Search: “deepfakes”

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash — new model trending #28 on Hugging Face

DeepSeek releases DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, a 552B-parameter multimodal MoE model with 1M-token context and KV cache cut to 890 bytes per token.

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash is a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model with a 552B-parameter backbone that activates 8B parameters per token during prefill and 16B during decode. It uses a Causal Encoder-Decoder architecture, Compressed Sparse Attention 2, and FP4 KV caching to reduce the global KV cache footprint to 890 bytes per token, roughly one quarter of DeepSeek-V4-Flash. The model was trained from scratch on 45T tokens with context extended to 1M tokens, includes an Engram conditional-memory module (196B parameters), and is released under the MIT license. Post-training uses SFT, RL, and on-policy distillation with large-scale automated synthesis of agentic tasks and a controllable reasoning effort setting from 1 to 100.

Hugging Face trending models·updated Sep 12, 05:56 UTC · 4d ago·first Sep 10, 02:17 UTC · 6d agoModel release 4 sources1

The Future of Deepfakes and the Decline of Reality (With Hany Farid)

GetReal cofounder and PhotoDNA developer Hany Farid discusses deepfake detection and how AI-generated media is blurring perceptions of reality.

404 Media's podcast episode features Hany Farid, cofounder of deepfake detection company GetReal and developer of the PhotoDNA perceptual hashing algorithm, discussing deepfakes and AI-generated images. The conversation reflects on how the technology has evolved since 2017 and speculates on where detection and perceptions of reality are headed. The episode is part of 404 Media's interview series for subscribers.

404 Media·Aug 17, 14:19 UTC · Aug 17, 2026AI safety & security

Adaptive Gated Deepfake Detection for Low-Resolution and Resource-Constrained Environments

AdaGate-DF routes deepfake detection by image quality through dual multi-exit gates, hitting 0.9370 AUC on Celeb-DF with low inference latency.

AdaGate-DF is an adaptive gated deepfake detection framework that uses image-quality cues to send high-quality images through earlier exits, saving compute in resource-constrained settings. On Celeb-DF it achieves an AUC of 0.9370, outperforming MaD-CoRN and DefakeHop++, and reaches 0.9708 at 384x384 resolution. On FaceForensics++ it remains effective under class imbalance while balancing uncertainty-aware prediction and computational efficiency.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:14 UTC · 12d agoAI research

Sexually Explicit Deepfake Sites Target 100-Plus Politicians in Europe

Deepfake pornography sites have targeted nearly 150 European politicians, overwhelmingly women MPs, per new research on 160 abusive domains.

Researcher Benjamin Shultz analyzed roughly 160 deepfake abuse domains and found at least 138 women MPs from 22 EU countries appeared or were mentioned, versus nine male MPs — making women MPs 33 times more likely to be targeted. Sites host database-like profiles with names, photos, personal details, and links to 'nudifier' creation tools. The findings, published by German think tank Agora Digitale Transformation, show politicians from Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and France most affected, with senior politicians targeted more often. The UK and EU are planning bans on nudify services, while the US Take It Down Act has taken major deepfake sites offline.

WIRED · Security·Sep 14, 11:00 UTC · 2d agoAI safety & security1

New York Seizes 12 Celebrity Deepfake Websites

Manhattan DA seized 12 deepfake sites that turned ~1,200 people's photos into non-consensual intimate imagery, the largest such seizure.

The New York District Attorney seized 12 websites hosting AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery of roughly 1,200 people, including politicians, actors, athletes, and influencers, calling it the largest seizure of such sites in history. DA Alvin Bragg cited New York's 2023 law criminalizing sexually explicit deepfakes. The action follows federal seizures of two deepfake domains in June and the 2025 shutdown of MrDeepfakes, and precedes a 15-year sentence in the first Take It Down Act conviction.

404 Media·Sep 14, 17:26 UTC · 2d agoPolicy & legal 2 sources

Split-second deepfake glitch blows digital certificate fraudster’s cover

Spanish police arrested a man who used deepfake video manipulation to bypass a certificate provider's identity checks and obtain digital signatures for financial fraud.

Spanish National Police arrested a man in Murcia accused of using deepfake software to pass an electronic certificate provider's video identity verification and obtain digital signatures usable in financial fraud. He made 38 attempts against more than 30 citizens using a forged national ID card, household spotlights with colored bulbs to simulate holograms, and VPNs to anonymize connections. Investigators traced more than 320 phone lines linked to 24 mobile devices, mostly registered with stolen identities; a momentary glitch in the digital mask during a live call exposed the scheme.

