Smart search ranks by meaning as well as keywords (one row per story, last 45 days).
A remote code execution proof of concept for Joomla Content Editor (JCE) 2.9.15 was published on Exploit-DB.
Exploit-DB added a webapps proof-of-concept for remote code execution affecting the Joomla Content Editor (JCE) component version 2.9.15. JCE is a widely deployed editor extension used on Joomla websites. The entry provides no CVE id and no evidence of in-the-wild exploitation.
Researchers propose Conformal Relevance, which builds conformal score functions via in-context example curation and ensembling to improve conciseness across seven NLP tasks.
The paper targets NLP tasks like summarization and extractive QA that reduce to retrieving content under coverage and conciseness constraints. Conformal Relevance replaces hand-engineered LLM scoring prompts with curated in-context examples and ensembles, maintaining coverage guarantees while improving conciseness with minimal manual input. The authors demonstrate the framework on seven NLP tasks and contribute theory, including a complementarity condition for when ensembling improves worst-case sentence scores and a saturation bound on ensemble gains.
Joomla fixed CVE-2026-73371, an improper ACL check letting unauthorized users batch-copy uneditable items in Joomla CMS 4.0.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2.
Joomla security advisory 20260808 describes CVE-2026-73371, an incorrect access control issue in batch copy actions. The flaw allows unauthorized users to perform copy batch operations on items they cannot edit. Affected versions are 4.0.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2; fixes ship in 5.4.8 and 6.1.3. The issue was reported by Sabuhi Mammadov on 2026-07-28.
Opinion piece urges migrating 35KB preprompts from Anthropic/OpenAI to self-hosted Ollama, citing session privacy risks and safety filters blocking security research.
The author documents gotchas migrating 35KB preprompts from Claude Opus to self-hosted Ollama, motivated by fears that frontier providers train on user sessions, citing the OpenAI Navier-Stokes controversy. The piece argues inference providers cannot audit their own retention or training pipelines and that only self-hosted hardware offers verifiable privacy. It also criticizes frontier safety filters for refusing vulnerability research tasks and calls for models that support exploitability testing in CI/CD pipelines.
Joomla fixed CVE-2026-73337, an MFA authentication bypass caused by insufficient state checks, affecting Joomla CMS 4.0.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2.
Joomla security advisory 20260807 describes CVE-2026-73337, an authentication bypass in Joomla CMS multi-factor authentication. Insufficient state checks create a vector that allows 2FA checks to be bypassed; the vendor rates the impact as high with moderate probability. Affected versions are 4.0.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2; fixes ship in 5.4.8 and 6.1.3. The issue was reported by bloman and Matej Rada on 2026-07-25.
Interpretability study traces how Qwen, Llama, and Gemma route query information and internal knowledge across layers when answering questions.
Researchers used layerwise interventions on hidden states to separate query-routing signals from target knowledge in language models, testing Qwen, Llama, and Gemma on country-continent questions with varied answer types. A pair-conditioned request direction strengthens before interventions alter downstream knowledge, opening a causal window while answer-supporting content is still forming. Trajectories differ by model: Gemma shows a partially overlapping mid-layer routing profile, while Llama has no sustained routing-effect window under the same gates.
Joomla patches CVE-2026-71573, improper CORS origin validation in CMS requests, in versions 5.4.8 and 6.1.3.
Joomla disclosed improper CORS origin validation (CVE-2026-71573), where configured CORS origins were not properly validated on CORS requests, rated moderate impact/severity and moderate probability. It affects Joomla CMS 4.0.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2. Fixed in Joomla 5.4.8 and 6.1.3; reported on 2026-07-09 by Agamemnon Fakas and caveeroo.
Paper proposes Generative Marketing Mix Modeling to causally estimate Generative Engine Optimization and Marketing effects on business outcomes.
The authors develop GMMM, a causal inference framework for measuring how often users see and notice a firm's name in generated answers, which standard marketing data ignore. For GEO it combines repeated generated answers with question counts, shares of generative-system usage and notice probabilities; for GEM it uses sponsored placement records with notice probabilities. The framework compares expected business responses under alternative treatment sequences, establishes identification conditions, and is evaluated on simulated product-recommendation answers in English and Japanese.
Joomla fixes CVE-2026-71572, response header injection in download views enabling reflected file download attacks, in 5.4.8/6.1.3.
