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DomainAllCyberAIWindow24h3d7d30dAllIn the wildImportant onlyShow duplicates
CategoryAllMalware 4Exploit / PoC 2Threat actor 2AI research 1Phishing & fraud 1Vulnerability 1
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New Phishing Attack Uses Blob URLs to Hide Malicious Pages From Security Scanners

Barracuda detailed a DocuSign-themed phishing campaign that renders credential-harvesting pages as browser blob URLs, evading URL reputation and blocklist defenses.

Barracuda researchers report a credential-harvesting phishing campaign that starts with a DocuSign-themed email containing a calendar invitation and routes victims through legitimate Microsoft OAuth endpoints and Microsoft Teams. A crafted redirect parameter leads Teams to load external content from cdn.bloom[.]io, which the browser renders as a blob URL — a session-only address held in local memory with no persistent public URL to crawl, categorize, or blocklist. The locally generated page registers a service worker, runs inside a sandboxed iframe, and is dynamically steered by backend infrastructure, indicating a centrally managed phishing platform. Barracuda recommends phishing-resistant MFA such as FIDO2 keys and passkeys, monitoring OAuth flows and redirect chains, and Teams malicious URL protection.

GBHackersupdated · 6d agofirst · 6d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 3 sources

Re: rosbridge_library Protocol.incoming() quadratic CPU cost in JSON fallback

Alan Coopersmith's mailing list reply merely points to the public oss-security posting of the rosbridge_library disclosure.

A follow-up reply on oss-security by Alan Coopersmith notes that the rosbridge_library Protocol.incoming() quadratic CPU cost issue was disclosed publicly on the oss-security mailing list. The reply contains no additional technical detail beyond linking the original disclosure.

oss-securityupdated · 1d agofirst · 2d agoVulnerability 3 sources

Diffusion Models and Concept Formation

Paper argues diffusion models implicitly form Cobweb-like concept hierarchies, with a basic level emerging at intermediate noise levels.

The authors draw a formal correspondence between diffusion models and Cobweb, a classic incremental concept-hierarchy learner, noting both are hierarchical Bayesian density models with Gaussian prototypes. Modes of the diffusion model's noisy marginals form a hierarchy whose basic level sits at intermediate noise, where class identity commits. The correspondence is tested on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST via mode-finding. Diffusion is reframed as a cognitive model of concept formation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

ApateWeb: An Evasive Large-Scale Scareware and PUP Delivery Campaign

Unit 42 uncovers ApateWeb, a campaign using over 130,000 domains and multilayered redirects to deliver scareware, adware and PUPs to millions of users.

Unit 42 discovered ApateWeb, a large-scale campaign using a network of more than 130,000 domains to deliver scareware, potentially unwanted programs, adware including a rogue browser and browser extensions, and scam pages. The campaign uses a three-layer structure with deceptive emails as the entry point, centralized victim tracking via UUIDs, intermediate adware or anti-bot redirections, and evasion tactics such as cloaking, bot detection error pages, and wildcard DNS abuse. Activity spiked since August 2022, with several hundred attacker-controlled sites remaining in Tranco's top 1 million rankings and millions of monthly hits; Unit 42 blocked an estimated 3.5 million sessions across 74,711 devices in November 2023.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Phishing & fraud in the wild

Cohere Releases North Small Translate: A 218B MoE Translation Model That Scores 83.6 on WMT26 Across 50 Languages

Cohere released North Small Translate, an open-weight 218B MoE (25B active) translation model scoring 83.6 on WMT26 across 50 languages.

Cohere and Cohere Labs released North Small Translate, a decoder-only sparse Mixture-of-Experts translation model with 218B total and 25B active parameters, 128 experts with 8 activated per token plus shared experts, and 16K-token input and output context. In Cohere's vendor-reported WMT26 evaluation, judged by GPT-5.6-Sol, it scores 83.6 averaged across 50 languages (84.36 in an agentic multi-pass mode), ahead of DeepL NextGen (81.37), Qwen 3.5 397B A17B (81.56), GLM 5.2 (76.50), and Google Translate (68.20). The model was built with RWS's Language Weaver team, post-trained specifically for translation, and reports 112 output tokens per second versus 81 for Gemma 4 31B, with long-document xCOMET-XL scores of 48.9 versus 21.3 for Google Translate. It is available free on Cohere's Chat V2 API until rate limits, with three self-hosting checkpoints including a 4-bit NVFP4 variant running on 1x B200 or 2x H100.