Help Net Security·Aug 12, 00:00 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Phishing & fraud

DeepSeek v4.1 Flash Uncensored

Hugging Face user dealignai published an uncensored FP8-quantized variant of DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, drawing moderate Hacker News attention.

A community-published uncensored FP8 quantization of DeepSeek v4.1 Flash appeared on Hugging Face under user dealignai. The release is a third-party upload rather than an official DeepSeek launch, and no benchmark data or license details are provided in the listing. It received limited visibility, with 43 points and 11 comments on Hacker News.

Hacker News · AI·updated 12:19 UTC · 10h ago·first Sep 11, 06:46 UTC · 5d agoModel release 3 sourcesHN 43↑ · 11 comments1

Manhattan DA takes down 12 AI deepfake porn sites

Manhattan DA seized domains of 12 AI deepfake porn sites hosting non-consensual videos of more than 1,200 people; investigation continues.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the seizure of domain names for 12 deepfake pornography sites that hosted AI-generated sexual videos of more than 1,200 real people, many of them celebrities. Bragg cited domestic violence cases where partners threatened to release deepfake images, and declined to say whether arrests or charges would follow. The DA's office will monitor for attempts to revive the sites on new domains.

The Record·Sep 15, 12:42 UTC · 1d agoPolicy & legal1

First ‘Take It Down Act’ Sentencing Puts Man Behind Bars for 15 Years

Ohio man James Strahler gets the first US Take It Down Act sentence: 15 years for distributing real and AI-generated abuse imagery.

James Strahler, 38, became the first person convicted under the Take It Down Act, receiving a 15-year federal prison sentence after investigators found more than 3,000 real and AI-generated abuse images across his devices, including over 700 he posted online. He pleaded guilty to cyberstalking, producing obscene visual representations of child sexual abuse, and publication of digital forgeries after victims received threats, extortion demands, and AI-fabricated explicit images; the FBI took over the case in June. The federal law, which took effect in May, criminalizes knowingly publishing or threatening to publish nonconsensual intimate imagery, and free-speech advocates have criticized its 48-hour platform removal window as a censorship risk.

404 Media·Sep 9, 15:57 UTC · 7d agoPolicy & legal

AI is getting better at election facts, but voters shouldn’t rely on it

CyberScoop·Aug 5, 09:00 UTC · Aug 5, 2026Exploit / PoC in the wild

More than half of AI

CyberScoop·Aug 7, 17:10 UTC · Aug 7, 2026Exploit / PoC

DF26: We Cannot Tell Fake From Real Anymore

DF26 benchmark shows humans and state-of-the-art deepfake detectors perform near chance on videos generated by seven modern text-to-video models.

Researchers introduce DF26, a benchmark of 271 real and 2,420 fully synthetic videos created by seven modern video generation models, all depicting single-person public-speaking scenarios such as direct-to-camera recordings, official statements, and studio interviews. Human viewers and state-of-the-art deepfake detectors scored close to random chance at distinguishing fakes from real footage. The authors argue current evaluation protocols are insufficient and call for benchmarks that explicitly measure robustness to modern generative model distribution shifts.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

White House launches Watershed 250, a six-month Texas pilot using volunteer vendor cyber and AI tools to harden water utility defenses.

The Office of the National Cyber Director and Texas Cyber Command will oversee the six-month Project Watershed 250 pilot to improve water sector cybersecurity through industry-donated red teaming, system hardening and AI tooling. Twelve companies including Microsoft, Fortinet, Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, AWS, Cloudflare, Zscaler, Forescout, Abnormal AI and Dragos participated in the rollout. Officials cited recent attacks including an Iranian-backed campaign against 30 water systems in 12 states and a 2024 incident in Muleshoe, Texas. Some water-security professionals criticized the program as lacking dedicated funding.

CyberScoop·Aug 31, 20:21 UTC · 16d agoPolicy & legal1

Harnessing CLIP and DINO: An Uncertainty-Aware Cascaded Fusion Network for Generalizable Deepfake Image Detection

UCF-Net fuses CLIP and DINO features with entropy-based uncertainty weighting to improve generalizable deepfake image detection across generators.

