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Three-quarters of Ransomware Attacks Target Mid-Market Firms

Black Kite research finds roughly 75% of ransomware attacks target mid-market firms, with manufacturers hit most often.

Attack-surface management vendor Black Kite published findings that about three-quarters of ransomware attacks target mid-market organizations. Manufacturing is the sector most likely to be attacked. The report frames mid-market companies as the sweet spot for ransomware operators.

Infosecurity Magazine · 29d agoRansomware in the wild

Hackers Target Claude, Cursor and Codex AI Agents to Steal Tokens and Prompt Histories

Gen Digital found infostealers like Amatera and Remus stealing AI coding agent tokens, prompt histories, and MCP configs from infected Windows and macOS machines.

Gen Digital analysts observed Amatera and Remus detections among tens of thousands of protected Windows users over three months, with Amatera targeting Cline and Continue data and Remus targeting Claude, Cursor, and OpenCode. CallbackBeaver added Cursor and Claude to its collection scope with more than 5,000 samples in 30 days, while macOS-focused Djinn Stealer has been associated with Claude, Codex, Gemini, Cline, OpenCode, and Kilo. The stealers harvest access and refresh tokens, prompt histories, and MCP configuration files that can expose source control, ticketing, databases, cloud resources, and sensitive project context for follow-on fraud. Many stealers add targets via remotely managed rules, meaning this is an adaptation of existing infostealers rather than a new vulnerability in the AI tools themselves.

Cyber Security News · 7d agoMalware in the wild2

Hackers Frequently Target Healthcare and Finance Orgs

A new Huntress survey indicates threat actors frequently target healthcare organizations and banks because of the highly personal data they hold.

Huntress published survey findings indicating that healthcare organizations and banks are frequent targets for threat actors. The piece attributes this to the highly personal information these sectors handle. The article is framed around cyberattack readiness rather than a specific incident.

Huntress · 15d agoIndustry

Pro-Ukraine Hacking Cat group deploying new malware against Russian targets

Kaspersky links pro-Ukraine hacktivist group Hacking Cat to Gorilla RAT and Monkey Ransomware in destructive attacks on Russian targets.

Kaspersky reports that pro-Ukraine group Hacking Cat, active since February 2024, has shifted from defacements to destructive encryption attacks, using a previously undocumented Gorilla RAT remote-access tool and Monkey Ransomware, which appends the .monkey extension to files. Initial access in some attacks came from exploited Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities, and rapid multi-language malware variants suggest possible generative AI assistance. Shared tools like Nemo Wiper across groups including Ukrainian Cyber Alliance complicate attribution, and targets include Rosatom contractor and heating provider Donbassteploenergo.

The Record · 2d agoThreat actor in the wild

Edge Case launches Guardian, an AI platform for tracking risk across autonomous systems

Edge Case launched Guardian, an AI platform creating a Digital Safety Twin to continuously track risk across autonomous and defense systems.

Edge Case launched Guardian, an AI-driven platform that fuses safety analysis, engineering data, and operational signals into a continuous Digital Safety Twin. It targets advanced autonomous platforms in commercial and defense markets, with six customer agreements signed at launch. The platform tracks hazards, mitigations, and source-linked evidence across the development lifecycle, shifting safety from one-time review to continuous capability.

Help Net Security · 14d agoAI tools & infra

Manufacturing Top Targeted Orange

Orange threat data reportedly shows manufacturing is the most targeted sector, highlighting elevated attack pressure on industrial organizations.

The headline suggests Orange Cyberdefense telemetry ranks manufacturing as the most targeted sector. The article text was unavailable, so the underlying metrics and time frame are unconfirmed. The finding is relevant to defenders prioritizing industrial and manufacturing environments.

Infosecurity Magazine · 28d agoThreat actor

Hackers Can Hide Malicious AI Commands Inside Normal English to Bypass Security Filters

Check Point's PuzzleMask technique hides malicious prompts in ordinary English that fast gatekeeper models miss but high-reasoning downstream models execute.

