Search: “car-head-unit”

Android Malware Hijacks Update System for Car Head Units

A click-fraud botnet crew now deploys Android malware to car head-unit infotainment systems by abusing the legitimate software update mechanism.

Threat actors behind a notorious Android click-fraud botnet are targeting vehicle infotainment head units, according to Dark Reading. The malware abuses legitimate update functionality to install and spread infections. The campaign highlights automotive Android systems as an emerging attack surface for established mobile botnet operators.

Dark Reading·Aug 26, 17:33 UTC · 21d agoMalware in the wild

Malware Hijacks Android Car Head Units

Kaspersky reports first known malware infecting Android car head units via firmware updaters, repurposing vehicles as BADBOX proxy nodes for ad fraud.

Kaspersky documented the first known malware infection of Android-based car head units, delivered through the built-in TWCore firmware updater on DoFun devices via an MQTT-driven installation flag. A multi-stage chain installs the JarService dropper and a loader that pulls a clicker and reverse proxy module ('zhima') used for ad fraud and proxy botnet infrastructure. The malware supports nine commands, including clipboard changes, HTTP requests, and JavaScript loading, checking in with C2 every 90 minutes. Kaspersky attributes the campaign with high confidence to MoYu Group, linked to the BADBOX botnet.

Security Affairs·Aug 22, 09:04 UTC · 25d agoMalware in the wild

Android car head units infected with proxy botnet malware through built-in software updaters

Kaspersky found malware delivered via car head unit updaters, attributed to the MoYu Group's BADBOX operation, recruiting devices into a proxy botnet.

Kaspersky discovered malware delivered through the built-in TWCore system updater in Android-based car head units running DoFun infotainment firmware, turning devices into ad-fraud tools and nodes in a proxy botnet. The three-stage infection chain (JarService dropper, loader, and final payload supporting nine commands) installs the zhima reverse-proxy module, which Nokia's Deepfield team independently found on TV set-top boxes. Kaspersky attributes the operation with high confidence to the MoYu Group, linked to the BADBOX supply-chain botnet first identified by HUMAN Security in 2023. DoFun closed the gap after Kaspersky's responsible disclosure.

Help Net Security·Aug 24, 00:00 UTC · 24d agoMalware in the wild

Vulnerabilities in Car Anti-Theft Device

Schneier on Security·Aug 5, 09:42 UTC · Aug 5, 2026Vulnerability

Qwen-Drive 1.0 tells you why it brakes, just don't expect the explanation to match the maneuver

Alibaba's Qwen-Drive 1.0 adds 3D perception and planning modules to Qwen3.5-4B for driving tasks, though explanations often mismatch maneuvers.

Qwen-Drive 1.0, built on Qwen3.5-4B, combines spatial perception, traffic question answering, and route planning in one vision-language model, adding a bird's-eye-view perception module and a Planning Expert trained via staged fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. The paper finds text-image models do not inherently grasp 3D space; spatial accuracy only improved when the base vision-language model itself was trained on spatial tasks, while avoiding catastrophic forgetting of general knowledge. The cut reinforcement learning-trained version halved road-departure rate in simulation from 24% to 12%, and the model beats specialized driving models in most of Qwen's benchmarks, but its explanations sometimes conflate causes like distant red lights and crossing children, and results partly rest on self-designed tests. The work follows prior findings from PaLM-E and a UC Santa Cruz adversarial sign attack on DriveLM showing VLM driving models' reasoning and spatial gaps.

The Decoder·Sep 7, 12:15 UTC · 9d agoAI research

The invisible passenger in your car

Kaspersky discovered Android adware and proxy-botnet malware delivered inside legitimate DoFun car head-unit software.

Kaspersky researchers uncovered Android malware distributed through legitimate software for DoFun automotive head units. The malware displays ads on infotainment screens and enrolls infected devices into a proxy botnet for resale of residential-style proxy traffic. Delivery via trusted vendor software means victims receive it through a legitimate update channel, raising infection likelihood.

Kaspersky Securelist·Aug 21, 08:00 UTC · 26d agoMalware in the wild

DriveZero: End-to-End Driving Beyond Human Demonstrations

DriveZero pairs a frozen vision-foundation-model perception stack with a PPO-trained closed-loop RL teacher to beat replay experts on nuPlan.

DriveZero is an end-to-end camera-only autonomous-driving planner that separates perception and action. Its DriveVFM perception backbone consolidates frozen vision foundation models (DINOv3, SigLIP2, SAM, Depth Anything V2) from raw images without task annotations, while DriveRL trains a privileged PPO teacher policy through closed-loop rollouts in interactive worlds built from real driving logs. The planner distills this teacher, achieving a 93.57 mean nuPlan score across Val14, Test14-hard and Test14-random splits and beating the Log-Replay expert on all three. It also sets state of the art on NAVSIMv1, NAVSIMv2 and closed-loop HUGSIM without human trajectory supervision.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 4, 20:00 UTC · 12d agoAI research

Automobile Camouflage to Hide from Flock Cameras

Schneier on Security highlights a printed vehicle-camouflage pattern tested to defeat Flock surveillance cameras and Axon body cameras.