MarkTechPost · 5d agoModel release

27.5KB language-agnostic WebGPU syntax highlighter

A developer released gpu-lexer, a 27.5KB language-agnostic syntax highlighter that uses a tiny WebGPU model to label code tokens in the browser.

gpu-lexer splits source into words, whitespace, and symbols, then a small WebGPU model uses local and whole-file context to assign nine token classes, working on languages never seen in training. On held-out files, 12.57% of token labels differ from Shiki, though this measures agreement with Shiki rather than objective correctness. In benchmarks against Shiki 4.4.3, Prism.js, Highlight.js, Sugar High, and Starry Night, it highlighted 10 concatenated copies of three.min.js (5.56M characters) about 10x faster on an Apple M4 Pro in Chrome 152. The author frames it as an experiment, not a grammar-equivalent highlighter.

Hacker News · security · 7d agoAI tools & infraHN 21↑ · 5 comments1

New Phishing Attack Creates Malicious Pages Inside the Victim’s Browser

Barracuda details a phishing campaign that renders pages in-browser via blob URLs, routed through Microsoft Teams and cdn.bloom[.]io to evade detection.

Barracuda researchers analyzed a phishing campaign that generates a blob URL to render the phishing page entirely inside the victim's browser, leaving no static page for scanners to inspect. The chain begins with a Docusign-themed email containing a calendar invite, followed by a crafted redirect through Microsoft Teams to a resource on cdn.bloom[.]io that the browser converts into the blob URL. Service workers, iframes, and a hidden command-and-control configuration indicate the page is part of a centrally managed phishing platform that can be updated and steered across victims. Researchers recommend inspecting blob URL activity, monitoring OAuth authorization flows, and analyzing the full click path in email security controls.

SecurityWeek · 7d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

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.CL · 9d agoAI research

'HTTP Terminator' Hunts for Novel Desync Attacks

PortSwigger's James Kettle discusses HTTP Terminator, an AI-powered open source tool that uncovered new HTTP request-smuggling (desync) techniques.

PortSwigger researcher James Kettle spoke with Dark Reading about HTTP Terminator, an AI-powered open source tool built to hunt for novel HTTP desync vulnerabilities. The tool has already discovered new HTTP request-smuggling techniques, extending Kettle's prior desync research.

Dark Reading · 20d agoTools

TCRF taken offline by DDoS attack after Claude user ban

The Cutting Room Floor game wiki was taken offline by a DDoS attack after a user leveraging Claude was banned.

The Cutting Room Floor (TCRF), a wiki documenting unused video game content, was knocked offline by a distributed denial-of-service attack. The attack reportedly followed moderation action banning a user who was using Anthropic's Claude. The incident highlights friction between community sites and AI-assisted users and tools.

Lobsters · security · 18d agoAI safety & security in the wild

[webapps] CubeCart 6.7.4 - Stored XSS

A proof-of-concept stored cross-site scripting exploit targeting CubeCart 6.7.4 was published on Exploit-DB.

Exploit-DB lists a proof-of-concept exploit for a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in CubeCart 6.7.4, a PHP-based e-commerce web application. The listing demonstrates injection of attacker-controlled script that persists in the application, but no exploitation in the wild or CVE assignment is reported in the provided text.

Exploit-DB · 16d agoExploit / PoC1

[webapps] webpack_devserver 5.2.5 - CSRF

Exploit-DB published a cross-site request forgery proof of concept for webpack_devserver 5.2.5.

Exploit-DB lists a webapps CSRF proof-of-concept against webpack_devserver version 5.2.5. The flaw affects the local webpack development server, where cross-site requests could be issued against it. No CVE id is cited in the entry and no active exploitation is reported.

Exploit-DB · Aug 17, 2026Exploit / PoC

Can Foundation Models Moderate Online Content? Evaluating Instruction- vs. Example-Driven Policy Operationalization

ModerationBench shows foundation models can nearly triple Bluesky's moderation F1 (0.60 vs 0.22), with instruction- and example-driven guidance performing comparably.