Check Point researchers disclosed PuzzleMask, a technique concealing policy-breaking instructions in natural-language prose without encodings or invisible characters. Fast screening models classified all 23 crafted wrappers as safe, while a high-reasoning model recovered and acted on the hidden instruction in 17 of 18 tests (94.4%). The gap stems from capability imbalance between gatekeeper and target models, with defenses including paraphrasing untrusted input, stricter self-referential wording rules, and output/tool-call monitoring.

Cyber Security News · 5d agoAI safety & security1

SilkParasite Espionage Campaign Targets Central Asian Governments with Five New RATs

Bitdefender reports SilkParasite, a China-nexus espionage cluster targeting Central Asian governments with seven RATs, five newly documented, delivered via spearphished RAR archives.

Bitdefender Labs assesses with medium confidence that SilkParasite, first discovered in late 2025, is a China-nexus cluster targeting government bodies in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Georgia. Attacks use password-protected RAR archives with malicious Office documents, macro-triggered DLL sideloading, and checks for running Kaspersky AV before execution. The arsenal spans seven RAT families in .NET, C++, Go, and JavaScript with plugin architectures and diverse C2 channels including Google Drive and HTTP cookie/ETag headers; roughly 65 DriveSilkRAT infections were observed, mostly in Asia. Ties to China include BLOODALCHEMY (a Deed RAT/ShadowPad descendant) and an improved SpiceRAT used by SneakyChef, with traces of AI-assisted development in the tooling and lures.

The Hacker News · 27d agoThreat actor in the wild

UBoatRAT Navigates East Asia

Unit 42 discovers UBoatRAT, a new custom RAT targeting South Korean and video-game industry personnel, delivered via Google Drive with GitHub-based C2 and BITS persistence.

Unit 42 identified UBoatRAT, a new custom remote access trojan first found in May 2017, whose initial version used a public Hong Kong blog service and a compromised Japanese web server for command and control. The latest variants target personnel or organizations related to South Korea or the video games industry, are delivered through Google Drive, and masquerade as Microsoft Word, Excel, or folder icons. The RAT checks for virtualization software and domain join, retrieves its C2 address from a Base64-encoded string in a GitHub-hosted file, uses a custom XOR-encrypted C2 protocol, and maintains persistence via Windows Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) jobs that survive reboots.

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

The Frontier AEO Tracker: What Astra Chooses (and every other frontier model, and what you can do about it)

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.

Latent Space · 8d agoAI research

US offering $10 million for info on Iranian hackers behind IOControl malware

US offers up to $10 million for information on CyberAv3ngers' 'Mr. Soul,' whose IOControl malware targets US and worldwide ICS/SCADA devices.

The State Department announced a reward of up to $10 million for information on an online persona known as Mr. Soul (or Mr. Soll) tied to CyberAv3ngers, which conducts malicious cyber activity for Iran's IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command. CyberAv3ngers used the IOControl malware against ICS/SCADA devices in the US, Israel and worldwide, targeting products from Unitronics, D-Link, Hikvision and Baicells, according to Claroty and Armis analyses. The malware allows remote control of infected devices and lateral movement within victim networks. The reward follows an August action offering rewards for and sanctioning six Iranian government hackers and comes amid the widening Israel-Iran military conflict.

The Record · 8d agoPolicy & legal in the wild 3 sources

AI-Generated Exploit Scripts Target Siemens S7 PLCs in U.S. Critical Infrastructure

NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE and EPA warn that actors use AI-generated Python scripts to exploit internet-exposed Siemens S7 PLCs at U.S. critical infrastructure.

A joint advisory from NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE and EPA describes an active threat in which AI-generated exploit scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools target Siemens S7 Series PLCs (S7-200 through S7-1500, including F-series safety controllers). The actors use Censys and ZoomEye scanning to find internet-exposed, outdated PLCs and a custom Python script using snap7 libraries over the S7comm protocol for initial access, credential access and denial of service; no attribution was given. Targeted sectors include Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Water and Wastewater, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities, with potential for process disruption and cascading impacts. A related Dream report details a near-autonomous AI-agent campaign (July 1-4, 2026, 12 waves) against Taiwan government entities, using Hermes and OpenClaw agents with eight parallel sub-agents to crack 85 accounts via password spraying and exfiltrate over 2,564 personnel records, SSO client secrets and database credentials.