Researchers propose UCF-Net, an uncertainty-aware cascaded fusion network that combines CLIP's language-aligned semantic priors with DINO's self-supervised visual-structure priors for deepfake detection. It aggregates hierarchical features across transformer depths via layer-wise expert modules and performs weighted fusion driven by entropy-derived uncertainty. The authors consolidate public deepfake datasets into a unified benchmark of roughly 4 million images plus a cross-generator set of over 8,000 faces from eight recent generators, where UCF-Net achieves the best mean AUC among evaluated methods, though zero-shot transfer remains challenging.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research

Arrested man allegedly impersonated NSA elite hacking unit, Supreme Court chief justice

Colorado man Joshua Culver indicted for impersonating NSA's Tailored Access Operations chief and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in Indiana court cases.

Joshua Culver, also known as Maverick Young, was arrested in Colorado after a July Indiana indictment on four counts of falsely impersonating an officer of the court and one count of using a forged judge's signature. He allegedly posed as an NSA officer in September to pressure the Tippecanoe County sheriff's office, and later presented a forged document purportedly from the head of the Tailored Access Operations unit demanding case dismissal and warrant quashing. The indictment also alleges he used a forged signature of Chief Justice John Roberts on a dismissal order in Grant County, Indiana.

CyberScoop·Aug 25, 18:43 UTC · 22d agoPolicy & legal2

Deep-Fake CAPTCHA: Mitigating Next-Generation Social Engineering Attacks

Researchers propose DF-CAPTCHA, a challenge-response defense that verifies callers in voice and video to defeat real-time deepfake impersonation in social engineering.

The DF-CAPTCHA framework prompts call participants with simple challenge-response tasks that are easy for humans but hard for real-time deepfake systems to convincingly generate. Responses are verified on four criteria: realism, identity consistency, task completion, and response time. User studies and experiments with real-time deepfake models across audio and video modalities show substantially improved detection over passive artifact-based methods.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 11:35 UTC · 6d agoResearch1

Governments ‘buying time’ in race between innovation, security, national cyber director says

National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross says allied governments are 'buying time' to secure systems as AI advances and exposes chronic cyber hygiene gaps.

Speaking at the Billington CyberSecurity Summit, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said the US and allies must balance AI innovation speed with securing systems and keeping the technology from adversaries. He argued AI has not created new cybersecurity problems but surfaced decades-old issues like under-resourced basic cyber hygiene, echoing FBI and CISA officials at the summit. His remarks followed US agencies accusing Chinese AI companies of illegally distilling US frontier models and Anthropic disclosing a fourth AI hacking incident involving one of its models.

CyberScoop·Sep 10, 13:53 UTC · 6d agoPolicy & legal

Water sector passes, government sector fails attempts to spot and halt simulated CISA attack

CISA red teamers compromised both a government and a water organization; water defenders detected and contained the simulated attack, government defenders did not.

CISA's red team gained initial access, elevated domain privileges, and lateral movement into sensitive business systems and cloud resources at an unnamed government organization, whose SOC ignored low- and medium-severity EDR alerts buried under thousands of false positives. A water organization's SOC quarantined phishing-compromised workstations within 2, 10, and 20 minutes, and later detected and isolated intrusions reaching the OT DMZ bastion host. Both organizations underestimated cloud risk, lacked Microsoft Conditional Access for workload identities, and had no process to revoke compromised access and refresh tokens. This is one of CISA's rare public red-team reports since 2023.

CyberScoop·Aug 25, 17:11 UTC · 22d agoAdvisory1

I’ve been deepfaked: What do I do?

ESET outlines steps for deepfake victims: preserving evidence, using platform reporting tools, and legal remedies like the US TAKE IT DOWN Act and StopNCII.org.

ESET published a how-to guide for people who discover deepfakes of themselves, covering evidence preservation, platform-specific reporting on Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X, and escalation to publishers or data protection regulators. It notes the US TAKE IT DOWN Act criminalizes non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) and requires 48-hour takedowns, while UK and EU laws add creation offenses and GDPR Article 17 erasure rights. Services like StopNCII.org and TakeItDown.NCMEC.org hash images so participating platforms such as Meta, TikTok, Reddit, and X can find and remove matching copies.

ESET WeLiveSecurity·Sep 2, 11:48 UTC · 14d agoAI safety & security1

Conti ransomware crew member sentenced to four years in prison

Ukrainian national Oleksii Lytvynenko sentenced to four years in the US for his role in Conti ransomware attacks on at least 12 companies.

