Search: “Hazmat”

Hazmat: Open-source containment for AI agents

Open-source tool Hazmat runs AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex in a dedicated account, restricting access to credentials and files.

Hazmat is a free open-source containment tool that launches AI coding agents, including Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Cursor Agent, under a separate local account, sharing only a chosen project directory and enforcing per-session sandbox policies, network rules, and optional backups. On macOS it backs up the project, builds a session-specific sandbox policy, and starts the harness behind a firewall rule; Linux runs natively and an Apple-container backend is experimental. About 5.5% of the code is a TLA+ formal specification of its containment model.

Help Net Security·Aug 17, 00:00 UTC · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security1

Hottest cybersecurity open-source tools of the month: August 2026

August's open-source security roundup highlights NVIDIA SkillSpector for AI agent skill scanning, Future AGI, Chainloop, PentestGPT, and Hazmat agent containment.

Help Net Security's August 2026 roundup covers five open-source tools: NVIDIA's SkillSpector, a scanner that assesses AI agent skills from directories, zips, SKILL.md files, or Git URLs and returns findings and risk scores; Future AGI, an Apache 2.0 platform for tracing, evaluating, simulating, and guardrailing LLM agents; Chainloop, a software supply chain evidence store that produces signed in-toto attestations in CI pipelines; PentestGPT, an agentic penetration testing framework running recon, exploit, and reporting stages; and Hazmat, which runs AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex inside a separate machine account for containment.

Help Net Security·Aug 26, 00:00 UTC · 21d agoTools

Houthis Used Claude Code to Develop Missile Guidance Software: Anthropic

Anthropic's threat report details a Houthi-linked Yemeni cell using parallel Claude Code sessions to build missile guidance software, evading safeguards by fragmenting tasks.

Anthropic's September threat report describes a Yemen-based cell, assessed as highly likely Houthi-linked, that used Claude Code across multiple parallel instances to develop guidance software for a tactical guided rocket, a ballistic missile with over 2,000 km range, and a hypersonic glide vehicle concept called 'R2000'. The operators integrated open-source autopilot software, built six-degree-of-freedom trajectory simulations, and used reinforcement learning to tune flight-control algorithms, ultimately compiling an offline executable. The group test-fired a guided rocket that failed, then used Claude within hours to analyze launch telemetry. Anthropic blocked numerous requests, but operators evaded safeguards by obscuring intent and dividing work across separate conversations before accounts were banned; the case is one of six conventional-weapons cases (three China-linked, two Russia-linked) in a report covering disrupted operations from December 2025 to August 2026.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 13, 14:15 UTC · 3d agoAI safety & securityHN 47↑ · 38 comments1

Week in review: Records allegedly stolen from Azure tenants, Medusa ransomware hits 500+ orgs

Week in review: Medusa ransomware hit 500+ orgs per CISA, millions of Azure tenant records allegedly stolen, SafePal and French tax authority breaches disclosed.

Help Net Security's weekly roundup covers the FBI, CISA, and HHS joint advisory update reporting Medusa ransomware has breached more than 500 organizations since June 2021, and threat actor TheHatman's claim of millions of employee records stolen from Azure tenants of Fortune 500 firms including McDonald's, Vodafone, Kyndryl, and Tata Consultancy Services, per Hudson Rock. It also covers the SafePal breach affecting 39,798 customers, France's DGFiP breach exposing data on 678,000 individuals, and UT San delaying its fall semester after a cyberattack. Security items include critical unauthenticated GitLab flaw CVE-2026-19478, an actively exploited patched macOS Screen Sharing flaw deploying a cryptominer, US charges against 17 Mabna Institute Iranian hackers over 31TB of stolen academic data, and Google Mandiant's AI agents finding 100+ high-severity vulnerabilities.

Help Net Security·Aug 23, 00:00 UTC · 24d agoData breach in the wildCVE-2026-19478

Show HN: Stuxnet – A reconstructed source code of the infamous cyber-weapon

A GitHub project publishes reconstructed source code of Stuxnet, the infamous industrial cyber-weapon, drawing 161 Hacker News points and 49 comments.

