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Discovery Foundation Models: Toward Open-Ended Discovery Intelligence

Paper defines Discovery Foundation Models with seven coupled capabilities for open-ended discovery, demonstrated via Zetema and GALILEO systems.

The paper formulates Discovery Foundation Models (DFMs) as general-purpose model systems for open-ended discovery, supporting seven coupled capabilities spanning problem discovery, formulation, representation construction, hypothesis formation, intervention, evidence-grounded revision, and continual improvement. It instantiates the framework with Zetema, which couples explicit research-state dynamics, verification and experimental gating, and cross-task Discovery Skill evolution. The framework is grounded with GALILEO, a real therapeutic-discovery system combining dry-lab reasoning with robotic wet-lab experimentation in a closed physical discovery loop; code is released on GitHub.

Hugging Face daily papersupdated · 2d agofirst · 3d agoAI research 2 sources

What researchers learned about building an LLM security workflow

Oslo and FFI researchers show structured agentic workflows lift LLM alert-triage accuracy from 0% to about 93% on malicious cases.

Researchers at the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment tested GPT-5-mini, Claude 3 Haiku, Qwen3:30B, and Gemma 3:27B on alerts from the AIT Log Data Set V1.1; given only alert descriptions and log summaries, all four models correctly flagged zero percent of true-positive cases involving reconnaissance, brute-force logins, and initial access. Wrapping the same models in a workflow with constrained SQL queries over Suricata logs, an evidence summarizer, and a verdict stage with revision loops raised malicious-case accuracy to an average of 93 percent, with GPT-5-mini identifying every malicious case across 100 runs. The authors flag it as a proof-of-concept on one synthetic scenario and note models skewed conservative on benign alerts, with GPT-5-mini marking every benign case uncertain.

Help Net Security · 24d agoAI research1

Large DDoS attack knocks Norwegian public services offline

A large DDoS attack on Norwegian IT partner Vivicta disrupted 10 government services, including ID-porten used by over 4.5 million users, for 30+ hours.

Norway's Digitalisation Agency (Digdir) said a distributed denial-of-service attack that began Monday targeted the infrastructure of its IT partner Vivicta and lasted around 30 hours at varying intensity, with some services still affected Tuesday. Disrupted services included ID-porten, a national digital identity gateway used by more than 4.5 million people, which many government services and parts of the health sector, such as online pharmacies and the electronic prescription system, rely on for authentication. Digdir said attackers did not gain access to sensitive information, and it was the third DDoS incident since June, reportedly two to three times larger than the previous one. Attribution and possible links between the incidents remain unclear.

The Record · 22d agoThreat actor

Norway announces investigations into telecom Telenor’s work with Myanmar junta

Norwegian police opened crimes-against-humanity and sanctions investigations into Telenor's data handovers to Myanmar's junta, raiding its Oslo headquarters.

Norway's National Criminal Investigation Service is investigating Telenor for complicity in crimes against humanity for repeatedly handing over historical customer traffic data to Myanmar's military regime between the February 2021 coup and the March 2022 subsidiary sale. The Police Security Service is separately probing sanctions violations because the sale to M1 Group included sanctioned surveillance equipment transferred without foreign ministry permission. The subsequent resale passed historical call data of over 18 million people to junta-linked owners, and a class action on behalf of 1,200 people alleges the data enabled arrests, torture, and at least one execution.

The Record · 1d agoPolicy & legal

Batten the Hatches: Cybersecurity with Military Mariners

Interviews with 20 U.S. Navy and Coast Guard mariners reveal informal, safety-oriented shipboard cyber risk models that may delay attribution and containment.

The study conducts semi-structured interviews with 20 military mariners from U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels to understand how service members recognize and respond to cyber risk aboard ships. Unique consequences of compromising military systems identified include weapon takeover and purposeful geopolitical escalation. Cybersecurity is organizationally abstract on ships, so mariners build cyber risk models from informal experience rather than formal instruction. A safety-oriented incident-response model creates resilience but may delay cyber attribution and containment.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch

Evidence-Grounded Retrieval for Investigation Hunt Lead Generation from CTI Reports

AHLERT generates environment-aware threat hunting leads from CTI reports using ATT&CK-seeded knowledge graph retrieval, roughly doubling F1 over flat-RAG baselines.

The paper introduces AHLERT, a system that converts Cyber Threat Intelligence reports into structured, investigable hunt leads via hybrid dense retrieval with multi-hop traversal over an MITRE ATT&CK-seeded knowledge graph and ontology-grounded RAG constrained to the defender's assets. It is LLM-agnostic and evaluated on public CTI reports for well-known APTs across proprietary and open-weight models. Hybrid evidence retrieval with ontology grounding raises mean F1 from 0.44 to 0.85, and AHLERT attains the highest effectiveness score (~86.95%) versus off-the-shelf LLMs.

arXiv cs.CR · 8d agoResearch

OpenAI Builds ‘Defense Factory’ Where AI Agents Continuously Find and Fix Vulnerabilities

OpenAI unveils a Defense Factory where AI agents continuously discover, validate, and fix vulnerabilities, integrating GitHub, Snyk, Semgrep, Tenable, and ServiceNow.