Researchers built ModerationBench, a new benchmark of 4,000 manually annotated in-the-wild posts from Bluesky, to test whether foundation models can reliably operationalize content moderation policies. They systematically compare instruction-driven guidance (reasoning from policy precepts) with example-driven guidance (generalizing from precedents) for Vision-Language Models. Both paradigms achieve comparable peak effectiveness, and foundation models nearly triple the F1 of Bluesky's deployed moderation system on Random Posts (0.60 vs 0.22).

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

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.CL · 12d agoAI research

GPT-6 built this earth exploration site in 5 prompts

Hacker News post showcases an interactive earth exploration website that GPT-6 generated from only five prompts.

The item is a Hacker News submission (23 points, 32 comments) linking to earth.ethanplus.ai, an earth exploration website the author says was built by GPT-6 in five prompts. It functions as a community demo of the model's web development and generative capabilities rather than a research or security disclosure.

Hacker News · security · 4d agoAI industryHN 23↑ · 32 comments

[webapps] Bludit CMS 3.20.0 - Reflected Cross-Site Scripting

A reflected cross-site scripting flaw in Bludit CMS 3.20.0 is documented with a public proof-of-concept exploit on Exploit-DB.

Exploit-DB published exploit ID 52678 targeting Bludit CMS 3.20.0, a web application affected by reflected cross-site scripting. The listing contains a proof-of-concept but includes no CVE identifier or evidence of active exploitation.

Exploit-DB · 14d agoExploit / PoC

Notes on gotchas while migrating 35kb preprompts from Opus to self-hosted Ollama

Opinion piece urges migrating 35KB preprompts from Anthropic/OpenAI to self-hosted Ollama, citing session privacy risks and safety filters blocking security research.

The author documents gotchas migrating 35KB preprompts from Claude Opus to self-hosted Ollama, motivated by fears that frontier providers train on user sessions, citing the OpenAI Navier-Stokes controversy. The piece argues inference providers cannot audit their own retention or training pipelines and that only self-hosted hardware offers verifiable privacy. It also criticizes frontier safety filters for refusing vulnerability research tasks and calls for models that support exploitability testing in CI/CD pipelines.

Hacker News · AI · 2d agoAI industryHN 41↑ · 13 comments1

Meta pledges to overhaul kids’ safety protections, pay $17 billion to settle social media case

Meta settles states' kids' online safety lawsuit for $17 billion, agreeing to landmark usage limits, age restrictions, and independent auditing.

Meta agreed to pay $17 billion to settle a civil suit from nearly every US state and territory alleging it hid research showing Facebook and Instagram are addictive to minors and violated COPPA by collecting data on children under 13. The settlement imposes reforms including two-hour daily limits for users under 18, a midnight-to-6am usage block, non-personalized feed options, and an independent auditor. Meta also settled separately with Texas for about $1 billion.

The Record · 21d agoPolicy & legal

How to Investigate GitHub PAT Compromise: Lessons From a Multi-Organization Campaign

Wiz CIRT published an investigation playbook for GitHub PAT compromise after responding to a coordinated multi-organization campaign.

Wiz's Computer Incident Response Team shared lessons from its response to a coordinated campaign compromising GitHub personal access tokens across multiple organizations. The post provides a practical playbook covering detection, scoping, and investigation steps for token compromise. Specific victim names, affected counts, and attribution are not provided in the announcement.

Wiz Blog · Aug 13, 2026Threat actor in the wild1

terms.txt: A Consent and Compensation Protocol for Agentic Web Access

terms.txt specifies a robots.txt-style protocol for per-path, per-purpose AI crawler consent and compensation, with enforcement adding 0.20-0.65 ms per request.

The paper documents that automated clients now make up most web requests, that training dominates Cloudflare-classified crawling, and that the largest AI platforms fetch thousands of pages per returned visitor while robots.txt cannot express identity, purpose, terms, or price. It specifies terms.txt plus an origin-enforced exchange using Web Bot Auth signatures, signed intent, delegation tokens, HTTP 402 negotiation, and signed receipts. A dependency-free implementation adds 0.20 to 0.65 ms per request on one vCPU.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Aggah Campaign: Bit.ly, BlogSpot, and Pastebin Used for C2 in Large Scale Campaign

Aggah campaign abuses Bit.ly, BlogSpot, and Pastebin as multi-hop C2 to deliver RevengeRAT across the Middle East, US, Europe, and Asia.

