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Persistent Attempts at Cyberespionage Against Southeast Asian Government Target Have Links to Alloy Taurus

Alloy Taurus (GALLIUM) compromised Southeast Asian government networks from 2022 to 2023 using Exchange web shells and undocumented .NET backdoors Reshell and Zapoa.

Unit 42 tracked persistent multiwave intrusions at a Southeast Asian government starting in early 2022 and continuing through 2023, attributing the activity with moderate confidence to Alloy Taurus (aka GALLIUM), a Chinese state-aligned espionage group. Attackers exploited Exchange Server vulnerabilities to deploy web shells including China Chopper, then ran reconnaissance with Fscan and WebScan, created administrative accounts, and installed undocumented .NET backdoors named Reshell and Zapoa. They established resilience by installing SoftEther VPN, brute-forced Active Directory credentials with Kerbrute, and dumped credential stores with GoDumpLsass and LsassUnhooker. The campaign reflects long-term espionage tradecraft to maintain a foothold.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild1

Tables Decoded: DELTA for Structure, TARQA for Understanding

DELTA extracts tables into compact OTSL text and TARQA fine-tunes LLMs on it, beating VLM baselines on table QA.

DELTA separates physical structure recognition, logical structure recognition, and OCR to output tables in Optimised Table Structure Language (OTSL), a compact unified format encoding cell arrangements and content. It achieves TEDS-Structure scores comparable to state-of-the-art methods across FinTabNet, PubTabNet, and PubTables-1M, with robustness tested on a curated Hindi benchmark, TORQUE. TARQA, an LLM fine-tuned on OTSL sequences, gains 9.3 percentage points on WTQ TabQA and 9.2 points on FinTabNetQA TabVQA; code, models, and the benchmark are released on GitHub.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

Connecting the Dots: Securing the Overlooked Corners of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) Supply Chain

Unit 42 warns attackers increasingly target CI/CD pipelines and developer tools rather than application code, urging full SDLC supply chain visibility.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 research argues attackers are shifting focus from application code to overlooked corners of the software development lifecycle supply chain, including CI/CD pipelines and developer tooling. The write-up calls for total SDLC visibility and strict security controls to defend these developer-facing attack surfaces.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 26d agoResearch in the wild

Eleethub: A Cryptocurrency Mining Botnet with Rootkit for Self

Unit 42 uncovered Eleethub, a Perl-based Bitcoin mining botnet using a crafted rootkit and libprocesshider to evade detection, still under development with few infections.

Unit 42 discovered an under-development Perl Shellbot campaign that mines Bitcoin using xmrig and emech while evading detection via a rootkit that replaces the ps tool and the LD_PRELOAD-based libprocesshider.so library. Infected devices download a malicious shell script, connect to IRC-based C2 at eleethub.com and the UnderNet network, and can receive commands for UDP/TCP floods, port scans, and HTTP attacks. The botnet can affect Unix systems and Windows 10 hosts running a Linux subsystem, and its operators use the 'Los Zetas' branding, though they are unlikely to be the Mexican drug cartel. Researchers found only a few compromised 'zombies' before the campaign expanded.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 28d agoMalware in the wild

Implementation of Machine Learning Workflows with NVIDIA cuML, RAPIDS, GPU Benchmarking, Explainability, Clustering, and Model Inference

Hands-on tutorial implements NVIDIA cuML and RAPIDS to GPU-accelerate scikit-learn-style ML workflows with benchmarking, clustering, and inference.

The tutorial demonstrates NVIDIA cuML as a GPU-accelerated machine learning framework, using cuml.accel to speed up unmodified scikit-learn scripts with zero code changes and the native cuML API for CuPy/cuDF interoperability. It benchmarks CPU versus GPU implementations of PCA, K-Means, nearest-neighbor search, logistic regression, random forests, and DBSCAN on datasets up to 200,000 samples with 64 features. It also builds GPU pipelines with UMAP, t-SNE, and HDBSCAN, validates GPU-generated SHAP explanations, uses the FIL library for forest inference, and covers model serialization and GPU/CPU portability.

MarkTechPost · 3d agoAI tools & infra

TasmScan: Continuation-Aware Taint Analysis for TVM Bytecode with Savelist Abstraction

TasmScan introduces source-free taint analysis for TON smart-contract bytecode, detecting 95.3% of defects with 96.8% precision and 17x speedup.