Oleksii Lytvynenko, 44, who pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, was sentenced Thursday to four years in prison by the US Justice Department. He joined the Conti ransomware group in September 2021 as an intruder and malware developer, holding stolen data from 12 victims including eight US-based organizations, and prosecutors said co-conspirators extorted roughly $634,000 in Bitcoin from Tennessee victims including government entities. Conti attacked more than 1,000 organizations before disbanding in 2022, with members rebranding into Zeon, Black Basta, and Quantum/Royal/BlackSuit.

CyberScoop·updated Sep 11, 16:07 UTC · 5d ago·first Sep 10, 20:31 UTC · 6d agoPolicy & legal 7 sources1

Microsoft sets security and safety rules for its AI models

Microsoft AI published a draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct setting safety rules and human-control requirements for its models, open for public consultation.

Microsoft AI released the first draft of its Humanist AI Code of Conduct, open for six weeks of public consultation, with a revised version expected later this year to guide model training from 2027 onward. The Code sets Absolute Constraints barring model assistance with chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive weapons, offensive cyber operations, CSAM, malicious deepfakes, and mass civilian surveillance, while permitting authorized defensive cybersecurity work such as vulnerability discovery, malware analysis, and PoC exploit testing. It establishes an instruction hierarchy where the Code takes precedence over operator policies and user instructions, plus Human Control Requirements covering shutdown compliance, least privilege, and no autonomous goal initiation. MAI models will undergo red-teaming, safety evaluations, and pre- and post-deployment reviews; current models have not yet been trained on the Code.

Help Net Security·Sep 15, 10:50 UTC · 1d agoAI safety & security

AI Deepfakes Used to Impersonate OnlyFans Creators in New Scam

Security Affairs·Aug 7, 06:55 UTC · Aug 7, 2026Phishing & fraud

FBI officials say AI is bolstering adversaries, emphasizing need to focus on cyber basics, patching

FBI officials said AI is accelerating adversary capabilities while its new cyber strategy emphasizes continuous patching, cyber hygiene, and AI-enabled defense.

At the Billington CyberSecurity Summit and ahead of a new FBI cyber strategy, deputy assistant director Jason Bilnoski said AI is boosting the speed and capability of both criminal and nation-state attackers, while stressing that basic controls like MFA would still prevent most attacks. Colleen Ferranti urged a shift from quarterly Patch Tuesday cycles to continuous, risk-based patching as AI accelerates vulnerability discovery. The strategy pledges AI-enabled triage, malware analysis, attribution support, agentic AI adoption, expanded Computer Network Operations, ICS Coordinators in every field office, and a pledge on victim relief and privacy.

CyberScoop·Sep 9, 13:00 UTC · 7d agoPolicy & legal

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp — new model trending #10 on Hugging Face

DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, its first experimental multimodal model, with large multimodal agent benchmark gains over V4-Flash-0731.

DeepSeek AI published DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, an experimental multimodal model built on the DeepSeek-V4-Flash architecture with added visual modules and continued training. It scores 83.9 on Terminal Bench 2.1 and 36.5 on ApexBench Pass@1 versus 26.2 for DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731, while remaining comparable to Opus-4.8 on several benchmarks. The MIT-licensed repository ships a tokenizer, OpenAI-style and TXT prompt encoding, and a minimal PyTorch inference implementation, with vLLM and SGLang deployment recipes.

Hugging Face trending models·Aug 31, 06:16 UTC · 16d agoModel release1

Early 764 member sentenced to 77 years, longest prison term to date for a nihilistic violent extremist

Kyle Spitze, an early 764 member, was sentenced to 77 years for producing CSAM, the longest sentence for a nihilistic violent extremist.

Kyle William Spitze, an original member of the 764 nihilistic violent extremist network and administrator of the Harm Nation offshoot, was sentenced to 77 years in federal prison. He pleaded guilty in December 2024 to producing child sexual abuse material, possession of CSAM, and distributing animal crush videos, victimizing dozens of girls through coercion, doxing and swatting threats. Investigators found roughly 25 photo albums of abuse imagery on his phone and evidence of animal torture. The Justice Department framed the sentence as a signal in a broader enforcement push against 764, which has seen multiple members arrested or sentenced since 2025.