Unit 42 details the Aggah campaign, which began with spearphishing emails in March 2019 spoofing a large financial institution and targeting education, media/marketing, and government organizations in the Middle East, later expanding to the US, Europe, and Asia. Delivery documents use Template Injection to load a remote OLE file whose macro runs mshta against a Bit.ly link redirecting to a BlogSpot post, which then uses Pastebin pastes to download RevengeRAT configured with a duckdns[.]org C2 domain. The embedded script also deletes Microsoft Defender signatures and kills Defender and Office processes, and modifies registry keys to enable macros. High-level TTPs resemble the Gorgon Group, but Unit 42 could not confirm attribution.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor

To See a World in a Living Context: Unified Indoor-Outdoor Urban World Generation

Researchers introduce HoloWorld, a unified text-driven framework generating coherent indoor-outdoor 3D urban worlds, improving average AQS over SOTA by 7.68%.

HoloWorld is a text-driven 3D generation framework that unifies indoor and outdoor urban world generation using a continuously updated cross-scale world context. It autoregressively generates urban exteriors with consistent spatial organization, grounded in 3D building instances and footprints, then produces building-specific interiors with geometry-constrained layouts that inherit exterior appearance. The authors claim it is the first framework to unify indoor and outdoor generation within one coherent 3D urban world, reporting a 7.68% average AQS improvement over prior SOTA and the highest average RDR score.

Hugging Face daily papers · 18d agoAI research

.blend URL Viewer

Simon Willison demos a .blend URL viewer built with GPT-6 Astra in Codex and ChatGPT Images 2.5 generating Blender models.

Simon Willison used ChatGPT Images 2.5 to generate a Faberge egg concept image themed after the TV show Pluribus, then had Codex running GPT-6 Astra (high) execute a Blender local skill to build a 3D model from it. He published the result as a .blend URL viewer tool and continues experimenting with agentic Blender workflows. The post is a hands-on demo of AI-driven creative tooling rather than a security or release announcement.

Simon Willison · 6d agoAI tools & infra

CUA-Universe: A Scalable and Dynamic Environment for Hybrid GUI+CLI Agents

Researchers introduce CUA-Universe, a pipeline turning real desktop software into hybrid GUI+CLI agent environments, lifting a 9B model's OSWorld success rate.

CUA-Universe is an environment-to-data pipeline that converts real desktop applications into hybrid GUI+CLI environments, scaling to 16 applications via App-Forge, Task-Weave, and Path-Steer. Training on its harvested trajectories shifted a 9B model toward effective GUI+CLI orchestration, yielding +39.3 points on CUA-Verse, +16.8 points success rate on OSWorld, and +7.84 points on OSWorld-MCP while cutting steps and tokens by up to 57% and 60%. The work addresses the scarcity of scalable hybrid environments for computer-use agents.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 12d agoAI research1

Trends in Web Threats in CY Q2 2022: Malicious JavaScript Downloaders Are Evolving

Unit 42 detected 751,000 landing URL incidents in Q2 2022 and documented malicious JavaScript downloaders evolving to evade detection.

Unit 42 detected 751,331 landing URL incidents (253,644 unique) and 1,744,629 malicious host URL incidents (256,844 unique) from April through June 2022. Total landing URL incidents rose compared with Q1 2022, and unique host URL incidents grew 42%, indicating attackers deploying more variants. The report includes a case study of a JavaScript downloader campaign demonstrating new evasion techniques. Personal sites, blogs, and business sites were the top apparently benign entry points.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Research

Creepy crawlies

git.kernel.org spends more CPU rendering commit pages for abusive AI-era scrapers than on all legitimate access including git clones.

Konstantin Ryabitsev reports that abusive crawler 'background radiation' at git.kernel.org consumes more CPU cycles rendering commit HTML than all legitimate access, with 14 cores across five geo-distributed nodes dedicated to scraper traffic. Simon Willison highlights the implications for crawlable web services like Datasette.

Simon Willison · 8d agoAI industry1