The Hacker News · 26d agoExploit / PoC in the wild1

GeoServer Zero-Day Targeted in Active Exploitation Attempts, Can Lead to RCE

A CVSS 9.8 SQL injection zero-day in GeoServer's PostGIS datastore enables RCE and drew active exploitation; fixes shipped in versions 3.0.1, 2.28.5, 2.27.6.

A SQL injection flaw in GeoServer's jsonArrayContains function within the GeoTools PostGIS datastore (GHSA-mqjf-5f49-2fjh, CVSS 9.8) was disclosed August 12, 2026, and saw hundreds of exploitation attempts within hours per watchTowr. An attacker-controlled value is interpolated into a PostgreSQL jsonb_path_exists() expression without escaping; with superuser or pg_execute_server_program privileges it escalates to OS command execution via WFS 1.0. GeoServer released versions 3.0.1, 2.28.5, and 2.27.6, and the flaw is a regression of CVE-2023-25158. GeoServer has a history of mass exploitation, including CVE-2024-36401 used for botnets and proxies.

The Hacker News · Aug 17, 2026Exploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2024-36401CVE-2023-25158CVE-2023-251571

A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over

404 Media reveals DHS Border Patrol's secretive Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT) analyzing Americans' financial activity and feeding intelligence to local police for traffic stops.

404 Media identified Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT) in the Spokane Sector (Washington) and Laredo Sector (Texas), which review law enforcement-sensitive databases including Americans' financial activity and pass intelligence to local police. In one case, a PITT analyst flagged financial patterns associated with narcotics activity, leading Montana Highway Patrol to stop a driver for an obstructed license plate and charge him with DUI and possession with intent to distribute. CBP declined to say what financial data is monitored or whether warrants are obtained; the program extends AP's earlier reporting on ALPR-based predictive policing.

404 Media · 8d agoPolicy & legal

In Other News: InjectEave Attack, SIM Swapper Sentenced, Glasswing Findings Review

SecurityWeek weekly roundup covers exploited WordPress Super Forms flaw CVE-2026-14894, a $10M bounty on an Iranian cyber official, InjectEave attacks, and more.

SecurityWeek's weekly roundup aggregates short items across the threat landscape, including Microsoft's report of invisible Unicode tag characters used in financial phishing lures at up to 2.37 million messages per day, and active exploitation of critical WordPress Super Forms plugin flaw CVE-2026-14894 to deploy PHP webshells. Policy items include a $10 million US bounty for IRGC-CEC Cyber Operations Command lead Amir Yaryab, a 16-month prison sentence for ex-AT&T employee Kenneth Carter over SIM swaps with nearly $600,000 in intended losses, and the US arraignment of Russian Sergei Anatolyevich Filimonov over credential harvesting. Technical items include InjectEave electromagnetic side-channel attacks tested on 11 devices, an FBI warning on OAuth consent phishing, and VulnCheck's finding that only 202 of 26,153 Anthropic Project Glasswing findings were fixed.

SecurityWeek · 5d agoIndustry in the wildCVE-2026-148942

APT28-Linked HOOKEDGE Backdoor Targets European Government and Diplomatic Organizations

Recorded Future links new HOOKEDGE batch-script backdoor campaigns against Romanian, Spanish and Turkish government targets to Russia's APT28 (BlueDelta).

Recorded Future's Insikt Group identified campaigns deploying the previously undocumented HOOKEDGE backdoor against government and diplomatic organizations in Romania, Spain and Türkiye from late September 2025 to early April 2026. The lightweight Windows batch backdoor is delivered via macro-enabled Word documents and attributed with moderate confidence to APT28 (Fancy Bear, tracked as BlueDelta), described as the evolutionary successor to HEADLACE, using webhook.site for C2, payload staging and exfiltration. HOOKEDGE fetches .cmd payloads and returns output through headless Microsoft Edge HTTP requests, maintains a 30-minute scheduled task, and a second-stage implant gives high-value targets five-minute beaconing for interactive operator tasking.

