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New AI Attack Hides Malicious Instructions in Normal-Looking Text to Evade Safety Filters

Check Point researchers show crafted prose hides policy-violating instructions that bypass all tested LLM gatekeepers, including GPT-4o mini and Llama Guard 3.

A new prompt-crafting technique embeds malicious payloads inside grammatical, natural-looking text without Base64, invisible Unicode, or obvious encodings, defeating lightweight pre-screening gatekeepers. In testing, all four evaluated gatekeeper models—gpt-4o-mini-2024-07-18, gpt-oss-safeguard:20b, claude-3-haiku-20240307, and llama-guard3:8b—classified the crafted wrappers as safe at a 100% bypass rate across 23 obfuscated prompts. GPT-5 Thinking in high-reasoning mode recovered and acted on the hidden instruction in 17 of 18 tests (~94.4%), often spending over a minute and multiple Python executions. Researchers recommend paraphrasing untrusted input, hardening gatekeeper policies, and applying defense-in-depth controls for agentic deployments.

GBHackers · 5d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

GuardBreaker: Derailing AI-assisted malware analysis with a code comment

ESET names 'GuardBreaker': UAC-0099 embeds a nuclear-weapon question in VBScript comments to trip LLM scanner guardrails during analysis of its MATCHBOIL loader.

ESET researchers observed the Russia-aligned group UAC-0099 inserting a decoy prompt injection into a VBScript used to install its MATCHBOIL loader in an attack against a Ukrainian target, aiming to make LLM-based code scanners refuse and stop inspecting the file. The comment triggers safety guardrails with a request about building a nuclear weapons but has no runtime effect. Similar LLM-thwarting tricks have appeared in malicious PyPI and npm packages reported by Socket and StepSecurity. ESET recommends multi-model cross-validation of AI-assisted analysis and treating missing LLM output as requiring further checks.

ESET WeLiveSecurityupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoAI safety & security 3 sources1

What Matters, When? Diagnosing and Improving Conditional Visual Grounding in Visuomotor Imitation Policies

Researchers diagnose conditional visual grounding failures in visuomotor imitation policies and show targeted interventions substantially improve distractor robustness.

The paper studies why ACT-based visuomotor imitation policies fail when visually similar distractor objects or receptacles are introduced, finding sensitivity depends on both distractor type and manipulation stage. Interventions including distractor augmentation, phase-dependent attention regularization, and appearance-based visual prompting improve target selection while preserving spatial control information, with gains in simulation and on a physical UR3e. The same failure pattern is confirmed in a pretrained vision-language-action policy on a state-conditioned medical instrument-handling task.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 12d agoAI research

Tracking Elirks Variants in Japan: Similarities to Previous Attacks

Unit 42 links new Elirks backdoor variants attacking Japanese organizations to 2012 Taiwan attacks, delivered via spear-phishing PDFs exploiting Adobe Flash CVE-2011-0611.

Unit 42 analyzed new Elirks backdoor variants found in an attack on a Japanese business, noting strong similarities to 2012 attacks on Taiwanese ministries. The backdoor retrieves its C2 address from attacker-created accounts on Japanese blog and SNS services. Recent deliveries used an airline e-ticket lure named "E-TKT" with a PDF exploiting Adobe Flash CVE-2011-0611. Shared infrastructure and tactics with the Scarlet Mimic campaign suggest possible ongoing cyber espionage across East Asia.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wildCVE-2011-0611

Perturbation Probing: A New Diagnostic for the Fragility of LLM Safety

Unit 42 research shows LLM safety refusals concentrate in a thin neural layer, motivating external, multi-layered AI security controls.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 introduces Perturbation Probing, a diagnostic technique for measuring the fragility of LLM safety mechanisms. The research finds that safety refusal behavior is localized within a thin neural layer, implying small perturbations can undermine built-in refusals. The authors argue this motivates external, multi-layered security defenses on top of model-internal safety training.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 18d agoAI safety & security

NERVE Attacks: Breaking AI-Powered Brain-Computer Interfaces

Researchers characterize NERVE, five attack dimensions against AI-powered brain-computer interfaces, and release the EEGle framework uncovering 17 attack instances.