CyberScoop·Aug 20, 18:34 UTC · 27d agoPolicy & legal

Researchers observe first ‘near-autonomous’ AI attack on government target in Taiwan

Dream researchers observed the first near-autonomous AI attack on a government target, with suspected Chinese hackers stealing 2,500+ Taiwan records.

Israeli firm Dream reported that suspected Chinese hackers used open-source AI models to run a near-autonomous cyberattack against Taiwan's government, extracting over 2,500 personnel records. The framework, built on Hermes and OpenClaw, adapted mid-operation without human intervention, ran autonomous 'Learning Cycles' researching applicable vulnerabilities, and expanded to supply chain vendors, a nuclear safety agency, a government email system, and seven-plus energy companies. Attackers bypassed safety guardrails by framing the work as authorized penetration testing. Dream discovered the operation via a 160MB online archive of nearly 1,400 files.

CyberScoop·Aug 12, 17:05 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Threat actor in the wild

Apollo discloses data breach from ongoing wave of attacks hitting financial sector

Apollo Global Management confirmed a breach of cloud platforms by BlackFile-linked social engineering attackers, exposing personal data including Social Security numbers.

Apollo Global Management disclosed that attackers accessed some of its cloud platforms between July 6 and July 10, 2026. The company determined on August 12 that compromised data included names, dates of birth, contact information, home addresses, and Social Security numbers. Google attributed the broader campaign against financial sector organizations to BlackFile, a threat group affiliated with The Com that operates extortion brands Redact, Pink, Helix, and Falcon. Apollo, which manages $1.05 trillion in assets, is the first victim to formally confirm sensitive personal data was compromised in this wave, with Blackstone and Bain Capital also reportedly targeted.

CyberScoop·Aug 21, 19:14 UTC · 26d agoData breach in the wild

Google Play Early Access Abused to Push Thousands of Deceptive Android Apps

Bitdefender found abuse of Google Play's review-free Early Access program to push thousands of deceptive casino and reward apps promoted with AI deepfake ads.

Bitdefender reports threat actors are abusing Google Play's Early Access program, which blocks public reviews and ratings, to distribute thousands of deceptive casino, reward, and utility apps. A GTA imitator, 'Vice Streets: Open World,' surpassed 1 million downloads before disappearing, with apps promoted via AI celebrity deepfake ads on TikTok and Facebook and monetized through endless ad serving and payouts that never arrive. The report coincides with disclosures on Android malware families Hagaseca, Mantax Otax, StreamRat, and GoldFactory's Gigabud banking trojan with its Vwork companion app used for cloned-app financial fraud.

The Hacker News·updated Sep 11, 12:14 UTC · 5d ago·first Sep 10, 14:36 UTC · 6d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 6 sources

Details emerge on BlackFile's recent attacks on financial companies

BlackFile (UNC6671), a The Com-linked extortion crew, keeps hitting financial and med tech firms with voice-phishing IT-support scams and ~$3 million demands.

Google Threat Intelligence Group (tracking BlackFile as UNC6671, linked to The Com) reports the extortion group remains active, shifting focus to the financial sector and med tech organizations, with new Redact-brand extortion demands issued last week. The group impersonates IT support in voice-phishing attacks using hundreds of recruited callers, targets large firms in what researchers call big-game hunting, and processes an average of 1.5 new victims daily. Extortion demands start around $3 million and are typically negotiated below $1 million; Flashpoint observed infrastructure targeting Blackstone, Bain Capital, Moody's, CME, and Apollo, though compromise is unconfirmed. Mandiant has responded to more than two dozen BlackFile compromises since January, and victims face escalation tactics including swatting.

CyberScoop·Aug 17, 20:41 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild

Russian national extradited to US for alleged involvement in bank-account takeover scheme

US extradited Russian national Sergei Filimonov over a bank-account takeover scheme using spoofed bank domains that defrauded two banks of $6.3 million.

US authorities extradited 36-year-old Russian national Sergei Anatolyevich Filimonov from the Republic of Georgia on charges including bank and wire fraud conspiracy and aggravated identity theft. He and unnamed co-conspirators allegedly ran spoofed bank domains, bought sponsored links to lure victims, and harvested over 5,000 victim login credentials starting in November 2023, causing unauthorized transfers of about $5.58 million and $735,000 from two banks in 2024. The FBI previously identified at least 19 US victims linked to the credential-storage domain, with roughly $28 million in attempted losses including $14.6 million confirmed. Filimonov faces up to 175 years in prison, pleaded not guilty on September 4, and remains detained in the Northern District of Georgia.