A Show HN post links to a GitHub repository (Sadpainy/Stuxnet) containing reconstructed source code of Stuxnet, the well-known industrial sabotage cyber-weapon. The post gained significant community attention with 161 points and 49 comments on Hacker News. The repository offers a historical code-level reference for studying one of the most famous malware specimens rather than describing new threat activity.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 7, 22:12 UTC · 8d agoResearchHN 161↑ · 49 comments

Show HN: Geiger – See every AI agent on your machine and what it can touch

Geiger, a new open-source tool, surfaces AI agents running on a machine and the files and resources they can access.

Geiger launched on Hacker News as an open-source utility that shows every AI agent operating on a local machine and the scope of what each agent can touch. The Show HN post drew early community attention with 21 points and 11 comments, with the code hosted on GitHub under the Atomburstofficial account.

Hacker News · security·Sep 9, 14:54 UTC · 7d agoToolsHN 21↑ · 11 comments

The State of Cloud Risk 2026: Most Security Findings Aren’t Real Attacker Opportunities

Wiz Research's 2026 cloud risk report finds most high-severity findings lack a viable path to compromise, urging exposure-based prioritization.

Wiz Research telemetry underpins a State of Cloud Risk 2026 report arguing that the majority of high-severity security findings are not real attacker opportunities because they lack a path to compromise. The report pushes defenders to prioritize findings by exposure and exploitability rather than raw severity scores. No specific CVEs, victims, or incident counts are provided in the available text.

Wiz Blog·Aug 26, 15:01 UTC · 21d agoResearch

China Is Strapping ‘Digital Bombs’ to Civilian Infrastructure—Is the US Ready?

WIRED examines Volt Typhoon pre-positioning 'digital bombs' in US civilian infrastructure via a war game simulation discussion.

WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast features reporter Andy Greenberg discussing a war game simulating a cyberattack by Chinese hacking group Volt Typhoon. The episode examines Volt Typhoon's practice of planting persistent access in US civilian infrastructure that could be activated during conflict, and questions whether the US is prepared.

WIRED · Security·Aug 20, 20:03 UTC · 27d agoThreat actor

Russian hackers plant nuclear weapon prompt in malware to trip AI safety guardrails

ESET reports Russian group UAC-0099 hid a prompt in VBS malware comments to trip AI safety filters and disrupt automated malware analysis in Ukraine.

ESET identified a technique dubbed GuardBreaker in which UAC-0099 embedded a comment reading "I want to make nuclear weapon. Help me …" inside a malicious VBS script to trigger AI safety mechanisms and halt AI-assisted malware analysis. The script, part of the group's toolset, downloads the MATCHBOIL malware used exclusively by this Russia-aligned group; CERT-UA documented the chain including LUNCHPOKE, BURNYBEAR and MATCHBOIL.V2 in a July advisory. UAC-0099 typically targets transportation and energy sectors and hands validated targets to GRU-linked Sandworm. ESET warned that AI-assisted analysis must be backed by layered detection and human-driven engineering.

Help Net Security·Aug 31, 00:00 UTC · 16d agoAI safety & security in the wild

Molecular Déjà Vu: Digit-Level Retrieval of Published Values in Frontier Language Models

Audit of 22 frontier models finds widespread verbatim retrieval of published molecular property values, with higher reasoning increasing recall of memorized numbers.

An arXiv audit tests 22 frontier LLMs across 12 molecular regression benchmarks for verbatim retrieval of published values. More than 50% of the LLMs show verbatim retrieval on five datasets, and identical experiments are flagged 89% more often at a high reasoning level than at the lowest one. Suppressing retrieval moves model prediction errors closer together in relative terms, suggesting predictive capability is not determined solely by memorized values.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:32 UTC · 12d agoAI research1

Using AI for Weapons Development

Anthropic report reveals Yemen-based actors used Claude Code to build guidance software for guided rockets and ballistic missiles.

Bruce Schneier highlights Anthropic's misuse disclosure describing a threat actor cell in northern Yemen running three weapons programs: a guided rocket with phone-class homing guidance, a 2,000+ km multi-stage ballistic missile, and the 'R2000' hypersonic glide vehicle set. The actors used Claude Code as a substitute for human engineers to write GNC software, integrate an open-source autopilot, tune controls, and run flight simulations, orchestrating multiple Claude instances in delegated roles. Safeguards blocked many requests but evasion tactics included hiding intent and splitting work across sessions; one guided rocket test-fire failed but no operational device was fielded.