NERVE is a systematic attack class spanning the BCI stack across five orthogonal dimensions: Neuro-mimetic Forgery, Evasion via Desynchronization, Replay-based Hijacking, Vein Tapping, and Embedded Backdoors. The accompanying EEGle framework enables AI-assisted, extensible BCI security analysis and helped uncover 17 novel neuro-specific attack instances, revealing a stealth-effectiveness spectrum unique to BCI backdoor design. The authors show generative AI lowers the barrier to entry for non-expert attackers and release EEGle to the community.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoResearch

KlueセキュリティインシデントとRecorded Futureへの影響

Recorded Future disclosed a Klue incident that exposed some Salesforce business data, including contacts and emails, via a compromised OAuth token.

Recorded Future disclosed that unauthorized activity in marketing vendor Klue's integration layer, starting June 12, 2026 and contained the same day, affected some of its Salesforce data through a compromised OAuth token in the Salesforce-Klue integration. Impacted fields are limited to business data such as customer contact names, email addresses, and possibly business contract information. No evidence indicates Recorded Future's core platform, Intelligence Graph, internal databases, or customer platform data were accessed. The company revoked all relevant OAuth tokens, coordinated with Salesforce and law enforcement, and began reviewing all third-party Salesforce integrations.

Recorded Future · Aug 12, 2026Data breach

New Ted Backdoor Hides Inside Victims' Own HAProxy Builds to Intercept Web Traffic

Rapid7 found a new backdoor, ted, compiled into trojanized HAProxy at two South Korean organizations, with medium-confidence attribution to North Korean actors.

Rapid7 documented a previously undocumented Linux toolkit named ted compiled into the HAProxy load balancer binaries of two South Korean organizations in the automotive and media sectors. The implant intercepts web traffic, serves altered pages only to filtered visitors, and hides C2 exchanges from backend logs and HAProxy statistics; a companion RAT, curlRAT, beacons on a default 12-hour schedule. The toolkit also trojanizes crond, sshd, agetty, atd, and polkitd binaries and sanitizes logs and bash history. Rapid7 attributes the activity with medium confidence to North Korean state-sponsored actors, with domain infrastructure overlapping APT37 listings in maltrail and delivery resembling the Operation SyncHole campaign.

The Hacker News · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild

BraZetsu Malware Turns Compromised Windows Hosts Into Criminal Marketplace Inventory

Group-IB details BraZetsu, a modular Python Windows malware that monetizes compromised-host access through the Infected Marketplace for initial access brokers.

Group-IB attributes BraZetsu to the Exilware threat actor, believed to be native Portuguese speakers targeting Iberian and Latin American e-commerce, financial, industrial, and law enforcement victims. The framework, first observed in early May 2026, uses generative AI for data triage and target prioritization, steals browser histories and digital certificates, and hunts Brazilian CNAB financial remittance files. Access to compromised hosts is sold on the Infected Marketplace from roughly $5.80, letting buyers remotely deploy secondary payloads over WebSocket-linked infrastructure. Some samples evaded detection on VirusTotal; delivery likely uses VBS loaders from a domain also used to distribute the Ousaban banking trojan.

The Hacker News · 13d agoMalware in the wild

When the prompt becomes the payload: A practical pen-testing guide for GenAI, LLM and RAG applications

CSO Online publishes a practical penetration-testing guide for GenAI, LLM, and RAG applications, covering prompt injection, retrieval poisoning, and tenant isolation testing.

The guide frames LLM applications as attack graphs spanning prompts, retrieval layers, vector stores, tools, identities, and downstream APIs, arguing that conventional web testing misses instruction-vs-data channel risks. It builds on OWASP prompt injection guidance (direct vs. indirect injection) and NIST's 2025 adversarial machine-learning taxonomy, noting that RAG and fine-tuning do not remove injection risk. Recommended practices include documenting trust transitions across components, using canaries and synthetic records to avoid test side effects, running multi-turn and obfuscated injection campaigns, and verifying chains from poisoned documents to observable state changes. It also details testing RAG pipelines via controlled document poisoning across metadata, OCR layers, and code comments, plus cross-tenant isolation checks on retrieved document IDs.