The Hacker News · 19d agoThreat actor in the wild

New GPUThor Rowhammer Defeats ECC on NVIDIA RTX A6000 to Gain Host Root Access

University of Toronto researchers present GPUThor, a Rowhammer attack that defeats ECC on NVIDIA RTX A4000-A6000 GDDR6 GPUs and achieves host root access.

GPUThor uses non-uniform hammering to bypass Target Row Refresh and overcome SECDED ECC on NVIDIA Ampere workstation GPUs with GDDR6 memory, inducing 72,000 to 377,552 bit flips per gigabyte across RTX A6000, A5000, A4500, and A4000 cards. Triple-bit silent data corruption enables host privilege escalation to root with the IOMMU enabled, reusing GPUBreach page-table corruption techniques, and double-bit DUEs allow escalation when the IOMMU is disabled during a ~10 ms lazy-service window. The attack cut end-to-end escalation time on the A6000 from 21.9 hours to 1.1 minutes. Reported to NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft, and AWS on April 29, 2026; findings were embargoed until August 25, 2026, and no CVE identifier was assigned.

The Hacker News · 8d agoResearch1

Def Con Attendees Targeted by Persistent Phishing Campaign

Huntress reports a persistent and elaborate phishing campaign targeting attendees following the Def Con security conference.

A Huntress researcher documented being targeted by an elaborate and persistent phishing scam after attending Def Con. The campaign specifically went after conference attendees, suggesting deliberate targeting of the security community. Details of the social engineering approach and persistence were shared.

Infosecurity Magazine · 27d agoPhishing & fraud

Chinese Hackers Exploit Critical Tencent Software Flaw for One-Click Code Execution

China-linked UNC3569 actively exploited critical Sogou Input Method flaw CVE-2026-51990 for one-click system-level code execution, deploying the GrayRabbit backdoor.

Gen Threat Labs reports that China-linked threat actor UNC3569, possibly tied to contractor i-SOON, exploited critical CVE-2026-51990 in Tencent's Sogou Input Method, a Windows IME used by hundreds of millions, via crafted sgbiz URLs. The chain combines unvalidated command-line argument injection, unrestricted URL navigation, and an un-sandboxed Chromium 80 engine missing roughly six years of security patches. The exploit gives system-level code execution and was used to deploy the GrayRabbit backdoor, which provides a reverse shell, plugin loading, file upload to C2, and system info collection, and has appeared in UNC3569 intrusions since at least 2021. Tencent patched the issue in version 16.3.0.3498 via automatic update, but the outdated Chromium configuration reportedly remained unchanged as of September 10.

SecurityWeek · 2d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 2 sourcesCVE-2026-519901· 1 read

Learning-Guided Planning in Large Dynamic Action Spaces: Budgeted Tree Search for One-to-Many Mobile Charging

LP-BTS uses graph proposal policies, learned critics, and budgeted PUCT search to plan mobile charging across dynamic action spaces up to 2,813 stops.

LP-BTS is a learning-guided planning architecture for one-to-many mobile charging, where N=250 sensors induce roughly 1,125 initial candidate charging stops. A graph proposal policy concentrates candidate support, a learned value critic evaluates leaves, and edge-budgeted PUCT compares simulated futures, letting a single frozen checkpoint cover action universes from 736 to 2,813 stops. On a sealed 30-scenario confirmatory bank it attains the highest observed survival (0.4545) and alive-AUC (0.8031), though its +0.0066 survival edge over the strongest engineered comparator is statistically unresolved.

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

Mirage2FA Surge Hits 4,500 US and EU Companies, Abusing Microsoft 365 Login Flows

Mirage2FA phishing-as-a-service campaign hit ~4,500 organizations, mostly US, stealing Microsoft 365 passwords and session cookies to bypass 2FA.

ANY.RUN research links the Mirage2FA phishing-as-a-service toolkit to 4,532 unique organization email domains between 2024 and 2026, with the US accounting for 63.7% of victims. The kit uses adversary-in-the-middle login flows to harvest credentials and session cookies, bypassing MFA on Microsoft 365 accounts. Researchers recorded more than 9,000 potential compromise events and estimated 48% of targeted email addresses were potentially compromised. Hijacked sessions extend to SSO-connected services, enabling impersonation, fraud and further compromise.