The post discusses covering cars with printed patterns designed to fool Flock automated license-plate recognition software, with testing reportedly done against Flock and Axon body cameras. Reader comments question effectiveness against other ALPR vendors, Flock's RF MAC-address upgrade, and whether such camouflage might become regulated. The page also contains off-topic comment threads about anti-bot over-blocking and privacy.

Schneier on Security·Sep 7, 11:06 UTC · 9d agoResearch

Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots

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

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

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 17:53 UTC · 7d agoAI research

The Evolution of the Agent Harness

Latent Space essay argues late-2025 agent gains came from models and harnesses maturing together, with harness logic absorbed into model weights.

The piece defines the agent harness as everything beyond model weights—tools, context, memory, guardrails—and charts its evolution from ReAct prompting (October 2022) through AutoGPT's premature autonomy, Cursor/Copilot's human-in-the-loop retreat, and Devin's roughly 15% success rate, to o1's capability overhang and Claude Code's February 2025 terminal agent with permission rules. It argues the Christmas 2025 jump cited by Transformer co-inventor Lukasz Kaiser reflected model and harness curves crossing, and that remaining harnesses will serve human attention rather than the model.

Latent Space·Aug 22, 07:30 UTC · 25d agoAI tools & infra

Lightweight Zero Trust via Automotive SDN

Researchers map automotive SDN with MACsec/MKA and CORECONF/YANG to NIST SP 800-207, satisfying five of seven Zero Trust tenets without added infrastructure.

Zonal in-vehicle networks ship Ethernet, MACsec, and TSN but treat the network itself as trusted, with no standardized runtime way to revoke access, rotate keys, or contain a compromised ECU. The paper first analyzes what Open Alliance TC17 v1.0 MACsec/MKA with pre-shared CAKs already provides against the seven NIST SP 800-207 Zero Trust tenets. It then adds CORECONF/YANG management per Open Alliance TC19, mapping the SDN Controller and Agents one-to-one onto NIST's PE, PA, and PEP, and instantiates a YANG-based network-access-control flow and key-management scheme. The result fully covers five of the seven tenets and partially covers two, without any ZTA-specific infrastructure.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 9, 07:20 UTC · 7d agoResearch

Record, train, and deploy from one place with Strands Agents, LeRobot, and Hugging Face Storage Buckets

Hugging Face, Strands Agents, and LeRobot integrate with Storage Buckets for a unified record-train-deploy robotics data workflow.

Hugging Face announced an integrated robotics workflow combining LeRobot, Amazon's Strands Agents, and Hugging Face Storage Buckets. The setup lets developers record robot data, stream it in a data loop, train models, and deploy agents from a single place. No article body was available, so details beyond the title are limited.

Hugging Face Blog·Aug 13, 17:16 UTC · Aug 13, 2026AI tools & infra

Cyber Op Targets South Korean Media & Automotive Sectors

Likely North Korean APT compromised load balancers at South Korean media and automotive firms using a previously undocumented Linux espionage toolkit.

A cyber operation attributed to a likely North Korean APT group targeted South Korean media and automotive sectors. The attackers deployed a previously undocumented Linux espionage toolkit to compromise load balancers, gaining access to communications and enabling further network exploitation. Specific victims, toolkit names, and indicators of compromise were not disclosed in the report summary.

Dark Reading·Sep 16, 01:00 UTC · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

Slovakia Warns of Cyber Risks in Road Speed Cameras

Slovakia's NBÚ warns that speed camera systems from SODASUS, Simicon and NEROline pose cyber risks including undocumented remote access.

Slovakia's National Security Authority (NBÚ) warned of a significant cyber threat tied to several road speed camera products: NERO R-ONE units sold by Cyprus-based SODASUS, and Cordon-series cameras made by Russia's Simicon and sold by Croatia's NEROline. A security analysis requested by the Interior Ministry found weak protections, mismatches between documented and actual communication settings and software versions, unclear hardware/software provenance, and pre-configured remote-access mechanisms outside operator control. NBÚ warned that compromised cameras could expose vehicle and licence-plate data, tamper with records, or serve as a foothold into public-sector networks lacking segmentation. The Interior Ministry reportedly removed the units from its pilot deployment and asked the supplier to replace them with equipment meeting Slovak and EU security requirements.

Security Affairs·Aug 24, 08:54 UTC · 23d agoAdvisory

FlashVector: Agent for Hierarchical Model Serving Stack Optimization

FlashVector agent optimizes all layers of Unity's ad-serving stack, delivering up to 2x model-server throughput and 1.98x latency speedup in production.