CSO Online · 7d agoAI safety & security1

GE-Act 2.0: Pretraining and Scaling a World-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation

GE-Act 2.0 is a from-scratch pretrained world-action model for robotic manipulation, with success rising from 17.1% to 44.1% as co-training data scales to 30,000 hours.

Genie Envisioner Act 2.0 (GE-Act 2.0) is a world-action model whose generative and action components are all initialized from scratch on manipulation data, combining a control-oriented autoencoder (CoAE), single-step visual planner (SVP), and inverse dynamics model (IDM) trained jointly via knowledge-aligned selective optimization (KASO). Scaling co-training data from 300 to 30,000 hours raises zero-shot success from 17.1% to 44.1% on G1-OP and 13.4% to 31.1% on G2-90D, despite the latter comprising under 2% of data, suggesting cross-embodiment transfer. Gains span 19/20 and 18/20 skill groups, and skill-specific coverage correlates with zero-shot OOD success (Pearson r=0.80).

Hugging Face daily papers · 12d agoAI research

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 · 16d agoAI safety & security in the wild

SEMA-GUARD: Semantic and Graph-Based Vulnerability Detection in Assembly Code

SEMA-GUARD uses semantic analysis and graph neural networks to detect vulnerabilities in assembly code, achieving 85.1% accuracy on a Juliet-derived benchmark.

SEMA-GUARD is a framework that detects vulnerabilities in compiled programs when source code is unavailable, targeting malware, firmware, and embedded systems analysis. It enriches control flow graphs with low-level execution semantics including stack manipulations, memory accesses, and data flow. Evaluated on a Juliet Test Suite set compiled to assembly and split into function-level chunks, it achieves 85.1% accuracy and an F1 score of 0.801, outperforming purely statistical or structural approaches.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch1

Analysis of Smoke Loader in New Tsunami Campaign

Fake Japanese Meteorological Agency tsunami warning emails delivered Smoke Loader and AzoRult malware to steal credentials from targets in Japan.

A fake tsunami warning email impersonating Japan's Meteorological Agency asked recipients to click a link on a registered fake agency domain, delivering the commodity loader Smoke Loader to targets in Japan. Smoke Loader, active since 2011, is modular, and its payloads have included banking trojans, ransomware, cryptominers, password stealers, and PoS malware; the campaign later also deployed AzoRult. New samples add junk-jump obfuscation, encrypted network traffic and payload files, a unique machine ID used for tracking and encryption, and PROPagate injection into explorer.exe, with persistence via a Startup folder shortcut and RC4-encrypted C2 communication.

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

HarnessVLN: Unifying Training-Free Embodied Navigation through an Agent Harness

Researchers introduce HarnessVLN, a zero-shot training-free agent harness that sets new training-free SOTA on vision-language navigation benchmarks including R2R and HM3D.

HarnessVLN is a zero-shot, training-free framework for embodied vision-language navigation that coordinates perception, retrieval, grounding, navigation, recovery, and termination through a unified tool interface. It validates planner proposals against spatial evidence, geometric feasibility, and subgoal consistency, using hierarchical event memory and a persistent Spatiotemporal Graph that stores reusable spatial evidence and failure annotations. It reports success rates of 60.8% on R2R, 53.9% on RxR, 76.0% on HM3D-v2, and 59.3% on HM3D-OVON, surpassing prior training-free state of the art, with real-world humanoid deployment demonstrated.

Hugging Face daily papers · 2d agoAI research

Corrupt Plans, Clean Traces: Evading Chain-of-Thought Monitoring with Plan Injection

Plan injection plants benign-sounding harmful reasoning that steers LLM actors to adversarial actions while evading chain-of-thought monitors.