CyberScoop·Sep 8, 20:32 UTC · 8d agoPolicy & legal

What Makes Adversarial Examples Transfer Across Deepfake Detectors?

A controlled study of 60 deepfake detectors shows adversarial example transfer depends heavily on source-target compatibility, with source averaging understating vulnerability.

The study evaluates adversarial example transferability across 60 deepfake detectors spanning six backbones, two pretraining regimes, and five training-data configurations, using AutoAttack (AA) and Carlini-Wagner with Expectation over Transformation (CW-EOT). Transfer rises sharply when source and target share an exact backbone, architecture family, pretraining regime, or training data, with the dominant factor depending on the attack. Mean attack success rate is 7.21% under AA and 19.52% under CW-EOT for single sources, while a multi-source oracle reaches 64.48% after excluding exact matches, showing source averaging can substantially understate target vulnerability. The authors release 240,000 adversarially perturbed images, pairwise transfer results, detector configurations, and evaluation code.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 9, 10:28 UTC · 7d agoAI safety & security

McKesson copes with fallout from data theft extortion attack

McKesson discloses a data theft extortion attack by ShinyHunters affecting oncology and medical-surgical customers, with a reported $55 million demand.

McKesson disclosed that attackers gained access to some of its third-party applications and stole data associated with a subset of customers in its oncology, multispecialty, and medical-surgical business units; the intrusion ran for four days from August 21 and was discovered August 25. ShinyHunters claimed responsibility and listed McKesson on its data-leak site, reportedly demanding more than $55 million with a September 1 deadline. Flashpoint analysts say the group typically uses social engineering and identity weaknesses with valid credentials to access cloud-hosted environments, making the intrusion hard to detect. McKesson, which distributes about one-third of pharmaceuticals used in North America with $403.4 billion in annual revenue, says operations continue and it has reasonable assurance of no ongoing unauthorized activity.

CyberScoop·Aug 31, 21:39 UTC · 16d agoData breach in the wild

Safe word: What is it and why do you need one?

ESET recommends pre-agreed family safe words to counter AI voice-clone scams such as virtual kidnapping, as one-in-four Americans report receiving deepfake calls.

ESET outlines how scammers use just seconds of audio scraped from social media or work content to create convincing voice clones, with a Hiya report finding one-in-four Americans received a deepfake voice call in the past 12 months. Common schemes include virtual kidnapping calls mixing cloned voices with sobbing and background noise. A pre-agreed, non-OSINT-discoverable safe word, plus callback verification via known numbers and 2FA, reduces success rates of these frauds.

ESET WeLiveSecurity·Sep 9, 09:00 UTC · 7d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Jail time for Maine child in 764 marks turning point in federal law enforcement

A 17-year-old from Maine became the first minor federally adjudicated for 764 extremist crimes, including child exploitation, signaling a policy shift on prosecuting juveniles.

The FBI said a Maine teenager is the first child federally charged and adjudicated for crimes tied to the nihilistic violent extremist collective 764, part of The Com network. Charges include conspiracy to sexually exploit a child, distributing CSAM, interstate threats, cyberstalking, and identity theft. The case marks a turning point in federal policy on prosecuting juveniles and continues heightened enforcement: Kyle Spitze was sentenced to 77 years and Alexis Chavez to 40 years in related cases. The FBI is investigating more than 500 subjects connected to 764 and its offshoots nationwide.

CyberScoop·Sep 2, 21:03 UTC · 14d agoPolicy & legal

ClearFake Deploys Crypto Stealer That Uses Vulnerable Driver to Kill EDR Security Tools

Cisco Talos details ClearFake's fake-CAPTCHA chain deploying ZigCryptoStealer with a BYOVD attack that kills EDR processes, observed at a Ukrainian government organization in April 2026.

