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CategoryAll Ransomware 55 Policy & legal 25 Data breach 20 Phishing & fraud 19 Industry 18 Malware 14 Vulnerability 10 Threat actor 9 Research 2 Exploit / PoC 1 AI research 1 AI policy 1

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Rewiring Democracy Series on The Renovator

Schneier and Sanders link a four-part Rewiring Democracy essay series covering civic AI in Japan, Switzerland, Brazil and Scotland.

Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders announced links to their Rewiring Democracy essay series on The Renovator. The four parts cover Japan's digital democracy party Team Mirai, Switzerland's public AI model Apertus, Brazil's Open Knowledge civic technologists, and civic AI in Scotland. The post is a brief index without technical details.

Schneier on SecuritySep 1, 09:59 UTC · 15d agoAI policy

Building a Production Greek-English Speech Recognizer

Engineering report details Sophea, a production Greek-English ASR reaching 4.26% WER on public English sets via ROVER ensemble and data-pipeline calibration.

Across 23 training iterations, two architectures, and nine production gates, no single data composition passed all gates; a three-model ROVER ensemble reached 9 of 9 gates and cut overlapping-speech WER from 53.35% to 37.87%. Calibrating an audio-quality filter against in-domain anchors reduced discarded scored Greek audio from 98.7% to 10.6%, and a pre-registered ablation traced a hallucination defect to one training-data package. The sophea/asr-k1 preview arbiter lists 4.26% average WER on eight public English test sets and 25.88% WER on live Greek noisy traffic; no weights or training data are released.

Hugging Face daily papersSep 10, 20:00 UTC · 5d agoAI research

Love Electric Breach: 877,000 Driver Records Offered for $600

A forum seller is offering 877,000 driver records from UK EV salary-sacrifice broker Love Electric for $600; researchers found the sample looks authentic.

A seller named seraphims advertised 877,000 records from Love Electric Financial Services, an Edinburgh-based FCA-regulated EV salary sacrifice broker, for $600 in cryptocurrency. Ransomnews analysts verified a 999-row SQL Server export containing names, addresses, National Insurance numbers, and driving licence numbers, with internal relationships and licence-format checks consistent with genuine production data. The full record count remains unverified, and the company had not commented at publication; the breach highlights risks from third-party payroll-adjacent providers.

Security AffairsAug 28, 20:15 UTC · 18d agoData breach

Technical Manual for a Toolkit for Measuring Contextual Individuation in Transformer Language Models

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.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CLSep 4, 16:38 UTC · 11d agoAI research

ASCII smuggling crosses over from AI prompt injection to phishing evasion

Microsoft details high-volume phishing campaign using ASCII smuggling (Unicode tag chars) for filter evasion, peaking at 2.3M messages.

Microsoft researchers observed a high-volume finance-themed phishing campaign using invisible Unicode tag characters (U+E0000–U+E007F), a technique known from AI prompt injection research as ASCII smuggling, to split lure words like 'funding' and evade email filters. Telemetry from Microsoft Defender for Office 365 showed signature hits jump from roughly 21,000 messages on February 8, 2026 to more than 1.3 million on February 9, peaking above 2.3 million on February 11, with elevated weekday activity lasting approximately three months. The discovery emerged from prompt injection protection research, showing AI-era evasion techniques crossing into traditional phishing. Most messages were flagged by layered Defender protections rather than a single Unicode-specific signal.

Microsoft Security BlogSep 3, 16:00 UTC · 12d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Student photos, bank details stolen by hackers after St James Anglican School in Perth hit by cyber attack

St James Anglican School in Perth reports hackers stole student photos and family bank details in a contained network breach.

St James Anglican School in Perth's north identified unauthorized access to its computer systems in a cyber breach. Hackers stole students' and families' personal information, including photos and bank details. Parents were advised the school immediately contained the incident and secured its systems.

DataBreaches.netSep 15, 11:48 UTC · 22h agoData breach

Suspected Iran-linked attack knocked UK power plant offline for days

Suspected Iranian hackers knocked a small UK power plant offline for four days in July 2026, with no noticeable impact on the national grid.

Sources told The Telegraph that a British power plant was offline for four days in July 2026 following a suspected Iranian cyberattack, reported to the National Cyber Security Centre. The UK energy minister said the incident affected a small-scale energy generator with no noticeable effect on the power supply, and energy CEOs were briefed and given further advice afterward. The attack followed warnings about Iranian cyber activity against US energy, water, and government networks, including a coordinated attack on 30+ US community water utilities.

Help Net SecurityAug 24, 00:00 UTC · 23d agoThreat actor

Introducing @huggingface/kernels: 200+ WebGPU Kernels for Local AI

Hugging Face released @huggingface/kernels, a library offering 200+ WebGPU compute kernels to accelerate AI inference locally in browsers.