Joomla disclosed a response header injection flaw (CVE-2026-71572) in multiple download views, caused by lack of output processing, enabling reflected file download and content-type confusion. It is rated low impact, severity, and probability and affects Joomla CMS 3.0.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2. The fix ships in Joomla 5.4.8 and 6.1.3 on 2026-08-18.
Huntress launched AI Search for Managed SIEM, translating plain-English questions into ESQL log queries with schedulable custom alerts.
Huntress introduced AI Search in its Managed SIEM, letting users query logs in natural language instead of writing ESQL, KQL, or SPL. The feature generates a real ESQL query behind the scenes, exposes it for users to inspect and learn from, and allows saved searches to be scheduled as recurring alerts at hourly, daily, or weekly cadence. A planned next version will return summarized plain-language answers instead of raw logs.
Joomla fixed CVE-2026-73372, an improper ACL check that leaks inaccessible contact items' data into schema.org snippets, affecting CMS 5.1.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2.
Joomla security advisory 20260809 describes CVE-2026-73372, an incorrect access control issue when injecting schema.org contact data. Improper access checks inject contact information for inaccessible contact items into schema.org snippets, exposing restricted data. Affected versions are 5.1.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2; fixes ship in 5.4.8 and 6.1.3. The issue was reported by Stefan Wendhausen on 2026-07-31.
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.
Joomla patches CVE-2026-72531, an improper ACL check allowing unauthorized custom-field creation via webservice endpoints, in CMS 5.4.8/6.1.3.
Joomla disclosed an incorrect access control issue (CVE-2026-72531) letting unauthorized users create custom fields for inaccessible components through webservice endpoints. It affects Joomla CMS 4.0.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2, rated moderate impact and severity with low probability. Fixed in Joomla 5.4.8 and 6.1.3; reported by ebadfd on 2026-07-06.
PrivAudit framework audits 998 websites for CCPA compliance, finding stronger disclosures but pervasive, weakly responsive third-party cookie tracking.
PrivAudit is an automated dual-lens auditing framework combining LLM-based analysis of privacy policies grounded in CCPA provisions with automated browser measurements of cookie writes under diverse privacy configurations. Applied to 998 websites, it finds CCPA-subject sites disclose opt-outs, data sharing, and user rights more frequently, yet tracking remains pervasive: 6,392 targeting cookies, 49% third-party writes. Cookies show limited-to-moderate responsiveness to privacy signals and consent choices even when sites claim to honor them. The framework is open-sourced and shared with regulators.
Joomla fixed CVE-2026-73373, an unrestricted SHTML file upload flaw affecting CMS 1.0.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2 that can enable code execution.
Joomla published security advisory 20260810 for CVE-2026-73373, an unrestricted upload of files with dangerous type in Joomla CMS. The default dangerous-file list omitted SHTML files, which could lead to code execution on servers that execute SHTML. Affected versions are 1.0.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2; fixes ship in 5.4.8 and 6.1.3. The issue was reported by Valentin Lobstein (Chocapikk) on 2026-07-29.
SCPTM graph-augmented variational topic model shows syntax aids topic diversity and descriptor quality but gains stem mainly from the variational encoder.
The Structural Contextual Probabilistic Topic Model represents corpora as heterogeneous document-word graphs with lexical and syntactic edges processed by a Graph Attention Network inside a VAE for mixed-membership topic distributions. Across four corpora, neural gains in document-topic alignment are attributable to the variational encoder rather than syntax, while graph-augmented variants improve topic diversity everywhere. Dependency paths add value on argumentative deliberative texts but are redundant in technical and institutional registers.
Joomla fixes CVE-2026-71574, inconsistent ACL checks letting unauthorized users mutate data via webservice APIs, in CMS 5.4.8/6.1.3.
Joomla disclosed an inconsistent access control flaw (CVE-2026-71574) in mutating webservice endpoints, where unauthorized users could perform mutations restricted in the backend UI; impact is rated high. It affects Joomla CMS 4.0.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2, with moderate severity and low probability. The fix ships in Joomla 5.4.8 and 6.1.3 on 2026-08-18.
ModerationBench shows foundation models can nearly triple Bluesky's moderation F1 (0.60 vs 0.22), with instruction- and example-driven guidance performing comparably.
Researchers built ModerationBench, a new benchmark of 4,000 manually annotated in-the-wild posts from Bluesky, to test whether foundation models can reliably operationalize content moderation policies. They systematically compare instruction-driven guidance (reasoning from policy precepts) with example-driven guidance (generalizing from precedents) for Vision-Language Models. Both paradigms achieve comparable peak effectiveness, and foundation models nearly triple the F1 of Bluesky's deployed moderation system on Random Posts (0.60 vs 0.22).