Researchers show that injecting harmful but benign-sounding plans into an actor model's context causes it to perform adversarial actions while its reasoning passes chain-of-thought monitors, achieving 25-33% monitor evasion rates across benchmarks and scaling to larger models like DeepSeek-R1. Actor models paraphrase injected plans as their own reasoning without attribution. Giving the monitor access to the injected plan dropped detection by up to 50% on the Bio-Math task, with extra thinking tokens spent rationalizing rather than flagging the plan.

CosmoH2G: A Hand-to-Gripper Transfer Dataset and Baseline Method for Object Manipulation with Complex Spatial Movements

Researchers release CosmoH2G, a 6,189-episode hand-to-gripper dataset with a two-stage method for complex spatial robot manipulation.

The paper introduces a scalable acquisition pipeline using a handheld gripper to collect paired hand-gripper demonstrations, producing 6,189 episodes across 1,254 unique objects with higher spatial complexity than existing benchmarks. A two-stage framework first predicts sparse gripper keyframes (initial and terminal), then generates the full continuous action sequence conditioned on them, while learning gripper orientation and post-optimizing translation via grasping heuristics and kinematic consistency. Simulation and real-robot experiments show stable, precise hand-to-gripper transfer of complex spatial manipulations, outperforming traditional baselines.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

Prompt Injections for Defense

Tracebit researchers show prompt injections placed next to AWS secrets can stop AI hacking agents by triggering forbidden outputs, a technique called context bombing.

Researchers from Tracebit reported that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, SSH keys, and other secrets stored on AWS could shut down attacks by AI hacking agents. The injected prompts order the attacking LLM to perform actions forbidden by its guardrails, such as explaining how to develop inhalable Anthrax spores or referencing Tank Man, causing guarded models to halt. The researchers named the technique context bombing and note it only works against agents with guardrails, not locally run guardrail-free models.

Schneier on Security · Aug 12, 2026AI safety & security

Show HN: Self-hosted company OS, Claude Code and Codex agents in departments

OtoDock, a self-hosted company OS that organizes Claude Code and Codex AI agents into departments, was launched on GitHub via Show HN.

OtoDock is a self-hosted 'company OS' shared on GitHub through a Show HN post, presenting Claude Code and Codex AI agents organized into department-style teams. The Hacker News feed entry shows the post reached 20 points with 5 comments; no further technical details are provided in the available text.

Dynin-Robotics: Omnimodal Unified Diffusion Vision-Language-Action Model

Dynin-Robotics omnimodal diffusion vision-language-action model unifies action, dynamics, and goal prediction, reaching 78.4% success on Franka tasks.

Dynin-Robotics builds a shared trajectory model on the Dynin-Omni omnimodal masked-diffusion backbone, representing language, observations, goals, and actions as discrete tokens. One model learns action prediction, action-conditioned next-observation prediction, terminal goal-state prediction, and trajectory-to-instruction reconstruction, enabling test-time scaling through goal prediction and joint refinement. It is continually pretrained on approximately 1.33 million trajectories from 48 Open X-Embodiment datasets and achieves competitive performance on LIBERO and zero-shot LIBERO-Plus plus a 78.4% average success rate across four manipulation conditions on a Franka Research 3 robot. An optimized block-parallel implementation accelerates model-side action decoding by up to 29.2x.

Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots

Show-Harness lets VLM agents control robots via discrete semantic action units, outperforming VLA baselines zero-shot and after light fine-tuning.

Show-Harness is an embodied agent harness that exposes discrete semantic action units a VLM reasons over, with embodiment-specific interpreters grounding them into local robot actions. It enables zero-shot robot control with closed-source frontier VLMs and low-cost adaptation of small open-source VLMs using only a few GPU-hours of fine-tuning. The companion GUMI (GUI Manipulation Interface) extends the same semantic action space to GUI-based demonstration collection without specialized teleoperation hardware. Experiments show robust generalization across tasks, embodiments, and environments, beating representative agentic and VLA paradigms.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

The 2026 PNPL Competition: Word Classification and Efficient Cross-Subject Generalisation in LibriBrain100

The 2026 PNPL competition releases LibriBrain100, a MEG speech dataset with 32 extra subjects, targeting word classification and cross-subject BCI generalization.