TasmScan is the first bytecode-level static analysis framework for the TON Virtual Machine, enabling cross-continuation data flow reasoning without source code by modeling savelist semantics through forward register analysis with formal over-approximation guarantees. It lifts bytecode into a typed intermediate representation (TASIR) and performs path-sensitive taint analysis. On a 208-contract benchmark with human-confirmed ground truth it detects 95.3% of defects across five classes at 96.8% precision, and resolves 294,546 dynamic continuation targets with 100% precision across 2,921 registry contracts. It achieves a 17x median speedup over symbolic-execution baselines.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

A Princeton Researcher Proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT) that Carries Decoder State across Every Token, Fixing 96 Blocks per Token with Unbounded Temporal Depth

Princeton researcher Yifan Zhang proposes Recurrent Looped Transformer, carrying full decoder state across every token for unbounded temporal depth.

Yifan Zhang's technical report defines the Recurrent Looped Transformer (RLT), pairing a causal encoder with a recurrent decoder whose final output and layerwise sliding-window attention cache carry into every subsequent token with no prompt-response boundary reset. The reference configuration ties 48 encoder and 48 decoder layers, executing 96 logical blocks per token while the state path grows to 48t blocks after t tokens at fixed per-token compute. The report details RL replay contracts that rebuild all states under current parameters and exact prefix snapshots for multi-turn serving, but explicitly reports no measured efficiency, reasoning quality, or scaling results.

MarkTechPost · 3d agoAI research1

MaxKernel: Agentic Kernel Generation for TPUs

Researchers open-source MaxKernel, a multi-agent LLM system that generates and optimizes TPU kernels matching expert hand-tuned baselines on JaxBench.

MaxKernel is a multi-agent system offering three paradigms for TPU kernel development: human-in-the-loop collaborative design, a fully autonomous metric/trace-driven optimization loop, and graph-based autonomous search for global exploration. All paradigms draw on a shared pool of specialized sub-agents for planning, implementation, self-debugging, testing, and hardware profiling. Evaluated on JaxBench's 50 diverse TPU kernel tasks and real-world workloads from open-source models, it consistently matches expert hand-tuned baselines. The system is open-sourced via the AI-Hypercomputer GitHub repository.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI tools & infra

[0day-rubbish] Accurate Online Private Cloud on-prem (current) Unauthenticated Hessian deserialization leading to JNDI remote class loading (9.8)

0day Rubbish disclosed an unauthenticated Hessian deserialization flaw in Accurate Online Private Cloud on-prem allowing JNDI remote class loading, rated 9.8.

The 0day Rubbish Research Team publicly disclosed an unauthenticated Hessian deserialization vulnerability in the current on-premises release of Accurate Online Private Cloud. The flaw lets unauthenticated attackers trigger JNDI remote class loading, a path that typically yields remote code execution. The issue carries a CVSS 9.8 rating. No CVE identifier or evidence of in-the-wild exploitation was included in the disclosure.

Full Disclosure · 8d agoVulnerability

Ambient @ EgoLongQA 2026: Distilling Long-Video perception into a Sub-2B Model

Ambient team wins EgoLongQA 2026 sub-2B division by distilling an agentic long-video perception pipeline into a 2B vision-language model.

Ambient's entry to the EgoLongQA track of the Wearable-AI Challenge at ECCV 2026 placed first in the <=2B parameter division with 0.8279 on the held-out test set. The system distills the junior perception module of a tool-using agentic pipeline into a 2B student, reaching 89% of the pipeline's accuracy with 1.1% of its parameters and lifting a 27.1% base model to 81.4%. To meet the division limit, the multilingual embedding table is pruned from 248,320 to 143,469 rows, reaching 1.9985B parameters with provably identical logits on retained rows.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

[AINews] Fal’s H3 Max Live breaks the infinite videogen barrier

Fal post-trained MiniMax H3 into a 'Max' variant with 35x-faster inference, enabling faster-than-realtime AI video generation and infinite streams.

Fal post-trained MiniMax's H3 model into a 'Max' variant and optimized it for its in-house inference engine, achieving roughly 35x the speed of the official endpoint. The optimization enables faster-than-realtime video generation, demonstrated by an infinite interactive AI-generated stream productized by levels.io. The roundup also notes Meta Muse Code's general availability with an SDK, open DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp weights, GLM-5.3-Flash's strong agentic cost/performance rankings, and Tencent's 770B-parameter Hy4 Preview MoE with 49B active parameters.

Latent Space · 15d agoAI industry

The Coding-Agent Trap: When a "Free" LLM Endpoint Is the Adversary, (Mon, Aug 31st)

A SANS honeypot caught a real coding-agent session routed to a rogue "free" LLM endpoint, exposing a Windows user's transcript and tool outputs.