Joomla fixed CVE-2026-73336, an XSS in schema.org markup outputs caused by improper escaping, affecting CMS 5.1.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2.
Joomla security advisory 20260806 describes CVE-2026-73336, a cross-site scripting issue in schema.org markup outputs. Improper escaping flags create an XSS vector in schema.org output; the vendor rates impact and severity as moderate with low probability. Affected versions are 5.1.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2; fixes ship in 5.4.8 and 6.1.3. The issue was reported by Amin Isayev and Geo (GitHub.com/geo-chen) on 2026-07-21.
Training-free reasoning-plus-retrieval framework lifts multilingual multimodal entity linking accuracy by 6.9% overall and up to 23.3% on rare entities.
The paper broadens rarity measurement in multimodal entity linking using knowledge-graph structural metrics beyond popularity-based pageview metrics, identifying many rare entities that popularity metrics miss. Across these rare-entity slices, state-of-the-art accuracy drops by 15.4-39.9%, exposing distinct failure modes under different rarity definitions. The proposed training-free framework iteratively searches and reasons over Wikipedia with a reasoning-capable vision-language model; experiments show reasoning and retrieval are complementary. On the MERLIN benchmark covering Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Tamil, and Vietnamese, the system improves overall accuracy by 6.9% and up to 23.3% on rare entities, with MERLIN-Rare test slices released.
Joomla fixes CVE-2026-72532, an improper ACL check letting unauthorized users create categories via webservice endpoints, in CMS 5.4.8/6.1.3.
Joomla disclosed an incorrect access control flaw (CVE-2026-72532) in category webservice endpoints, allowing unauthorized users to create categories for inaccessible components. It affects Joomla CMS 4.0.0-5.4.7 and 6.0.0-6.1.2 and is rated moderate impact and severity with low probability. The fix ships in Joomla 5.4.8 and 6.1.3 on 2026-08-18; it was reported by Amin Isayev and Geo.
Study shows LLMs with Mixture-of-Agents and QLoRA finetuning effectively simplify medical texts into plain language while preserving content.
The paper evaluates Plain Language Adaptation (PLA) using GPT-4o-mini, Gemini-1.5-pro, and LLaMA in zero-shot and few-shot settings. It compares prompting strategies, QLoRA finetuning across models, and integrates Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) techniques for robustness. Results demonstrate LLM-driven PLA makes healthcare texts more comprehensible while retaining essential content.
Metasploit 6.5 ships 13 new modules including RCEs for SonicWall SMA1000, Ghost CMS, Joomla JCE and Langflow, plus a Linux kernel LPE.
Rapid7's Metasploit wrap-up covers the 6.5 release, which adds 13 new modules, including remote code execution exploits for WordPress WP2Shell, Ghost CMS, Joomla JCE, Langflow, OpenCATS, Pterodactyl Panel, SonicWall SMA1000, Ray Dashboard and a Pix-for-WooCommerce plugin. The Fragnesia Linux kernel local privilege escalation (CVE-2026-46300) also landed. The release introduces HTTP malleable profiles, MCP functionality, Linux multi-fetch payloads and improved Windows on ARM support.
An open methodology toolkit measures whether transformer language models contextualize fixed word forms across domains using bridge forms and layer-wise silhouette analysis.
The manual documents an open toolkit built around 'bridge forms' - identical written words recurring across two or more subject domains with a different sense in each - to test whether transformer language models individuate word occurrences by context beyond the embedding layer. It covers declarative specification of bridge forms, Wikipedia corpus acquisition, occurrence localization, layer-wise representation extraction, domain-pairwise silhouette measurement, and visualization, justifying each choice against failure modes such as sense contamination and subword-tokenization misalignment. It is a methodological and implementation reference and reports no empirical results.
Huntress details Knight Office, a new AiTM phishing kit stealing Microsoft 365 session tokens and registering attacker-controlled devices.
Huntress investigated an August 18, 2026 adversary-in-the-middle attack using the Knight Office phishing kit, which captured Microsoft 365 session tokens via a DocuSign-style lure routed through a Monday.com tracking link and a compromised Joomla site. After token capture, the actor enrolled an unauthorized host in Microsoft Entra ID and bound a Windows Hello for Business key credential to the account. The kit's operator console, found at IP 104.37.188.94, is built on Python Flask and hosts at least 25 .vu phishing domains. Telemetry links the kit to at least nine token-replay logins in two weeks and roughly 700 reported lure emails since April.