The 2025 PNPL competition on non-invasive speech decoding from MEG achieved F1-macro scores of 95.6% for speech detection and 73.6% for phoneme classification, built on LibriBrain's ~50 hours of single-subject data. The 2026 edition extends this with LibriBrain100, adding 32 subjects (~40 minutes each) plus ~80 hours of within-subject data. Two tracks target within-subject word classification at scale and cross-subject generalization with subject-specific fine-tuning shrinking from ~40 to ~20 to ~10 minutes, aiming at clinically feasible non-invasive BCIs for people with profound paralysis.

Hugging Face daily papers · 13d agoAI research

Researcher shows how Claude Code can be tricked simply by asking it to summarize a website

Researcher wunderwuzzi showed Claude Code can be hijacked via prompt injection simply by asking it to summarize a website.

Security researcher Johann Rehberger (wunderwuzzi) demonstrated that Claude Code can be manipulated through prompt injection by simply asking it to summarize a website. Instructions embedded in fetched web content are executed by the agent, hijacking its behavior. The Register frames the finding as another demonstration of prompt injection risks in agentic coding tools that ingest untrusted web content.

The Register · Security · 18d agoAI safety & security1

Japan’s Health Ministry to Strengthen Cybersecurity Measures at Hospitals

Japan's Health Ministry requested ¥13.7 billion for fiscal 2027 to strengthen hospital cybersecurity with network protections and dedicated specialists amid rising attacks.

Japan's Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry included ¥13.7 billion in its fiscal 2027 budget request to strengthen cybersecurity at hospitals. The measures aim to protect hospital networks and deploy cybersecurity specialists, responding to a surge in cyberattacks on medical institutions. The plan was reported by The Yomiuri Shimbun.

DataBreaches.net · 9d agoPolicy & legal

Hackers Use Cross-Platform Noodle RAT to Secretly Control Windows and Linux Systems

Check Point identifies Noodle RAT as a distinct cross-platform Windows/Linux backdoor used by Chinese-speaking actors against Asia-Pacific organizations since 2016.

Check Point assesses Noodle RAT, also known as ANGRYREBEL, as a distinct backdoor family rather than a variant of Gh0st RAT or Rekoobe, with separate Windows (Win.NOODLERAT) and Linux (Linux.NOODLERAT) variants sharing a common command-and-control design. The Windows implant runs filelessly via shellcode with loaders like MULTIDROP and MICROLOAD, while the Linux variant provides reverse shells, file management, and SOCKS tunneling after exploitation or web-shell placement on exposed servers. Groups including Iron Tiger, Calypso APT, Rocke, and Cloud Snooper have deployed it against organizations in Thailand, India, Japan, Malaysia, and Taiwan. Check Point released sample hashes and C2 IP indicators alongside the analysis.

Cyber Security News · 4h agoMalware in the wild 2 sources

ReactHuman: A Physics-Grounded Benchmark for Human-Like Reactive Decision-Making in Embodied Multimodal LLMs

ReactHuman benchmark tests whether multimodal LLMs react safely to sudden household hazards; seven evaluated models mishandle roughly one hazard in three.

ReactHuman is the first physics-grounded benchmark for human-like reactive decision-making, placing a multimodal LLM as the brain of a simulated humanoid facing 17 event families of sudden household hazards across over 1,000 bit-for-bit reproducible scenes with annotation-free ground truth from 240 Hz rigid-body simulation, including adversarial objects whose appearance contradicts their physics. A five-metric suite scores each reaction along reasonable, safe, and physically grounded axes, and every committed plan is physically executed. Seven representative MLLMs mishandle roughly one hazard in three, act from fixed dispositions rather than the observed scene, trust appearance over motion, and miss interception points at meter scale; none of these failures shrink with model scale.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

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.