Hugging Face introduced the @huggingface/kernels package, bundling more than 200 optimized WebGPU compute kernels for running AI workloads locally. The release targets browser-based and on-device inference, reducing reliance on server-side compute. No article body was available beyond the title, so benchmark results and supported models are not specified.

Hugging Face BlogSep 1, 00:00 UTC · 15d agoAI tools & infra

The Open ASR Leaderboard Adds Its First Global South Language

Hugging Face's Open ASR Leaderboard added its first Global South language, expanding speech-recognition benchmark coverage.

The Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard, a community benchmark tracker for automatic speech recognition models, added its first Global South language. This expands evaluation coverage beyond the high-resource languages the leaderboard previously tracked. No further details were available in the announcement text.

Hugging Face BlogAug 28, 00:00 UTC · 19d agoAI research

Climate-ModernBERT: Revisiting Corpus Composition for Domain-Adaptive Continued Pretraining

Climate-ModernBERT domain-adapted encoders reach 76.3 average F1 across nine climate benchmarks, 2.8 points above vanilla ModernBERT-Base.

The authors continue pretraining ModernBERT-Base on three climate corpora - academic text, climate-filtered web data, and synthetic documents - and compare joint mixtures against parameter-space merging of specialized checkpoints. The best model achieves 76.3 average F1 across nine climate NLP benchmarks, a 2.8-point improvement over the vanilla baseline. Academic climate corpora provide the strongest adaptation signal, and parameter-space merging outperforms joint multi-source training while preserving complementary corpus information; all variants are released.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CLSep 7, 17:41 UTC · 8d agoAI research

U.K. Supreme Court Opens Door for Spyware Victims to Sue Foreign States

UK Supreme Court ruled Bahrain not immune from spyware litigation, letting two dissidents pursue claims over FinSpy hacking; case returns to the High Court.

The UK Supreme Court ruled in The Kingdom of Bahrain v. Shehabi that Bahrain is not immune from litigation over its alleged use of FinSpy spyware against two Bahraini dissidents living in the UK. Citizen Lab researchers Siena Anstis, Natalia Krapiva, and Kate Pundyk, writing in Lawfare, called the decision a milestone for accountability in transnational repression. The case now returns to the UK High Court, where attribution, causation, and injury must be proven.

Citizen LabSep 2, 14:14 UTC · 13d agoPolicy & legal in the wild

US and Canadian Court Records Breached Following Thomson Reuters Incident

Thomson Reuters disclosed a breach of its C-Track court software exposing sensitive case records across Ontario courts and 11 US states.

Thomson Reuters detected unauthorized access to its C-Track case management product on June 30 and disclosed the incident on September 2. Files from three Ontario courts and appellate courts in 11 US states plus the US Virgin Islands were affected, potentially exposing names, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, medical information, dates of birth and health insurance data. The company said financial transaction systems were not impacted and found no evidence of misuse; the investigation into exact scope is ongoing.

Infosecurity MagazineSep 3, 12:00 UTC · 12d agoData breach 2 sources

A Single Canadian Tax Lure Spread into a 46-Country, US-First RMM Campaign

A phishing campaign using fake Canada Revenue Agency tax documents has expanded to 46 countries, with 45% of activity targeting the US via RMM tools.

ANY.RUN analysis traced a campaign that began with fake Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) T4 tax documents and grew into a broader remote-access operation spanning 46 countries. The United States accounts for 45% of observed activity. Attackers impersonate trusted organizations and document types to trick victims into installing remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools.

ANY.RUNAug 25, 10:40 UTC · 21d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Welsh environment regulator's FoI blunder exposes diversity data of 2,000 staff

Natural Resources Wales inadvertently exposed diversity data of about 2,000 current and former staff via a 2021 Freedom of Information spreadsheet published online.

Natural Resources Wales confirmed equality monitoring data of roughly 2,000 employees who worked between April 2013 and March 2018 was inadvertently disclosed in a spreadsheet released in 2021 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The data may have included ethnicity, disability status, religion or belief, sexual orientation, Welsh language ability, and caring responsibilities — special category data under UK GDPR. The breach was reported to the Information Commissioner's Office, the data was removed and permanently deleted, and NRW says it has found no evidence of misuse. The issue was discovered only after a member of the public alerted the regulator on 23 August 2026.

The Register · SecuritySep 7, 11:04 UTC · 8d agoData breach

Only Half of UK Manufacturers Have a Cyber Incident Response Plan

Make UK survey finds only half of UK manufacturers have a cyber incident response plan; 30% report recent incidents.

A Make UK survey reveals major cyber resilience gaps across UK manufacturing. Only around half of UK manufacturers have a cyber incident response plan in place. Some 30% of manufacturers report experiencing a recent cyber incident.