OpenAI introduced a Defense Factory, an agent-first cybersecurity operation that connects AI agents to developer and security tools via APIs, CLIs, and Model Context Protocol integrations including GitHub, GitLab, Snyk, Semgrep, Tenable, Jira, Linear, and ServiceNow. During an internal security sprint, over 250 people across more than 100 service areas closed 53 urgent or high-priority issues on day one, achieved a 90.6% accepted ownership-assignment rate, and Codex generated all remediation patches with only 0.53% rolled back. Agent-assisted deduplication flagged 37% of findings as duplicates, and runtime validation reproduced 19.5% of findings, cutting the false-positive rate to 0.81%. OpenAI argues defenders must exploit a temporary 'defender's window' using source-code access and frontier models before open-weight models enable autonomous offensive agent fleets.

Cyber Security News · 6d agoTools 2 sources

Researchers open-source a Wi-Fi cyber range for security training

NTNU and Aegean researchers open-source a software-emulated Wi-Fi cyber range using mac80211_hwsim with LLM-assisted scenario building.

Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of the Aegean published a design and prototype for a cyber range dedicated to IEEE 802.11 security training, emulating access points and clients with mac80211_hwsim, Linux namespaces, hostapd, wpa_supplicant, dnsmasq, and FreeRADIUS. The platform bundles Aircrack-ng, Wireshark, and custom tools WPAxFuzz and Bl0ck, and can convert plain-language scenario descriptions into deployable definitions via a locally hosted Llama model. A working prototype covering scenario creation and deployment is on GitHub; monitoring, access control, and orchestration zones remain future work.

Help Net Security · 24d agoTools1

DDoS Attack Hits Norwegian Government Services

A coordinated DDoS campaign disrupted Norwegian government online services, causing availability outages across public digital services.

A coordinated distributed denial-of-service campaign caused disruption to Norwegian government digital services, according to Infosecurity Magazine. The attack affected the availability of public-facing services, and no data compromise was indicated in initial reporting. The responsible group or motive was not named in the report.

Infosecurity Magazine · 21d agoThreat actor

Turn it off and on again, but for critical infrastructure

KTH researchers trained a reinforcement-learning intrusion response agent on an emulated segmented OT network that autonomously resets hosts and processes to disrupt intruders.

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology built a containerized replica of a segmented industrial network, attacked it across 14 days, and captured 40,000 30-second traffic intervals to train a defense agent under partial observability. The agent observes six packet-count numbers per interval, maintains 500 running state hypotheses, and can reset supervisory hosts, water tank processes, or entire subnets, with resets rebooting the target, renewing credentials, and changing its IP. The best agent approached a full-visibility baseline but depends on an assumed attacker behavior model; the testbed comprised three supervisory hosts, two PLCs, two tanks, weak credentials, and CVE-2017-7494 exposure. The team released its implementation and plans validation on a real industrial testbed with a partner.

Help Net Security · 2d agoResearchCVE-2017-74942· 1 read

Former OpenAI researcher builds an AI model that judges options instead of writing text

TypeSafe AI launches Jev, a judgment-only model built by ex-OpenAI staff that classifies inputs with 70-500 ms latency instead of generating text.

Startup TypeSafe AI, co-founded by former OpenAI researcher and InstructGPT co-author Diogo Almeida, introduced Jev, a model that scores developer-defined answer options with probabilities rather than generating free-form text. The company claims 70-500 ms responses, parallel multi-question evaluation, and $0.042 per million input tokens with free outputs, targeting request routing, sales intent scoring, and assistant guardrail checks. Benchmarks are self-built and not independently verified, the 'no hallucination' guarantee only covers output structure, and access is currently via waitlist.

The Decoder · 13h agoAI industry

North Korean Hackers Deploy New Linux Espionage Toolkit

Rapid7 says North Korea-aligned actors use a new Linux espionage toolkit (ted HAProxy backdoor, CurlRAT) against South Korean automotive and media targets.

Rapid7 reports a stealthy Linux framework comprising a custom HAProxy backdoor ('ted'), trojanized system binaries (agetty, atd, crond, polkitd, sshd), an SSH keylogger, and CurlRAT that polls C&C every 12 hours. Initial access came via a Groupware login portal flaw, with credential harvesting enabling lateral movement to internal systems. The toolkit supports long-term surveillance, HTTP traffic interception/injection, and drive-by downloads, likely in use since late 2024. Infrastructure and artifacts overlap Operation SyncHole, suggesting Lazarus or APT37 involvement.