A SANS analyst describes how an internet-exposed inference honeypot was discovered, relabeled with sought-after model names like DeepSeek, and enrolled in infrastructure serving "free" LLM backends. On 2026-08-30 an opencode terminal coding agent sent an 88-message, 224 KB transcript 210 times in 91 seconds via a China Unicom relay, exposing directory listings, tool outputs and read file portions. The analyst frames tool-enabled agents treating model endpoints as trusted control planes as a novel risk — a "rogue model endpoint" that could request tool executions on the user's machine.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 16d agoAI safety & security1

CertiFlash: A Formal Verification Framework for Flash Translation Layers in Computational Solid State Drives

CertiFlash provides machine-checked formal verification of SSD flash translation layers, proving isolation, integrity, and ownership invariants to prevent tenant data leaks.

CertiFlash is an open-source formal verification framework for Flash Translation Layers (FTL) in computational SSDs, mechanized in the Rocq proof assistant. It shows that a faulty FTL can corrupt device state at five surfaces (e.g., leaking data between tenants or dropping integrity tags), demonstrated on a DaisyPlus OpenSSD. Designers prove once that every operation of a general FTL model preserves a global invariant covering mapping, isolation, integrity, ownership, and allocation; new designs need only discharge five hypotheses. Across four case studies, added effort was 27-3,231 lines against a 16,489-line framework.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch1

Augustinian BabyLM: What Ostensive Definition Can and Cannot Teach a Small Language Model

Study shows visually grounded token embeddings in a small masked LM persist through training and improve object-property knowledge, but escape standard BabyLM benchmarks.

The paper implements ostensive definition for a small DeBERTa masked language model trained on 10M words, seeding visually grounded tokens with embeddings derived from labeled image regions before training. Visual initialization leaves a persistent, seed-replicated advantage on object-property knowledge (COMPS) and a corpus-tailored Visual-Property Swap benchmark covering color, material, size, and shape, but has no effect on most BabyLM grammar benchmarks. Synthetic grounding of previously unseeded words causally transfers the advantage to exactly those words.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research

SimpleMemVLA: A Simple but Effective Native-Video Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models

SimpleMemVLA passes full timestamped video history straight to a VLA backbone, setting state of the art on four memory benchmarks.

SimpleMemVLA is a vision-language-action model for long-horizon manipulation that removes the dedicated memory module entirely. It keeps sampled history intact and feeds it to the backbone as timestamped video, with the hidden states of a generated sub-task serving as the only channel into a standard flow-matching action head. Prefilling the shared history prefix during action execution keeps latency close to a single-frame VLA. The system sets a new state of the art on four memory benchmarks and outperforms retrieval, compression and recurrent-state mechanisms, with causal interventions confirming the policy genuinely reads its history.

Hugging Face daily papers · 15d agoAI research

The Permanent Threat: Analyzing Aeternum’s Blockchain-Based C2 Operations and Communications

Unit 42 analyzes the Aeternum botnet loader, which uses Polygon blockchain smart contracts for resilient decentralized C2 and payload execution.

Palo Alto Unit 42 published a technical analysis of Aeternum, a botnet loader that leverages Polygon blockchain smart contracts as its command-and-control infrastructure. The decentralized C2 design makes takedown difficult, giving the threat a persistent, 'permanent' communication channel for payload delivery and execution. The analysis covers the smart contract mechanics and communication protocol used by the operation.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 10, 2026Malware

graphql-go/graphql <= 0.8.1: quadratic CPU-exhaustion DoS via OverlappingFieldsCanBeMergedRule

Unauthenticated quadratic CPU-exhaustion DoS disclosed in graphql-go/graphql up to v0.8.1 via OverlappingFieldsCanBeMergedRule; no fixed version exists.

Evgenios Gkritsis publicly disclosed an algorithmic-complexity denial-of-service flaw in github.com/graphql-go/graphql affecting all released versions up to and including v0.8.1. The defect is triggered via the OverlappingFieldsCanBeMergedRule validation, is unauthenticated and network-reachable, and causes quadratic CPU exhaustion. No fixed version exists; the disclosure was public because the project has no private security-reporting channel or SECURITY.md.

oss-security · 2d agoVulnerability

Cortex Cloud Archives

Palo Alto Networks publishes a product category page for Cortex Cloud, an AI and automation platform for cloud and SOC workflows.