FlashVector is an agentic system that optimizes performance across GPU kernels, ML framework computation graphs, model servers, and on-demand feature processing. Deployed in Unity's Vector advertising platform, it achieved up to 2x model-server throughput increase, 1.98x latency speedup, and 1.6x feature-store throughput gain. Optimizations spanned NVIDIA Triton's C++ codebase and the Python feature transformation service, demonstrating extensibility beyond single-kernel tuning.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 15, 16:27 UTC · 1d agoAI research1

MobileVLA-R1 2.0: RL-Enhanced Reasoning for Mobile Robot Control

MobileVLA-R1 2.0 couples chain-of-thought reasoning with RL for mobile robot control, gaining 10 points on real Unitree G1 tasks.

MobileVLA-R1 2.0 is an RL-enhanced vision-language-action framework that explicitly couples structured embodied reasoning with executable mobile robot control via supervised Chain-of-Thought alignment and reinforcement learning. A reasoning-conditioned action decoder maps multimodal reasoning representations to task-level action targets, decoupling high-level action generation from robot-specific actuation for both locomotion and manipulation. It achieves an average 1.6 point SR improvement on VLN-CE and a 10.0 point improvement in full-task success on real-world Unitree G1 mobile manipulation, with evaluations covering navigation, quadruped control, and real deployments on Unitree Go2 and G1 robots.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 4, 20:00 UTC · 12d agoAI research

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

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

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

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 13, 20:00 UTC · 3d agoAI research

Physical AI Takes the Wheel: How the World’s Robotaxi Leaders Are Building With NVIDIA Technologies

NVIDIA details a three-computer robotaxi platform that Uber, Lyft, May Mobility, Mercedes-Benz and others are adopting to scale autonomous fleets.

NVIDIA says every major commercial robotaxi program runs on its stack, spanning training (DGX with Alpamayo VLA models), simulation and validation (Omniverse, Cosmos, AlpaSim on RTX PRO), and in-vehicle compute (DRIVE Hyperion 10 with dual DRIVE AGX Thor chips). Adding meta-action and chain-of-thought reasoning data to a VLA model reduced minimum average displacement error by 43%, from 2.08 to 1.18. Uber plans NVIDIA DRIVE Hyperion-based fleets across 28 cities by 2028, partnering with Autobrains, Avride, Lucid, May Mobility, Mercedes-Benz, Momenta, Nissan, Nuro, Pony.ai, Stellantis, Waabi, Wayve, WeRide and Zoox. DRIVE Hyperion 10 combines 14 cameras, nine radars, three lidars and 12 ultrasonics with redundant compute and NVIDIA Halos safety validation.

NVIDIA Blog·Sep 10, 16:00 UTC · 6d agoAI industry

Wicked Problem, Parsimonious Solution: Securing Electric Vehicle Charging Station Software

Position paper proposes hierarchical software quality assurance to characterize and secure EV charging station software attack surfaces.

The authors argue that charging station supply-equipment software is a largely unprotected and poorly characterized attack surface in EV charging infrastructure. They advocate applying hierarchical software quality assurance (HSQA) to this specialized software, spanning from individual vulnerabilities such as CVEs to high-level characteristics like the CIA Triad. HSQA embeds quality and security considerations across the entire software development lifecycle to assess and improve charging station software security.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 9, 17:37 UTC · 7d agoResearch

OpenVDN/vdn-minimax-h3 — new model trending #12 on Hugging Face

OpenVDN releases VDN-H3, an open hybrid-attention video model on MiniMax H3 that renders a 14.4-second 768p clip in 11.23 seconds on 8 B200 GPUs.

VDN-Minimax-H3 (VDN-H3) adds a frame-wise linear attention branch plus two LoRA adapters to MiniMax H3, distilled into 8-step and 50-step variants. It generates 768p, 14.4-second clips in 11.23 seconds on 8 B200 GPUs (90.5 seconds on one H200) using 8 denoising steps. Weights (about 82 GB total, including the 72 GB H3 base), the optimized inference stack, and training code are fully open-source under the MiniMax H3 Community License, which excludes the EU, UK, Korea, and US.

Hugging Face trending models·Sep 2, 05:03 UTC · 14d agoModel release1

Show-Harness: Just a VLM Agent Can Play Robots

Show-Harness enables VLM agents to control robots via a semantic action interface, achieving zero-shot frontier control and few-GPU-hour adaptation of small VLMs.

Show-Harness exposes discrete semantic action units that VLMs reason over, with embodiment-specific interpreters deterministically grounding them into local robot actions. It enables zero-shot closed-source frontier VLM control and adapts small open-source VLMs for low-cost deployment with a few GPU-hours of fine-tuning. The companion GUMI interface extends the same semantic action space to GUI-based demonstration collection without teleoperation hardware, and Show-Harness-equipped agents outperform representative agentic and VLA paradigms.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 8, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research

TANGO: Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model

Researchers introduce TANGO, a whole-body vision-language-action model enabling zero-shot language-guided humanoid navigation on the Unitree G1 robot.