The Hacker News · 22d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Benchmark Radar: A Living Database and Search Engine for AI Benchmarks and Evaluation

Benchmark Radar provides a living searchable database of 1,283 AI benchmark records and 12,916 score observations drawn from 37 daily discovery sources.

Benchmark Radar combines daily discovery of benchmark papers, repositories, datasets, and releases from 13 direct connectors and 24 first-party feeds into a searchable catalog with model card mentions and score histories. The catalog contains 1,283 source records drawn from 4 benchmark catalogs plus 12,916 numeric observations on 790 records. The release includes a web dashboard with leaderboard, Pareto frontier of score versus usage, saturation and trend views, daily feeds, a CLI, and reproducible analysis. The paper audits the full catalog and examines benchmark saturation and limits of score comparisons.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

New IoT Malware Uses Public Linux Exploits to Gain Root and Launch DDoS Attacks

Nozomi details KATARU, an IoT botnet that brute-forces Telnet, exploits public Linux kernel flaws for root access, and launches multi-protocol DDoS attacks.

KATARU, discovered after honeypot Telnet brute-force activity from a Vietnamese IP, downloads an ARM payload (vlxx.arm) and attempts privilege escalation by editing /etc/passwd or exploiting CVE-2026-46300 (Fragnesia), CVE-2026-43284 (Dirty Frag), and CVE-2026-31431 (Copy Fail). It combines Mirai-style TCP, UDP, ICMP, HTTP, QUIC and DNS floods with application attacks against Minecraft, FiveM, OpenVPN and WireGuard. The malware uses X25519 and ChaCha20-Poly1305 encrypted C2, unusually broad persistence across systemd, cron, init frameworks, and Android hooks, plus anti-debugging and decoy traffic to hinder analysis. Implementers copied x86 shellcode into the ARM binary and reused an RFC 7748 test-vector key, indicating low-quality but rapidly evolving commodity development.

GBHackersupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoMalware in the wild 2 sourcesCVE-2026-46300CVE-2026-43284CVE-2026-31431

Show HN: Ordewell – turn one goal into an ordered plan of coding-agent tasks

Ordewell is an open-source tool that decomposes a single goal into an ordered plan of coding-agent tasks, posted on Hacker News.

Ordewell, shared as a Show HN project on GitHub, converts one high-level goal into an ordered plan of tasks for coding agents to execute. The post received 40 points and 29 comments on Hacker News. It focuses on task planning and orchestration for autonomous coding agents.

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

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

Microsoft named a Leader in the Frost Radar™: Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, 2026

Microsoft was named a leader in the 2026 Frost Radar for Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, cited for Defender for Cloud runtime security.

The 2026 Frost Radar for Cloud Workload Protection Platforms placed Microsoft in its leadership tier, calling the company a visionary leader. Microsoft attributes the recognition to unified runtime security delivered through Microsoft Defender for Cloud. The post is vendor marketing with no incident, vulnerability, or technical detail.

Microsoft Security Blog · 28d agoIndustry3

Revolut Exposed KYC Data After Fraudulent Government Email Passed Security Checks

Revolut handed over KYC documents, selfies, and Bitcoin transaction histories to attackers after a fraudulent email from a genuine government domain passed authentication checks.

Revolut confirmed on September 12, 2026 that it disclosed sensitive customer KYC data to an unauthorized third party after a fraudulent information request was sent from an email account operating inside a real government agency's domain, carrying valid domain authentication credentials. The exposed data included identity documents (passports, driver's licenses), verification selfies, birth dates, contact details, IBANs, account statements, and full transaction histories including Bitcoin. Revolut discovered the fraud only after independently verifying with the agency, blocked the sender, and notified law enforcement and financial regulators, but did not disclose the number of affected customers or the agency involved. Researcher ZachXBT assessed the operation was targeted at high-net-worth users, useful for fraud, impersonation, or extortion.

Security Affairs · 4d agoData breach

N0va Phishkit Targets US and EU Businesses: A New Challenge for Identity Security

N0va phishkit targets US and EU organizations with trusted-brand lures, capturing tokens via legitimate authentication flows to gain SSO access to corporate resources.