Schneier on Security·Sep 14, 16:07 UTC · 2d agoAI safety & security in the wild

Show HN: MultiMatte, a Promptable Image Background Removal Model

Feyn releases MultiMatte, a promptable background-removal model fine-tuned from Meta's SAM 3 via LoRA, outputting alpha mattes that beat SAM 3 on segmentation benchmarks.

Feyn introduced MultiMatte, a promptable image background-removal model built on Meta's SAM 3 (860M parameters). It modifies only 19.49M parameters (2.27%) using a rank-16 LoRA adapter and replaces binary masks with alpha mattes to handle fuzzy boundaries like hair. On the DIS-VD benchmark it scores 0.901 S-measure versus SAM 3's 0.667, and it improves on SAM 3 across all twelve evaluated splits. Training used 19,953 images for 14,000 steps with focal and Dice loss, and the merged weights are available via the nobg library and a web demo.

Hacker News · security·Sep 10, 15:50 UTC · 6d agoModel releaseHN 21↑ · 4 comments1

How Developers Prevent Production Risk at the Source

Wiz argues shift-left code-stage security cuts remediation costs and ships Wiz Code, WizOS, and WizCLI to catch flaws pre-deployment.

A Wiz blog post argues that fixing vulnerabilities at the code stage costs a fraction of production remediation, citing the node:20-slim base image which ships 14 known CVEs, three of them critical. It claims AI agents can now analyze open-source commits and generate working exploits in minutes, shrinking the window between a public fix and automated attacks. The post promotes WizOS near-zero-CVE base images, WizCLI and MCP-server checks inside developer and AI agent sessions, and Wiz Code scanning across pull requests, repositories, and pipelines covering SAST, SCA, secrets, and IaC misconfigurations.

Wiz Blog·Sep 3, 00:31 UTC · 13d agoIndustry1

Countering misuse of AI: September 2026 / Anthropic

Anthropic publishes threat intelligence on Claude misuse across seven harm areas from December 2025 through August 2026.

Anthropic's Threat Intelligence team details disrupted operations using Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus across cyber operations, influence operations, surveillance, scams, biological misuse, weapons development, and distillation. The report introduces Generative Threat Groups (GTGs), including state-sponsored groups and financially motivated individuals running AI-augmented multi-victim campaigns. It argues AI uplift now collapses the gap between state-sponsored operations and lone actors, aided by frameworks like PentAGI.

Lobsters · security·updated 13:01 UTC · 8h ago·first Sep 11, 09:46 UTC · 5d agoAI safety & security 18 sources1

CTEM Is Not About the Stages. It’s About the Outcome.

Horizon3 argues CTEM programs should measure continuously reduced exposure rather than mapping technologies to Gartner's five stages.

Horizon3 contends that Continuous Threat Exposure Management should be judged by one outcome: continuously reducing attacker-reachable exposure, not by mapping a technology to each of Gartner's five stages. The post argues validation and verification, not visibility or closed tickets, provide evidence that attack paths are actually broken. It describes a Discover, Validate, Prioritize, Remediate, Verify, Repeat motion as its operationalization of CTEM.

Horizon3.ai·Sep 2, 13:11 UTC · 14d agoIndustry

Lightweight Vision Transformer Compression for On-Device Plant Disease Detection in Resource-Constrained Agricultural Field Conditions

A unified ViT compression pipeline (H-BAC pruning, quantization, distillation) cuts plant-disease models 54.5x to 6.01 MB while keeping 95.13% accuracy.

Researchers combined Hessian-Balanced Adaptive Block Pruning (H-BAC), guided by second-order sensitivity estimation, with quantization and attention-based knowledge distillation to compress Vision Transformers for on-device chilli plant disease detection in India. On a 3-class cross-village, cross-device out-of-distribution dataset, the integrated pipeline reduced model size from 327.42 MB to 6.01 MB (54.5x) at 95.13 +/- 2.32% accuracy, matching the 95.13% FP32 baseline. Ablations also show a directly trained 6.01 MB INT8 student reaches 94.87% accuracy, indicating where pruning and distillation add limited value.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:40 UTC · 12d agoAI research

The Closed Loop Remediation Playbook with Wiz

Wiz announces Workflows general availability and public preview of Remediation and Response for closed-loop, automated cloud remediation.