TANGO addresses humanoid navigation in cluttered indoor environments by predicting 29-DoF joint-space actions directly from natural-language instructions and egocentric RGB, rather than 2D path planning. It is trained entirely in simulation via a pipeline combining global path planning, kinematic whole-body motion generation, obstacle-aware motion editing, and RL-based tracking. In simulation it achieves state-of-the-art vision-language navigation performance and transfers zero-shot to a Unitree G1 humanoid without any real-world navigation data.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 9d agoAI research1

Context Engineering Inside the Harness: 4 Mechanisms That Beat Context Overflow and Goal Loss on Long-Horizon Tasks

Survey of four harness mechanisms—context budgeting, compaction, todo-state, and memory—that keep long-horizon LLM agents on task across 200+ tool calls.

The article details how agent harnesses, not larger context windows, solve context overflow and goal loss on long-horizon tasks, citing Chroma's Context Rot report showing 18 LLMs (GPT-4.1, Claude 4, Gemini 2.5, Qwen3) degrade on long inputs. Concrete implementations include LangChain Deep Agents offloading tool responses over 20,000 tokens to the filesystem and truncating old tool calls at 85% window usage, and Claude Code capping auto memory at 25KB while re-reading the 5 most recently modified files after compaction. OpenAI's Responses API now offers server-side compaction via context_management with a standalone /responses/compact endpoint, which Codex uses for long-running coding tasks. Manus reports a roughly 100:1 input-to-output token ratio per ~50-tool-call task, motivating todo.md state recitation to prevent goal drift.

MarkTechPost·Sep 13, 05:56 UTC · 3d agoAI research1

A Georgia Cop Used Flock to Track 2 Other Cops: His Ex and Her Friend

A Georgia police officer used Flock license plate reader cameras to surveil his ex-partner and another officer after their affair ended.

Internal investigation records show a Georgia officer used the Flock license plate reader network to track the movements of a fellow police officer with whom he had an affair, along with a man whose vehicle frequently appeared near hers. The unauthorized personal use of police surveillance infrastructure surfaced through an internal affairs review. The case highlights oversight gaps around law enforcement access to mass surveillance data.

WIRED · Security·Aug 27, 18:12 UTC · 20d agoPolicy & legal

New surveillance tech links your phone to your license plate

Researchers show roadside cameras plus Bluetooth signals can link phones to license plates, enabling richer tracking.

Ars Technica reports on new surveillance research showing that combining roadside camera license plate recognition with phone Bluetooth signals can associate specific devices with specific vehicles. The approach could turn existing traffic cameras into far richer tracking tools that follow both a car and its occupant's phone. The work raises significant privacy and civil liberties concerns.

Ars Technica · Security·Aug 11, 13:15 UTC · Aug 11, 2026Research

Android Car Malware Spreads Through Built

Kaspersky found MoYu Group malware infecting DoFun Android car head units via firmware updaters, enabling ad fraud and proxy botnet operations.

Kaspersky discovered in June 2026 the first documented malware specifically infecting Android-based car head units, spread through the built-in updater (TWCore) of DoFun head unit firmware via a dropper dubbed JarService. The multi-stage implant supports nine commands enabling unwanted ads, ad fraud, and additional module downloads, and installs the zhima reverse proxy module. The campaign is attributed with high confidence to the MoYu Group behind the BADBOX ad fraud and residential proxy scheme; the distribution issue was fixed after responsible disclosure.

The Hacker News·Aug 25, 06:01 UTC · 22d agoMalware in the wild

New Agent Tesla Malware Variant Boosts Evasion Capabilities

KnowBe4 documented an Agent Tesla v4 campaign using emoji-based code obfuscation to evade detection.

KnowBe4 researchers reported a campaign distributing Agent Tesla v4, a long-running Windows keylogger and infostealer. The new variant uses emoji-based code obfuscation, a novel technique, to hinder static analysis and evade security tooling. Defenders should watch for behavioral indicators such as credential theft and unusual process activity.

Infosecurity Magazine·Aug 21, 12:00 UTC · 26d agoMalware in the wild

Show HN: Panel – A research workspace where the agent can build its own panes

Panel is an open-source research workspace where AI agents dynamically build their own panes, posted on Hacker News.

Panel, shared as a Show HN project on GitHub, is a research workspace in which the agent can construct its own panes rather than using a fixed interface. The post received 41 points and 8 comments on Hacker News. It targets agentic research workflows with a dynamically generated UI.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 15, 13:58 UTC · 1d agoAI tools & infraHN 41↑ · 8 comments