SecurityWeek · 9d agoThreat actor in the wild1

The Model Proposes, the Code Disposes: A Pre-Registered Ablation of a Verifier-and-Acceptance Stage in an LLM-Orchestrated Offensive-Security Agent

Pre-registered ablation finds a model verifier stage in an LLM offensive-security agent suppresses findings; removing it eliminated suppression with precision tradeoff.

The paper evaluates a verifier-and-acceptance stage in an LLM-orchestrated offensive-security agent via a pre-registered 20-run confirmatory ablation and a 2x2 factorial study with 40 runs on vulnerable lab targets. Removing the stage eliminated pre-report suppression (median 2 vs 0 findings, p = 0.00003) but reduced model-blinded shipped precision (0.471 vs 0.353, p = 0.0087). Suppression was attributed to the model verifier rather than deterministic acceptance rules, and an instrumented canary recorded zero external contacts in all 60 runs. The full design retained 93.8% of model-adjudicated true candidates but failed its pre-registered non-inferiority floor of 0.90.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch

Drowning in CVEs and thirsty for answers? Try CTEM

Sponsored Register piece argues traditional vulnerability management cannot scale with CVE volume and promotes Continuous Threat Exposure Management via Horizon3's NodeZero.

The sponsored article cites surging CVE volumes, CVSS triage shortcomings, NVD backlog, and AI-driven discovery accelerating an asymmetric vulnerability cycle. It outlines Gartner's five CTEM steps - scoping, discovery, prioritization, validation, and mobilization - and describes how Horizon3's NodeZero automated pentesting validates exploitable attack paths with evidence. Horizon3 says NodeZero uses a deterministic machine learning expert system rather than general LLMs, limiting generative AI to scoped tasks via AWS Bedrock.

The Register · Security · 13d agoIndustry

NIST Seeks Public Input on AI-Ready NVD Modernization

NIST is seeking public comment on modernizing the National Vulnerability Database to support AI-powered vulnerability research.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology announced it is soliciting public input on modernizing the National Vulnerability Database. The initiative aims to make the NVD AI-ready to support AI-powered vulnerability research and analysis.

Infosecurity Magazine · Aug 12, 2026Policy & legal

Risky Bulletin: Dutch intel services to get extensive new powers

Netherlands proposed a bill granting AIVD and MIVD expanded warrantless tapping, faster hacking powers, and forced data disclosure, citing Russia, China, and Iran threats.

The Dutch government introduced a bill greatly expanding surveillance powers of intelligence agencies AIVD and MIVD, allowing up to one year of tapping without pre-approval and simplified hacking operations against 'foreign adversaries'. Agencies could compel Dutch companies or citizens to provide data under threat of charges, share data with the private sector, and oversight bodies would merge into a new CTT board. The bill follows similar overhauls in Ireland, Germany, and France after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The newsletter also reports Moonwell hacked for $8.7M, a Cosmos EVM bug exploited for ~$3M, ShinyHunters listing McKesson with claimed hundreds of millions of records, and a pro-Kremlin DDoS claim against Norway's government network.

Risky Business News · 17d agoPolicy & legal

An Empirical Security Analysis of Open-Source Software Used in Onboard Satellite Systems

Study of 126 onboard satellite OSS repositories finds 2,827 security findings, 72% medium severity or higher, dominated by memory safety and code quality weaknesses.

Researchers performed an empirical security analysis of 126 public repositories of open-source software used in onboard satellite systems using SBOM generation, software composition analysis, static application security testing, infrastructure-as-code analysis, and secret scanning. After cleaning and deduplication the pipeline produced 2,827 findings, with medium-severity findings accounting for 49% and 72% classified medium or higher. A CWE-based taxonomy mapped all findings to eight weakness families, with Memory Safety and Code Quality dominating, followed by Input Validation and Injection. Project-developed code accounted for 81.4% of findings, though external dependency code remained relevant; findings do not establish mission-specific exploitability.

arXiv cs.CR · 2d agoResearch1

Why AI raises the stakes for exposure validation

Fal.Con 2026 commentary argues AI accelerates vulnerability discovery and exploitation, making evidence-based exposure validation essential for defender prioritization.

CSO Online reports on the exposure-validation theme at CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 2026 conference, where CEO George Kurtz described AI as the new cyber battlefield and emphasized AI red teaming and continuous security. The piece argues that as AI speeds up vulnerability discovery and exploitability analysis on both sides, teams must determine which exposures are actually exploitable in their environments—chained weaknesses, credential abuse, lateral movement, privilege escalation—rather than chasing theoretical risk. It points readers to Horizon3's conference perspective.