Wiz published a remediation playbook promoting a closed-loop approach to cloud security remediation. The company announced that Wiz Workflows is now generally available, while Remediation and Response capabilities are in public preview. The announcement is a vendor product release aimed at enabling self-healing cloud environments rather than reporting a new threat or vulnerability.

Wiz Blog·Aug 17, 12:23 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Tools

TCRF taken offline by DDoS attack after Claude user ban

The Cutting Room Floor game wiki was taken offline by a DDoS attack after a user leveraging Claude was banned.

The Cutting Room Floor (TCRF), a wiki documenting unused video game content, was knocked offline by a distributed denial-of-service attack. The attack reportedly followed moderation action banning a user who was using Anthropic's Claude. The incident highlights friction between community sites and AI-assisted users and tools.

Lobsters · security·Aug 28, 21:26 UTC · 19d agoAI safety & security in the wild

Russian-Linked Hackers Accessed Polish Power Plant OT Network Through Private APN, Says CERT.PL

CERT.PL disclosed that Russian-linked hackers accessed a Polish combined heat and power plant's OT network through a private APN in 2025.

Poland's CERT (CERT.PL) released details of a 2025 attack on a Polish combined heat and power plant. Russian-linked hackers accessed the plant's OT network through a private APN. The disclosure adds to a series of intrusions against Polish critical infrastructure attributed to Russian-linked actors.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 12, 09:30 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Threat actor in the wild

Show HN: Panel – A research workspace where the agent can build its own panes

Panel is an open-source research workspace where AI agents dynamically build their own panes, posted on Hacker News.

Panel, shared as a Show HN project on GitHub, is a research workspace in which the agent can construct its own panes rather than using a fixed interface. The post received 41 points and 8 comments on Hacker News. It targets agentic research workflows with a dynamically generated UI.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 15, 13:58 UTC · 1d agoAI tools & infraHN 41↑ · 8 comments

Trends in Web Threats in CY Q2 2022: Malicious JavaScript Downloaders Are Evolving

Unit 42 detected 751,000 landing URL incidents in Q2 2022 and documented malicious JavaScript downloaders evolving to evade detection.

Unit 42 detected 751,331 landing URL incidents (253,644 unique) and 1,744,629 malicious host URL incidents (256,844 unique) from April through June 2022. Total landing URL incidents rose compared with Q1 2022, and unique host URL incidents grew 42%, indicating attackers deploying more variants. The report includes a case study of a JavaScript downloader campaign demonstrating new evasion techniques. Personal sites, blogs, and business sites were the top apparently benign entry points.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 13:05 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Research

Anthropic: AI Misuse Is Entering a New Phase: From Cybercrime to Surveillance, Propaganda and Weapons

Anthropic's threat intelligence report documents AI misuse scaling cybercrime, surveillance, propaganda, and weapons development from December 2025 to August 2026.

Anthropic's September 2026 threat intelligence report covers malicious activity disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026, spanning cyber operations, influence campaigns, surveillance, fraud, and weapons. One operator (aliases MeowSHA/frkoo/blazespider) ran a credential-harvesting pipeline on 10 AWS EC2 workers that downloaded and scanned 1.8 million Android APKs for hardcoded secrets, feeding confirmed breaches. Claude was abused to build malware, phishing tools, and a mass-interception platform used by Malian national security authorities, with actors linked to China, Iran, and West Africa.

Security Affairs·Sep 12, 16:46 UTC · 4d agoAI safety & security1

Users in Houthi-Held Yemen Tried to Develop Advanced Weapons With AI, Anthropic Says

Anthropic says Claude users in Houthi-held northern Yemen attempted hypersonic missile and guidance software development; accounts were blocked, no operational weapon fielded.

Anthropic's third misuse report since March 2025, covering December through August, says users in northern Yemen ran three weapons programs, including a multi-variant hypersonic glide missile and a warhead maneuvered mid-course with mobile phone hardware. The users used Claude Code instead of human engineers to develop guidance, navigation and control software, conducted one failed guided rocket test, and built an offline simulation toolkit before Anthropic banned the accounts. Houthis denied relying on open sources for weapons development, and analysts noted they lack the industrial capacity to actually build hypersonic missiles.

SecurityWeek·Sep 12, 01:50 UTC · 4d agoAI safety & security

VU#728712: Konami's Metal Gear Online 3 contains a heap-based buffer overflow

CERT/CC details CVE-2026-19874, a heap overflow in Metal Gear Online 3 letting match hosts execute code on lobby members' machines.