Five critical flaws (CVSS 9.8–10.0) in WPMU DEV Dashboard, Avada, TranslatePress, Pods, and GiveWP enable WordPress admin takeover and RCE.
Wordfence and Patchstack disclosed five critical flaws in WordPress plugins and themes: WPMU DEV Dashboard, Avada, TranslatePress, Pods, and GiveWP. The issues include unauthenticated authentication bypass (CVE-2026-76581), arbitrary file write leading to RCE (CVE-2026-18431), administrator account takeover via password-reset URL exposure (CVE-2026-19632), privilege escalation (CVE-2026-19598), and PHP object injection to RCE (CVE-2026-82222, CVSS 10.0). Patchstack says the GiveWP flaw chains an unsafe unserialize helper, attacker-controlled donation data, and a gadget chain in shipped code.
An 8.9B-parameter latent-space language model using next-concept prediction matches OLMo-3-7B pretraining loss with only 51.3% of the training tokens.
NCP-ArchPreview augments next-token prediction with Next Concept Prediction over a product-quantized concept vocabulary built from hidden states, trained jointly end-to-end. The 8.9B model was trained on 5.73T tokens from the Dolma-3 dataset, the largest latent-space language model demonstration to date. It consumes 51.3% of the tokens to reach OLMo-3-7B's final pretraining loss and outperforms it by 2.45 points on the downstream macro-average, including a 5.99-point GSM8K gain. The learned latent space also enables lightweight domain adaptation via a 17M-parameter VQ module and improves speculative drafting accepted length by 4.17%.
TrendAI and CHT Security used an AI pipeline to find over 300 verified WordPress plugin zero-days at roughly $20 per vulnerability.
A pipeline built in three days by TrendAI and CHT Security, presented at Ekoparty Miami, paired AI-driven static analysis with automated Docker provisioning and Chrome DevTools MCP dynamic verification to surface more than 300 critical zero-days in WordPress plugins within 72 hours. The run consumed about 222 million tokens across 95 tasks, averaging roughly $20 per verified vulnerability, with findings including pre-auth RCE, SQL injection, privilege escalation, SSRF, and an AI-assembled downgrade attack chain. Dynamic verification eliminated over 80% of false positives, but manual review at 30-60 minutes per finding remains the bottleneck, straining ZDI and NIST triage backlogs.
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.
Weekly recap: actively exploited Chrome V8 zero-day, MikroTik RouterOS zero-day chain, Magento StyleSmuggler backdoor, and critical N-able N-central flaws.
Google patched an actively exploited Chrome V8 type confusion zero-day, CVE-2026-85046 (CVSS 8.8), the sixth exploited Chrome zero-day of 2026. CERT Polska warned of the MikroTrick exploit chain (CVE-2026-67276 and CVE-2026-86060, CVSS 9.2) giving unauthenticated full control of MikroTik RouterOS devices via SSH, observed since September 2. Sansec disclosed the StyleSmuggler Magento/Adobe Commerce zero-day used since September 4 to inject a Rust backdoor into online stores, while N-able patched three critical N-central flaws (CVE-2026-86206, CVE-2026-86207, and CVE-2026-86218, CVSS 10.0) with Huntress observing likely exploitation. Elastic and Morphisec also detailed RevStealer, an information stealer spread via game cheats and a fake Claude Desktop app.
Evaluation of twelve LLMs on 222 clinical questions shows verbatim quotes rarely substantiate claims; claude-opus-5 fully substantiates only 37.1%.
The authors build a standardized harness over four clinical practice guidelines and evaluate twelve LLMs on 222 synthetic clinical questions, measuring citation attachment, verbatim quote production, and claim substantiation. Most models attach verbatim quotes to over 90% of claims from prompting alone, though lightweight models like claude-haiku-4.5 struggle. Quotes frequently fail to substantiate claims: claude-opus-5 quotes 98.0% of claims but fully substantiates only 37.1%, exposing a capability gap for verifiable clinical QA.
PRC-linked Red Heron exploits critical Gitea RCE CVE-2026-60004 to steal source code and deploy JITTERLY implant with SIXZUT LD_PRELOAD rootkit; victims span five countries.