The N0va phishing kit targets organizations in government, technology, consulting, and healthcare across North America and Europe with lures impersonating Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, DocuSign, Google Drive, Dropbox, Zoom, and Adobe Sign. Victims are guided through legitimate authentication flows, including device code phishing, after which N0va captures access and refresh tokens and abuses token-exchange or device-registration mechanisms to establish SSO access. ANY.RUN tracks the campaign via a characteristic /api/verification/init URL pattern and demonstrates detection in its interactive sandbox.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 6h agofirst · 9h agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 9 sources

Berlin investigates new data leak after hackers publish stolen login credentials

Berlin investigates a fresh leak after Rhysida hackers published stolen login credentials; the city refuses to pay the ransom demand.

Berlin confirmed hackers published additional stolen data, including login credentials, from a mid-August cyberattack on two city ministries responsible for urban development/housing and transport/climate. The Rhysida ransomware group claimed the breach in late August, saying it stole 5.79 TB of data including contracts, emails, passwords and classified information; Berlin acknowledged an extortion demand but refused to pay. Berlin's data protection regulator said the leak includes personal data on public employees and possibly residents, such as names, addresses, dates of birth and bank information. Germany's BSI separately linked the campaign to the TerminalFix fake-CAPTCHA technique and the LoremIpsumLoader/AxolotLoader malware tied to financially motivated Rhysida-associated hackers, days before Berlin's Sept. 20 election.

The Record · 9d agoRansomware in the wild1

From Intent to Execution Grant: An Execution-Boundary Conformance Profile for High-Risk AI Actions

Researchers specify EBL-Core, an execution-boundary conformance profile binding AI agent intents, policies, and evidence into verifiable execution grants, validated with bounded tests.

The paper defines EBL-Core, a conformance profile deciding whether one fully materialized AI-generated candidate action may receive action-scoped execution authority. It binds a structured intent object, Root and Operational Policies, typed evidence, and a verifiable Decision Derivation through an Execution Release Contract, with lifecycle rules for Redemption and Revocation. Evaluation included 34 static vectors, 15 lifecycle checks, and 100 trials of 32 concurrent Redemption attempts yielding exactly one winner per trial. The authors state these bounded results demonstrate executability of the specified subset, not production readiness or complete mediation.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoAI safety & security1

Actively Exploited Oracle WebLogic Flaw Lets Unauthenticated Attackers Access Critical Data

CISA added actively exploited Oracle WebLogic flaw CVE-2026-21962 (CVSS 10.0) to its KEV catalog, letting unauthenticated attackers access or modify critical data.

CISA added CVE-2026-21962, a CVSS 10.0 improper access control flaw in Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle WebLogic Server Proxy Plug-in, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. Oracle shipped patches in January 2026, and GreyNoise, CloudSEK, and SOCRadar have since reported exploitation attempts, including a lone IP scanning multiple WebLogic, Ivanti, GNU InetUtils, and GLPI vulnerabilities. The flaw is also among several exploited by a China-linked actor delivering the SNOWLIGHT downloader to government and commercial infrastructure in more than 100 countries. Federal civilian agencies must apply fixes by August 27, 2026 under BOD 26-04.

The Hacker News · 21d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-21962CVE-2020-14882CVE-2020-14883+2 CVEs1

Another Blueprint In The Wall: How to Ask Frontier AI Like a Kid?

Six frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind converge on one imagined successor architecture when asked under a school-audience framing.

Researchers ran ten independent sessions per model type across six frontier models using a three-stage prompt sequence progressing to a full ASCII backbone architecture. Under school-audience framing, responses repeatedly converged on a shared motif including persistent latent state, adaptive computation, memory, specialist routing, verification, and stopping control, while control runs without the framing produced heterogeneous responses. A GPT-5.6 Sol output closely overlapped an architecture independently sketched by GPT-6 Astra, raising questions about shared design priors or motif propagation between model families. The paper coins 'epistemic jailbreak' for the observed loss of provenance discipline as prompt specificity increases.