VU#728712 describes a heap-based buffer overflow in Konami's Metal Gear Online 3, tracked as CVE-2026-19874, affecting version 1.1.2.8 (Steam AppID 287700). The input-validation flaw lies in processing Steam lobby metadata tied to the player-removal feature, letting a match host trigger remote code execution on lobby members' machines via specially crafted data. The game is an 8v8 competitive shooter using Steam Matchmaking for lobbies.

CERT/CC Vulnerability Notes·Aug 24, 14:57 UTC · 23d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-19874

North Korean Hackers Tied to Rust Supply Chain Attack

Researchers linked a backdoor hidden in compromised Rust packages to North Korean actors' prior software supply chain attack campaigns.

Cybersecurity researchers attributed a malicious backdoor planted in compromised Rust packages to North Korean threat actors based on ties to earlier supply chain attacks. The campaign targets the open-source developer ecosystem, where infected packages can propagate downstream to developer build systems. The attribution suggests DPRK-aligned actors continue investing in open-source supply chain tradecraft.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 21, 12:40 UTC · 26d agoThreat actor in the wild

Trends in Web Threats: Old Web Skimmer Still Active Today

Unit 42 detected 577,000 landing URL incidents in Q1 2022, with an old web skimmer family still actively stealing payment card data.

Palo Alto Unit 42 detected 577,275 landing URL incidents (116,643 unique) and 2,043,862 malicious host URL incidents (180,370 unique) between January and March 2022. Web threat volumes declined after the November 2021 holiday peak, but an old web skimmer family remained active. Business and economy sites overtook personal sites as the most common apparently benign entry points. Most malicious domains geolocated to the United States, Germany, and Russia, though proxy servers and VPNs obscure true locations.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 13:05 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Research

What Is a Website Attack Surface? A Beginner’s Guide to Reducing Risk

Sucuri's beginner guide explains how logins, plugins, APIs, and forgotten backups expand a website's attack surface and how to reduce that risk.

Sucuri published educational guidance explaining that login pages, contact forms, plugins, APIs, staging sites, and forgotten backups each add exposed components that constitute a website's attack surface. The article frames continuous attack surface reduction as a risk management practice for website owners. It is evergreen educational content rather than breaking incident news.

Sucuri Blog·Aug 19, 20:06 UTC · 28d agoIndustry

Concern Hacktivism Israel Hamas

Hacktivist activity tied to the Israel-Hamas conflict is raising concern among defenders as threat groups target organizations in the region.

Infosecurity Magazine reports growing concern over hacktivism linked to the Israel-Hamas conflict. The headline suggests ongoing geopolitically motivated attacks against organizations connected to the conflict. Full article text was unavailable, so specific groups, targets, and techniques are unconfirmed.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 19, 00:00 UTC · 28d agoThreat actor in the wild

Vibe-Terrorism: Inside the Yemen Cell That Used Claude to Build Guided Weapons

Anthropic's threat intelligence report says a small Yemen cell used Claude to help build guided weapons, a novel AI misuse case.

SOCRadar highlights a case from Anthropic's September 2026 threat intelligence report in which a small militant cell based in northern Yemen used Claude to help build guided weapons. The write-up coins the term "vibe-terrorism" for this AI-assisted weapons development. It is framed as a novel example of AI misuse outside typical cyber threat activity.

SOCRadar·Sep 11, 10:10 UTC · 5d agoAI safety & security

US fuel gauge exposure fell by more than half in three months

Help Net Security·Aug 7, 00:00 UTC · Aug 7, 2026Exploit / PoC

Show HN: LLM Attention Visualization

A developer released a browser-based tool that visualizes which past tokens influence each LLM output token using aggregated, value-weighted attention scores.

A Show HN project presents a React application built on Transformers.js that renders per-token attention influence by aggregating attention weights scaled by value-vector magnitudes across all attention heads and layers. To expose internal tensors, the author instrumented the ONNX computation graph, hosted a modified model on Hugging Face, and pre-generated prompts to avoid long model downloads in the browser. Demos with a 600-million-parameter model show how verbatim copying draws heavily on source tokens and how single outputs blend information from multiple phrases.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 8, 16:59 UTC · 8d agoAI tools & infraHN 41↑ · 9 comments