Infosecurity MagazineAug 11, 08:00 UTC · Aug 11, 2026Industry

17th August – Threat Intelligence Report

Colombia's Ministry of Justice suffered a ransomware attack disrupting drug-monitoring and legal public services, per Check Point's 17 August 2026 threat intelligence report.

Check Point Research's weekly threat intelligence bulletin for 17 August 2026 leads with a ransomware attack on Colombia's Ministry of Justice. The attack affected part of the ministry's technology infrastructure and disrupted public services related to illicit-drug monitoring and legal processes. Officials confirmed that some files were impacted; the bulletin also aggregates other cyber research and attack discoveries from the week.

Check Point ResearchAug 17, 13:37 UTC · 29d agoRansomware

Wake-Up Call for CNI After Iranian Attack Shuts Down UK Power Plant

A cyber-attack attributed to Iran shut down a UK power plant, exposing the frailty of critical national infrastructure, security experts warn.

Security experts say an Iranian cyber-attack forced a UK power plant offline, describing the incident as a wake-up call for critical national infrastructure operators. The attack caused physical operational disruption at an energy facility. Technical details about the intrusion path and the affected operator remain limited in initial reporting.

Infosecurity MagazineAug 24, 09:01 UTC · 23d agoThreat actor in the wild

Thomson Reuters Court Software Breach May Have Exposed SSNs and Sealed Data

Unauthorized access to Thomson Reuters' C-Track court platform may have exposed SSNs and sealed records across 11 US states, USVI, and Ontario.

Thomson Reuters' West Publishing disclosed that an unauthorized party obtained files from the C-Track court case management platform starting in March 2026, with access to one environment running from March 1 through June 29, 2026 per Montana's account. Notices name roughly 24 court bodies across 11 US states, the US Virgin Islands, and Ontario, including appellate courts in Minnesota, Ohio, Montana, and Pennsylvania. Exposed data may include names, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, dates of birth, medical and health insurance information, and confidential or sealed court records. The company is offering 12 months of Experian or TransUnion monitoring, and courts disagree over whether the vendor's backup cloud environment or the production platform was accessed.

The Hacker NewsSep 3, 14:39 UTC · 12d agoData breach 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.CLSep 4, 17:32 UTC · 11d agoAI research1

Large group of Serbian opposition, activist figures targeted with spyware

Researchers found at least 14 Serbian opposition figures and student protesters targeted with Pegasus and NoviSpy spyware around elections; 11 more phones under investigation.

The SHARE Foundation, with Citizen Lab confirmation and Amnesty International peer review, found at least 14 Serbian opposition and civil society figures targeted with advanced spyware since December, including a member of Parliament, a local politician and student protesters. Citizen Lab confirmed zero-click Pegasus on a student protester's iPhone between December 2025 and January 2026, while Amnesty confirmed a new detection-evading NoviSpy Android variant in at least two cases. Targeting coincided with March 2026 local elections; Serbia's BIA intelligence agency denied the claims, and 11 additional alerted phones remain under forensic investigation.

The RecordSep 3, 19:34 UTC · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild

Thomson Reuters reveals breach that exposed U.S. and Canadian court records

Thomson Reuters disclosed a C-Track breach exposing court records and personal data across at least 12 US states, US Virgin Islands, and Canada.

Thomson Reuters discovered unauthorized activity in its C-Track court case management platform on June 30, 2026, tracing the intrusion to March 2026. Affected systems include Ontario's three courts, Wyoming's entire state judiciary, and appellate and supreme courts across at least 12 US states plus the US Virgin Islands. Exposed records may include names, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, medical information, dates of birth, and health insurance details, with some sealed court information possibly affected. The company is offering 12 months of free credit monitoring and reports no evidence of fraud so far; attribution and access method remain unknown.

Help Net SecuritySep 3, 00:00 UTC · 13d agoData breach

Measuring Language Transfer in Robot Policies: Adding Greek to a Cosmos3 Vision-Language-Action Policy

Researchers added Greek to the Cosmos3 vision-language-action policy using only machine-rephrased instructions, finding bilingual training reaches roughly two fifths of English performance.

The paper studies localizing the open Cosmos3 vision-language-action robot policy to Greek without architectural changes, using machine-rephrased instructions only. Bilingual training yields a consistent 6.7-7.1 point margin over controls on a 90-task, three-seed evaluation suite, while Greek-only training gains at most 2.7 points. Several common evaluation instruments, including color-histogram metrics and single-goal benchmarks, produced false conclusions, and results were dominated by seed variation. The authors recommend building guaranteed-null baselines and replicating low-resource-language results across seeds.

Hugging Face daily papersSep 6, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research