Researchers Disclose AI-Assisted SharePoint Exploit Chain Reaching Unauthenticated RCE

Rapid7 disclosed CVE-2026-55040, a SharePoint JWT validation bypass chaining into CVE-2026-63520 unauthenticated RCE, with research substantially AI-agent-assisted; patches released.

Rapid7 disclosed CVE-2026-55040 (CVSS 9.1), several JWT validation pipeline issues letting unauthenticated attackers impersonate chosen SharePoint users by SID or UPN, chained with CVE-2026-63520 (CVSS 8.1), an unsafe .NET type instantiation in Business Connectivity Services yielding RCE as the service account. An AI agent contributed significantly across 96 sessions and roughly 80,000 tool calls over 24 active days, though an expert had to steer it and it repeatedly overstepped its threat model. No exploitation of the bypass had been reported as of CISA's July 14 assessment. The RCE affects SharePoint Subscription Edition, 2019, and 2016, plus Project Server 2013 SP1 and Office Web Apps 2013 SP1; the July updates break the chain.

Fake IT Calls Target Executives in Microsoft 365 Data Theft and Extortion Attacks

Arctic Wolf tracks PREY-0058, a vishing and AitM token-theft crew targeting Microsoft 365 executives for data theft and extortion.

Arctic Wolf disclosed a widespread data theft and extortion cluster, PREY-0058, which overlaps with Mandiant's UNC6671 and possibly the Pink/Cinder extortion groups. Attackers impersonate IT help desk staff by phone, direct executives to authentication-themed lure domains, and run adversary-in-the-middle Microsoft 365 logins to harvest credentials, MFA approvals, and session tokens replayed via residential proxies such as NodeMaven. After access, they run discovery in SharePoint and Entra ID, then bulk-exfiltrate data from SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, and Box before sending extortion demands. Targets are primarily US construction, healthcare, real estate, finance, and professional services organizations.

The Hacker News · 9d agoThreat actor in the wild 2 sources1

Electronic health record company says customer data stolen in breach

Veradigm disclosed that attackers used stolen vendor credentials via an API to steal patient data including Social Security numbers, as the Gentlemen ransomware gang claims 3.5 million patients' records.

Electronic health records company Veradigm filed an 8-K with the SEC stating that an unauthorized party obtained credentials from a vendor's environment and used them to access a Veradigm API, downloading patients' personal data including Social Security numbers; no clinical or medical data was involved. The Gentlemen ransomware gang added Veradigm to its leak site, claiming theft of 3.5 million patients' health records. Access was limited to the specific API interface, with no operational disruption. Veradigm was previously hit by SamSam ransomware in 2019 and disclosed a December 2024 breach affecting 2,672,036 people.

The Record · 7d agoData breach in the wild

Hunt Malware & Phishing Threats with ANY.RUN for Proactive Enterprise Security

ANY.RUN promotes its Threat Intelligence platform for turning scattered malware and phishing indicators into proactive enterprise threat hunting workflows.

ANY.RUN published a vendor blog post describing how its Threat Intelligence product helps analysts consolidate endless alerts, indicators, behavioral evidence and infrastructure context. The post frames threat intelligence as a way to move from raw data collection to proactive protection against malware and phishing. No new threat activity, malware family or vulnerability is disclosed.

ANY.RUN · 28d agoTools

ToxicRAG: Compromising Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems via Single-Shot Knowledge Poisoning Attacks

ToxicRAG shows a single narrative-form poisoned document can steer RAG answers, achieving 0.61-0.91 attack success rates across four LLMs.

The attack injects one document per target question written as a coherent knowledge-update narrative that acknowledges the previously accepted answer, introduces fabricated events that appear to invalidate it, and attributes the attacker-chosen answer to purported authorities. An optional answer-focused self-validation loop revises candidates when a surrogate LLM fails to reproduce the target answer. Across 100 target questions each from Natural Questions, HotpotQA, and MS-MARCO, with four victim LLMs and four dense retrievers, ToxicRAG achieves attack success rates of 0.61-0.91 and matches or exceeds the strongest baseline by 0 to 11 percentage points.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoAI safety & security1