ClearFake compromises websites, injects JavaScript via a malicious Cloudflare Worker, retrieves instructions from BNB Smart Chain contracts (EtherHiding), and presents a fake Google CAPTCHA that tricks Windows users into pasting a command that loads a remote library over WebDAV via rundll32. The crypto-stealer branch uses DLL side-loading with a signed Chrome component to launch ZigCryptoStealer, which hijacks clipboard cryptocurrency addresses, alongside a signed but vulnerable Windows driver used in a BYOVD attack to terminate EDR processes. A parallel branch delivers Amatera secondary payloads that install a hidden remote-access client providing operator desktop control, with Cisco Talos tracking the remote-loader activity as UAT-10820. Talos observed unusual remote library execution at a Ukrainian government organization in April 2026 and assesses the attacks are part of a broader theft operation rather than a single targeted campaign.

Cyber Security News·Sep 9, 14:26 UTC · 7d agoMalware in the wild1

Cyber threats nudge Trump to sign executive order on foreign equipment in U.S. energy infrastructure

Trump signed an executive order declaring an emergency to bar foreign bulk-power equipment deemed a national security cyber risk.

The executive order, 'Declaring a National Energy Emergency to Secure the United States Bulk-Power System,' prohibits acquiring, importing, transferring, or installing foreign-produced bulk-power equipment and software deemed risky, citing fears of digital backdoors in Chinese-made grid gear. China supplies roughly 85% of solar supply chain capacity and is a major transformer manufacturer. The Energy Department has 120 days to develop implementing rules; the order revives a 2020 Trump-era measure the Biden administration had suspended after utilities found compliance difficult.

CyberScoop·Aug 26, 21:47 UTC · 21d agoPolicy & legal1

DeepZero: Open-source hunting for vulnerable Windows drivers

DeepZero, a new open-source engine, automates discovery of exploitable Windows kernel drivers for BYOVD attacks using Ghidra, Semgrep, and an LLM.

DeepZero is a free, open-source Python pipeline orchestrator that automates hunting for exploitable Windows kernel drivers relevant to BYOVD (bring your own vulnerable driver) attacks. Its seven-stage YAML pipeline parses PE headers, filters for kernel-mode drivers with IOCTL surfaces, excludes drivers listed on loldrivers.io, then runs headless Ghidra decompilation, Semgrep scanning, and an LLM-based exploitability assessment. The maintainer reports multiple verified vulnerabilities in the Snappy Driver Installer corpus, some still in the disclosure process, and notes findings involving plug-and-play-created device objects may need physical hardware to confirm.

Help Net Security·05:30 UTC · 17h agoTools

National cyber director lays out White House plans to secure AI without writing new rules

CyberScoop·Aug 5, 14:45 UTC · Aug 5, 2026Exploit / PoC in the wild

DeepSeek, Alibaba and Chinese AI Firms Extract Billions of Tokens From U.S. AI Models

NSA, CISA and FBI advisory AA26-251A accuses DeepSeek, Alibaba and four other Chinese AI firms of industrial-scale distillation of US frontier models.

Joint advisory AA26-251A from NSA, CISA and FBI accuses DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI of extracting billions of tokens from Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok variants since at least late 2024, likely with Chinese government awareness. Campaigns allegedly used API proxy 'transfer stations', account pools, metadata sanitization and prompt injection to harvest reasoning, coding, agentic and reinforcement-learning capabilities, with techniques mapped to MITRE ATLAS. DeepSeek's R1 and V3 and Alibaba's Qwen families reportedly trained on harvested outputs, and DeepSeek's $5.6 million training-cost claim is disputed as excluding distilled data value. Agencies urge anomaly monitoring, output alteration for suspected extractors, and intelligence sharing across vendors, clouds and aggregators.

GBHackers·Sep 9, 08:29 UTC · 7d agoAI safety & security in the wild1· 1 read

Kimwolf botnet rebuilt to survive takedowns, researchers say

Palo Alto Unit 42 reports the Kimwolf/Aisuru botnet now uses HTTP/2 Chrome-impersonation floods and Ethereum blockchain-based command resolution to survive takedowns.

Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 says a new Kimwolf/Aisuru botnet version active since February conducts DDoS floods over HTTP/2 with full Chrome browser fingerprints, making attack traffic hard to distinguish from real users. The malware resolves command servers via the Ethereum Name Service using five shuffled Ethereum endpoints, with a Tor hidden service fallback, so authorities cannot seize a domain or serve a takedown order. The botnet, powered mostly by hijacked Android TV boxes and IoT devices, previously had servers seized and an alleged operator arrested; new C2 infrastructure traces to a single network in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It is unclear whether the same developers built the new version.

CyberScoop·Aug 12, 00:13 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Malware in the wild1