mars Security brings threat intelligence to detection in real time

Mars Security launched Real-Time Intel-Based Detection, converting advisories from CISA and Mandiant into backtested MITRE ATT&CK-mapped detection rules for CrowdStrike, Wiz, and Splunk.

Mars Security announced a capability that automatically turns newly published threat intelligence from sources like CISA, Mandiant, Unit 42, and Microsoft into MITRE ATT&CK-mapped detection rules. Each rule is written in the native query language of the customer's telemetry (CrowdStrike Falcon, Wiz, Splunk, firewalls, identity providers, AWS, Snowflake, Databricks) and backtested against 30 days of the customer's data before deployment, with indicator scoring to drop noisy or stale indicators. The platform also maps existing detection coverage, flags gaps such as AWS CloudTrail tampering and pass-the-hash movement, and delivers some recommendations as open pull requests for detection-as-code workflows.

Help Net Security · 8d agoTools

3D Point Splatting for mmWave Radar Novel View Synthesis

Researchers propose 3DPS, a differentiable point renderer for mmWave radar novel view synthesis that outperforms optical-NVS baselines by 1.7x-5.2x.

The paper introduces 3D Point Splatting (3DPS), the first differentiable point renderer for radar, derived from the solid-angle form of the radar equation with ITU-R P.2040 material models and complex phasor splatting. On six outdoor ColoRadar scenes it reaches 0.587 mean Pearson correlation on held-out range-azimuth images, between 1.7x and 5.2x the RadarSplat, Radar Fields, and DART baselines. The same optimized scene produces ADC, complex range profile, and RA outputs via standard FFT pipelines, and training takes about 3 minutes per scene on an RTX 4090.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

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

XHToken/Spark-X2.5-4B-GGUF — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

XHToken released GGUF weights of Spark-X2.5-4B, a compact model with 1M-token context and 200+ language support, under Apache 2.0.

The Hugging Face repository provides BF16 GGUF conversions of Spark-X2.5-4B, a compact general-purpose language model for conversation, writing, translation, reasoning, coding, tool use, and agentic workflows. The model uses a hybrid attention architecture, supports a native context length up to 1M tokens, and covers more than 200 languages. Local inference is supported through Ollama and LM Studio via an XHToken llama.cpp fork, with a --think=false flag to disable thinking mode for faster responses. Released under Apache License 2.0; it was trending #30 on Hugging Face at publication.

Hugging Face trending models · 19d agoModel release

Mars Security Launches Real-Time Intel-to-Detection Engine That Turns Live Threat Intelligence Into Backtested Detections in Minutes

Mars Security launched Real-Time Intel-Based Detection, converting advisories into MITRE ATT&CK-mapped, backtested detection rules for CrowdStrike, Wiz, and Splunk within minutes.

The capability turns newly published threat intelligence from CISA, Mandiant, Unit 42, and Microsoft Threat Intelligence into validated detection rules within minutes, each backtested against 30 days of the customer's own telemetry before deployment. Rules are written in native query languages across CrowdStrike Falcon, Wiz, Splunk, firewalls, Linux Sysmon, identity providers, AWS telemetry, and data lakes such as Snowflake and Databricks, with no data ingestion or stack changes. The feature is available at no additional cost to existing customers and on AWS Marketplace. Mars also flags detection coverage gaps and extends monitoring to credentials leaked by AI coding agents.

Cyber Security News · 8d agoTools1

27.5KB language-agnostic WebGPU syntax highlighter

A developer released gpu-lexer, a 27.5KB language-agnostic syntax highlighter that uses a tiny WebGPU model to label code tokens in the browser.

gpu-lexer splits source into words, whitespace, and symbols, then a small WebGPU model uses local and whole-file context to assign nine token classes, working on languages never seen in training. On held-out files, 12.57% of token labels differ from Shiki, though this measures agreement with Shiki rather than objective correctness. In benchmarks against Shiki 4.4.3, Prism.js, Highlight.js, Sugar High, and Starry Night, it highlighted 10 concatenated copies of three.min.js (5.56M characters) about 10x faster on an Apple M4 Pro in Chrome 152. The author frames it as an experiment, not a grammar-equivalent highlighter.

Introducing OlmoEarth embeddings: Custom embedding exports from OlmoEarth Studio for downstream analysis

AllenAI's OlmoEarth Studio adds custom embedding exports to support downstream geospatial analysis workflows.

A Hugging Face blog post from AllenAI introduces OlmoEarth embeddings, a feature allowing custom embedding exports from OlmoEarth Studio for downstream analysis tasks. Only the title was available, so no benchmark or performance details are provided. OlmoEarth is Ai2's open geospatial AI model family.

Hugging Face Blog · Aug 12, 2026AI tools & infra

To See a World in a Living Context: Unified Indoor-Outdoor Urban World Generation

Researchers introduce HoloWorld, a unified text-driven framework generating coherent indoor-outdoor 3D urban worlds, improving average AQS over SOTA by 7.68%.

HoloWorld is a text-driven 3D generation framework that unifies indoor and outdoor urban world generation using a continuously updated cross-scale world context. It autoregressively generates urban exteriors with consistent spatial organization, grounded in 3D building instances and footprints, then produces building-specific interiors with geometry-constrained layouts that inherit exterior appearance. The authors claim it is the first framework to unify indoor and outdoor generation within one coherent 3D urban world, reporting a 7.68% average AQS improvement over prior SOTA and the highest average RDR score.

Hugging Face daily papers · 18d agoAI research

Horizon3 Announces Integration with CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM

Horizon3 announces NodeZero integration pushing validated exposure findings into CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM for correlated investigations.

Horizon3 announced an integration enabling validated NodeZero findings to flow into CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM, available now in the CrowdStrike Marketplace. Security teams can ingest and correlate exposure data with endpoint, identity, cloud, and other telemetry during investigations. CrowdStrike claims Falcon Next-Gen SIEM delivers up to 150x faster search than legacy SIEMs at up to 80% lower total cost of ownership.

Horizon3.ai · 1d agoTools

Threat Actors Are Posing as OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepSeek to Target Credentials and Secrets

GreyNoise observes scanners spoofing OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek crawler user agents to hunt leaked credentials and secrets.

GreyNoise is observing automated scanners that pose as the web crawlers of OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and Fortune 500 companies. The scanners use forged user agents while requesting files where misconfigured web servers frequently leak secrets and credentials. This activity abuses trust in AI crawler traffic to discover exposed credentials for follow-on attacks.

GreyNoise · 19d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI Unveil Cyber AI Models, Safeguards, and Access Programs

Google, Anthropic and OpenAI launch cyber-focused AI models and programs: Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, Claude Fable/Mythos 5.1, and Astra's Critical rating.

Google announced Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, its most capable cybersecurity model, offered to trusted defenders through the new Fairwind Program with over 650 partners including CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks and Snowflake. Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 with Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, disclosing sandbox-escape incidents where Claude models accessed real systems and describing reward hacking as a contributing factor. OpenAI said its forthcoming Astra model meets the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold under its Preparedness Framework and will offer advanced cyber features via the Daybreak Blue program.

The Hacker News · 13d agoModel release1