This item is a product category archive page for Palo Alto Networks' Cortex Cloud, describing it as an AI and automation-driven platform spanning code to cloud to SOC. The page contains no new research, incident, or product release details beyond marketing language about prioritizing risks and accelerating remediation.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 27d agoIndustry

Memory-Efficient Designs for Word-Wise Universal Fully Homomorphic Encryption

BXT framework mitigates FHE memory bottlenecks via ciphertext compression, serialization, delayed seeding, and digit pruning, achieving up to 3.8x CNN inference speedup.

A new paper proposes BXT, an optimization framework for word-wise Universal Fully Homomorphic Encryption that targets the memory bottleneck rather than compute. It combines four techniques: ciphertext compression via seed regeneration, bit-packed ciphertext serialization for L2-to-L1 transfers, delayed PRNG-heavy offline seed generation across aggregated operations, and fault-aware ciphertext digit pruning. On CNN inference, the BXT-CSO50 configuration achieves up to 3.8x speedup over a 100x GPU baseline with under 1% accuracy loss at 50% comparison precision.

arXiv cs.CR · 12d agoResearch

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

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

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

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

Identifying a BOLA Vulnerability in Harbor, a Cloud

Unit 42 found a BOLA flaw, CVE-2024-22278 (CVSS 6.4), letting Maintainers improperly alter Harbor project metadata; fixed in versions 2.9.5, 2.10.3, and 2.11.0.

Unit 42 researchers identified a broken object-level authorization flaw, CVE-2024-22278, in Harbor, a CNCF-graduated cloud-native container registry with 1.8 million downloads. The flaw (CVSS 6.4) lets users with the Maintainer role create, update, and delete project metadata, actions reserved for ProjectAdmin, risking data exposure, integrity compromise, and circumvention of vulnerability scanning. Harbor patched the issue in versions 2.9.5, 2.10.3, and 2.11.0. The finding came from Unit 42's automated BOLA detection tool built on generative AI.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026VulnerabilityCVE-2024-22278

HybridFLow: SDN-Orchestrated Client Partitioning for Hybrid Federated Learning

HybridFLow uses SDN topology visibility to partition federated-learning clients into sync/async groups, reaching 80% accuracy 33-40% faster than SmartFLow.

HybridFLow is a closed-loop, SDN-driven orchestration framework for hybrid federated learning that integrates network-layer intelligence into cross-silo training. It leverages the SDN controller's global topology view to generate calibrated per-client communication-time estimates, partitioning clients into synchronous and asynchronous groups while balancing round latency and update staleness, with measured times fed back after each round. Across multiple network topologies it reaches 80% target accuracy 33-40% faster than SmartFLow and cuts average round duration by 30-40 seconds, while FedAsync fails to reach target accuracy under non-IID data.

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

OpenBMB Releases MiniCPM5-2B: A 2.52B Dense Model Averaging 53.9 Across 34 Benchmarks and Built to Run On Device

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a 2.52B-parameter Apache 2.0 on-device model averaging 53.9 across 34 benchmarks, ahead of Qwen3.5-4B.

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a 2,516,756,480-parameter dense LlamaForCausalLM model with grouped-query attention and a 131,072-token context, under Apache 2.0, runnable via vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, and Ollama. It averages 53.9 across 34 benchmarks versus 51.1 for Qwen3.5-4B, with strong tool-use (97.1 on tau2-Bench Telecom) and code results (69.1 LiveCodeBench v6, 46.4 SWE-bench Verified). Training combined 400B tokens of deep-thinking SFT, critic-based JustRL II RL teachers, and on-policy distillation merging 16 RL experts; datasets and intermediate checkpoints were published alongside the weights.

MarkTechPost · 9d agoModel release

MicroHasTEE: Bare-Metal Haskell for Type-Level Peripheral Ownership on Armv8-M

MicroHasTEE expresses TrustZone secure and non-secure firmware as one typed Haskell program, catching peripheral-ownership inconsistencies at compile time.

MicroHasTEE is a multiparty Haskell framework that models both TrustZone firmware images as participants in a single typed program, using type-level capability ledgers to track peripheral acquisition, configuration, transfer, and finalization. MicroHs compiles the shared program twice to produce separate bare-metal Secure and Non-secure firmware images. The framework rejects inconsistent resource use, post-configuration attribution changes, wrong-domain callbacks, and calls to unregistered Secure services. A door-lock case study on an STM32U5 Nucleo board produced images of 232.7 KiB and 228.4 KiB of flash with roughly 220 KiB of SRAM per domain.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch1

Litelm: LiteLLM Without the Bloat

New open-source project Litelm launched on GitHub as a leaner alternative to the LiteLLM multi-provider LLM gateway.