Acronis Threat Research Unit attributes a campaign to Chinese-speaking threat actor Red Heron, which weaponized CVE-2026-60004, a CVSS 9.8 RCE in Gitea versions 1.17 through 1.27.0, patched in 1.27.1 on July 27, 2026. The actor built an automated exploitation framework after a public PoC appeared, scanned 1,386 internet-exposed Gitea instances across seven countries, and separately listed 477 Taiwan-based systems across defense, energy, elections, and AI sectors. Confirmed victims include organizations in Canada, Argentina, Taiwan, the US, and Sri Lanka, with a Canadian renewable-energy firm hit in 22 sessions and a Taiwanese industrial automation firm losing hundreds of repositories including SCADA/HMI tools. Red Heron deploys the JITTERLY Linux implant (30+ commands, AES-128-GCM, Adaptix-like protocol) and the SIXZUT LD_PRELOAD rootkit disguised as libglthread.so.2, and moved laterally into a Synology/Proxmox environment to steal VM backups.
Controlled mid-training experiments on Qwen3-8B-Base find each domain has a 10-40% coverage optimum and domain gaps survive alignment SFT.
Using Qwen3-8B-Base (with a 4B replication) across five semantically rule-disjoint KOR-Bench domains, the authors train 30 data allocations spanning the five-domain simplex at five seeds each. All five domains show interior optima in the moderate 10-40% coverage band, and domain gaps persist after a fixed-budget compensatory SFT pass, which raises 116/120 cells yet bridges 0/240 pairs at a 5% threshold. Zero coverage collapses mid-training-only accuracy, though a FineWeb-Edu-only control shows the collapse is partly generic drift. The results argue mid-training data composition requires principled design rather than reliance on later alignment.
Rosetta ranks 4th and 5th in AlexandriaX-2026 dialectal Arabic dialogue translation using a LoRA adapter on NileChat-3B, finding limited pretraining benefit.
The Rosetta system for the AlexandriaX-2026 shared task fine-tunes a LoRA adapter on NileChat-3B for context-aware English-to-dialectal Arabic dialogue translation. The adapter was additionally pretrained on MADAR and PADIC dialect corpora for the unconstrained track. It achieved spBLEU 26.10 (4th, constrained) and 25.09 (5th, unconstrained). External dialect pretraining improved only two of thirteen dialects while slightly degrading overall performance, indicating negative transfer.
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.
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.
Study of 167 Java CVE instances finds CodeQL false positives follow recurring patterns; query refinements remove 81.8% of reviewed ones.
Researchers ran CodeQL's Java security query suite on 167 CVE instances from 110 projects, manually reviewing 500 sampled false-positive paths and building a five-category taxonomy led by Missed Path Constraint or Sanitization (36.6%), Benign Execution Context (29.4%), and Missing Trust Boundary Modeling (27.6%). Guided by the taxonomy, query-level refinements removed 81.8% of reviewed false positives and 15.8% of reported paths across the selected queries while retaining 7 of 8 true positives. To address generalization, agentic coding tools given the refinement patterns as templates adapted them to new projects successfully in 56% and 62% of tasks, versus 28% without guidance.
TokenRhythm releases NeoHorse-1-4B, an Apache-2.0 agentic fine-tune of Qwen3.5-4B claiming +5.93 benchmark macro-average gain.
NeoHorse-1-4B is a roughly 4B-parameter text-only causal language model post-trained by TokenRhythm from Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B for agent harnesses, tool use, coding, and instruction following. It applies routing-guided curriculum SFT and routing-guided on-policy distillation over execution trajectories as an early prototype toward recursive self-improvement (RSI). The release reports a 64.87 macro average across ten benchmarks versus 58.94 for Qwen3.5-4B (+5.93) and is distributed under Apache-2.0, trending #30 on Hugging Face.
Tiny Aya L2-Thinker, a 3.35B model, achieves over 93 percent in-language reasoning across 60 languages via optimized multilingual data mixing; weights released.
The paper studies L2 reasoning, the ability to reason consistently in the language of the user's prompt, approached through SFT data composition and scheduling. Tiny Aya L2-Thinker (3.35B) achieves an in-language reasoning rate above 93 percent across 60 languages on six benchmarks spanning math, commonsense, instruction following, open-ended generation, and cultural reasoning. Findings show generalization to held-out languages comes from broader language coverage, multilingual non-reasoning data, and a strong English reasoning backbone, suggesting reasoning is language-agnostic and transferable without per-language supervision. Model weights and multilingual reasoning data are publicly released.