CSO Online · 5d agoIndustry

France Establishes New Government-Focused Cyber Incident Response Unit

France created REACTIV, an ANSSI-led interministerial cyber incident response unit for state services, after the DGFiP breach exposed up to 678,000 taxpayers.

ANSSI announced REACTIV (Interministerial Response & Action against Data Breaches) on September 7, a dedicated incident response capability for French state services. It lets ANSSI require ministries to take urgent protective measures for citizens' data and lead centralized technical crisis communications during attacks on state services. The move follows the DGFiP tax authority attack that exposed data of 350,000 to 678,000 taxpayers, after which the Prime Minister ordered an extensive audit of ANSSI. Two suspects aged 16 and 18 from the ZeroBytes hacking group were arrested in late August.

Infosecurity Magazine · 8d agoPolicy & legal

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 · 26d agoThreat actor in the wild

DPRK APTs: Ted backdoor and curlRAT target South Korean media and automotive sectors

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.

Rapid7 Blog · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild1

What vulnerability prioritization looks like when KEV, EPSS, and CVSS disagree

Cohesity field CISO Joye Purser ranks KEV over EPSS over CVSS and urges 24-72 hour patching of exploited internet-facing systems.

In a Help Net Security interview, Cohesity Global Field CISO Joye Purser lays out a vulnerability prioritization framework that puts active exploitation (KEV) first, then exploit likelihood (EPSS), then technical severity (CVSS), adjusted for asset exposure, business criticality, and compensating controls. She endorses 24-72 hour remediation targets for critical exploited internet-facing vulnerabilities and describes the organizational tradeoffs and emergency procedures needed to hit them. The interview also covers honeypot failure modes when deception systems are over-connected or over-trusted, and budget guidance recommending OT/IT segmentation, phishing-resistant MFA, and tested recovery for a 400-person manufacturer.

Help Net Security · 17d agoIndustry

North Korean remote workers are broadening their job hunt beyond IT

Huntress links suspected North Korean remote workers to sales, marketing, and healthcare jobs using stolen identities, VPNs, proxies, and KVM hardware.

Huntress investigations identified suspected DPRK remote workers hired beyond IT in sales, marketing, and healthcare/financial organizations, sometimes actually performing the work they were hired for. Fraudulent documents included passports from the same city issued one day apart, ID cards with identical validity dates, and electricity bills built from the same online template with matching typos. A financial-services case found a PiKVM and Guermok USB capture card on a new hire's laptop within hours of delivery, suggesting a laptop farm, and another hire used a police mugshot with the photo digitally swapped. Researchers urge rigorous background checks and identity verification at the interview stage.

Help Net Security · 20d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Toward an Empirical Probabilistic Risk Manifestation Model of Organizational Cybersecurity in SMEs

Empirical study of 22 SME security assessments builds a probabilistic risk model and shows assessments can be cut 24-45% while retaining most critical findings.

Researchers analyzed 281 validated security findings from 22 real-world SME cybersecurity assessments conducted over two years via a pro bono university clinic. They derived an empirical Risk Manifestation Model linking eight organizational security functions to two exposure conditions, five attack mechanisms, and six outcome categories, using probability propagation to identify dominant risk pathways. The dominant pathway runs from asset exposure to credential compromise to unauthorized access, stable under leave-one-organization-out analysis. Retaining six functions reduces assessment burden by 24% while preserving 97% of critical findings; five functions cut burden 45% while preserving 89% of critical findings.

arXiv cs.CR · 3d agoResearch

Path to Astra: critical capabilities and frontier safeguards

OpenAI says Astra is its first model to meet the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold under the Preparedness Framework, launching with stronger safeguards.

OpenAI published 'Path to Astra', announcing that Astra is the first OpenAI model to meet the Critical cybersecurity capability threshold under its Preparedness Framework. The company says the model will be released with strengthened frontier safeguards, marking a milestone in frontier capability and safety evaluation.

OpenAI News · 15d agoModel release

Jev: New frontier model 40-400x cheaper and 20-200x faster

TypeSafe AI launches Jev, an early-access 'System One' model delivering calibrated structured outputs claimed 40-400x faster and cheaper than LLMs.

TypeSafe AI, founded by former OpenAI researcher Diogo Almeida, released its first 'System One Model' called Jev in early access. Jev forgoes string generation and is trained with Reinforcement Learning for Calibrated Decisions (RLCD) to produce type-safe structured values with calibrated probabilities. The company claims 70-500ms response times (40-200x faster), input pricing of $0.042 per million tokens, and free output tokens via a parallel sampling architecture. Target use cases include AI-powered workflows, real-time applications, and verification/guardrail tasks.