Litelm is a community-published GitHub project positioned as a stripped-down alternative to LiteLLM, a widely used gateway/SDK for routing requests to multiple LLM providers. The post drew modest attention on Hacker News with 45 points and 17 comments. The listing provides no further technical details, benchmarks, or feature specifics.

Breaking the Seal: Static Deobfuscation of JSCeal’s Compiled V8 Bytecode

Check Point's hasherezade details static deobfuscation of JSCeal, a V8-bytecode stealer targeting cryptocurrency applications since March 2024.

JSCeal is an infostealer distributed as compiled V8 bytecode (.jsc) executed by a bundled Node.js runtime, aimed at cryptocurrency applications. Other vendors track the same family under the names WEEVILPROXY or MeadowLocust. Check Point Research has tracked the campaign since early 2024, with activity dating back to March 2024. The write-up presents a static approach to unpacking the bytecode without executing it.

Check Point Research · 16d agoMalware in the wild1

openbmb/MiniCPM5-2B — new model trending #4 on Hugging Face

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, a dense 2B open-weights Transformer claiming 2B-class open-source SOTA for on-device deployment.

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-2B, the second model in the MiniCPM5 series following MiniCPM5-1B, and it is trending #4 on Hugging Face. The dense 2B Transformer targets on-device, local, and resource-constrained deployment and claims 2B-class open-source SOTA while remaining competitive with 4B-class models. Reported strengths include coding, mathematics, long-context understanding, tool use, and agentic tasks; a tech report (arXiv 2506.07900), GitHub repo, and online demo accompany the release.

Hugging Face trending models · 10d agoModel release

CodeTD: Topology of Attention Detects Hallucinations in Code LLMs

CodeTD detects hallucinations in code LLMs before execution by analyzing topological patterns of attention maps, outperforming recent baselines.

CodeTD applies topological data analysis (TDA) to code LLM attention maps to quantify prompt-generation mismatch as a pre-execution correctness signal. Experiments cover HumanEval, MBPP, BigCodeBench, and MultiPL-E across 5 programming languages and 10 code LLMs up to 34B parameters. The method outperforms recent baselines and transfers between coding benchmarks, helping catch code that fails the task or embeds security vulnerabilities.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research1

There Is No Patch Tuesday on the Blockchain: Why Solidity Developers Need Fusion-Grade AppSec Before They Deploy

Checkmarx argues Solidity developers need pre-deployment AppSec because disclosure-to-weaponization time has collapsed from 840 days to 1.6 days.

A Checkmarx write-up contrasts traditional software patch cycles with blockchain development, where there is no Patch Tuesday and fixes require on-chain upgrades. It cites stats that median disclosure-to-weaponization time collapsed from 840 days to 1.6 days and that 80% of exploitations now occur on or before disclosure day. The piece advocates fusion-grade application security for Solidity teams before contracts deploy.

Checkmarx · Aug 17, 2026Research1

Code to Cloud Platform Archives

Unit 42 archive page for Code to Cloud platform product-category articles; no new research or announcements.

This Unit 42 archive page lists product-category posts about Palo Alto Networks' Code to Cloud platform, which secures public cloud environments, SaaS applications and remote locations. It contains no new research, incidents, or announcements.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 28d agoIndustry

Perplexity Details Its GPU Embedding Stack: How Ivy, Tulip and ROSE Serve pplx-embed

Perplexity details its GPU embedding serving stack (Ivy, Tulip, ROSE), which reuses LLM prefill/decode kernels, CUDA graphs, and LazyTensors to cut launch overhead.

Perplexity engineers published a deep dive on the serving infrastructure behind pplx-embed, used across Perplexity Search and its API platform. The stack comprises Ivy (Rust HTTP gateway), Tulip (gRPC scheduling and batching), and ROSE (Runtime-Optimized Serving Engine), which reuses LLM prefill and decode kernels rather than running a separate embedding engine. Optimizations include whole-model CUDA graphs with lazy capture and a LazyTensor abstraction that overlaps CPU batch preparation with in-flight GPU work. Benchmarks are reported against vLLM v0.22.0 in BF16, with FlashAttention 4 generally fastest but FlashInfer 3 winning on Qwen-based models at very long sequence lengths.

MarkTechPost · 10d agoAI tools & infra1