Search: “light-clients”

Modified ScreenConnect Clients Used in Worm-Like Campaign

Huntress warns of worm-like attacks using modified ScreenConnect clients to spread VBScript payloads; ConnectWise issued an advisory.

Campaigns starting in late August use social engineering, including Quick Assist abuse, to install rogue ScreenConnect clients that spawn wscript.exe and deploy four VBScript files for reconnaissance, staging, and PowerShell execution. The attackers persist via User Run Keys, attempt UAC bypass, install UltraViewer, and propagate the VBScript chain to other connected ScreenConnect endpoints. ConnectWise published an advisory about a file transfer behavior issue affecting cloud and on-premises ScreenConnect, with a CVE identifier and fix expected within a week; it recommends disabling file transfer meanwhile.

SecurityWeek·Sep 7, 11:45 UTC · 9d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

ClickFix Campaigns Abuse Legitimate Services for Persistent Access

Dark Reading reports two ClickFix social engineering campaigns abusing legitimate services to compromise organizations and maintain persistent access.

Dark Reading describes two separate attacks in which threat actors used the ClickFix social engineering tactic to compromise organizations. The campaigns abuse legitimate, trusted services to gain and maintain persistent access to victim environments. No specific victims, actors, or indicators were named in the available text.

Dark Reading·Sep 8, 17:25 UTC · 8d agoThreat actor in the wild

Guppy: Efficient Light Clients via Recursive Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Guppy lets blockchain light clients verify full state via recursive zero-knowledge proofs without validators maintaining state commitments, processing thousands of updates per second.

Guppy is a light-client protocol in which validators commit only to state updates while an off-chain, untrusted service secured by recursive zero-knowledge proofs maintains a verifiable Merkle tree over the full state. A hash-chain commitment moves validator signature verification out of the proving circuit, and a parallel recursive proving pipeline keeps latency growth logarithmic with throughput. A Plonky2-based implementation maintains a tree of size 2^30 while processing thousands of updates per second, adding only 2-4 seconds of latency without increasing block-construction complexity.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 7, 20:41 UTC · 9d agoResearch

Cisco BroadWorks Out-of-Band Blind XML External Entity Injection Vulnerability

Cisco patched an XXE flaw in BroadWorks' OCI XML parser letting unauthenticated remote attackers read sensitive files from the filesystem.

Cisco BroadWorks permits external entity resolution by default in its Open Client Interface XML parser, enabling out-of-band blind XXE injection. An unauthenticated remote attacker can send crafted XML to the OCI-P provisioning service and read sensitive configuration files with BroadWorks user privileges. Cisco has released software updates and no workarounds are available.

Cisco Security Advisories·Aug 19, 16:00 UTC · 28d agoAdvisory

Rogue ScreenConnect Clients Spread Four-Stage VBScript Chain to Newly Connected Hosts

Huntress says rogue ScreenConnect clients spread a four-stage VBScript chain delivering backdoors, privilege-escalation tools, or an XMRig miner to newly connected hosts.

Huntress identified three unrelated August 2026 incidents using a Quick Assist tech-support scam, a phishing-delivered MSI installer, and a fake Geek Squad refund form to install rogue ScreenConnect clients. Each client repeatedly spawned wscript.exe to run 1.vbs through 4.vbs, which profiled the host, enumerated installed security products, and downloaded stage-specific payloads from Dropbox. Depending on detected state, payloads included a user-level ScreenConnect backdoor, UAC-bypass privilege escalation tooling, or tunneling utilities with an XMRig cryptocurrency miner. Infected clients re-infected newly connected hosts, creating worm-like propagation, and ConnectWise issued an advisory about affected file transfer behavior in ScreenConnect.

The Hacker News·Sep 7, 11:36 UTC · 9d agoMalware in the wild

Attackers use rogue ScreenConnect clients to spread malware

Attackers deploy rogue ScreenConnect clients that spread VBScript malware to newly connected machines while ConnectWise patches a file-transfer flaw.

ConnectWise confirmed a file transfer flaw in ScreenConnect affecting both Cloud and On-Premise deployments, with a CVE identifier and official fix promised within the week; administrators can mitigate immediately by disabling TransferFiles (or TransferFilesInSession) in each role. Huntress documented incidents where social engineering installs rogue ScreenConnect clients that spawn Windows Script Host processes running four VBScript files (1.vbs-4.vbs), add a WindowsServiceHost registry Run key, and propagate to newly connected endpoints. Payloads enabled host profiling, persistence, additional ScreenConnect installs, tunneling, security-control changes, and cryptocurrency mining. ConnectWise has not confirmed a technical link between the flaw and this campaign.

Help Net Security·Sep 7, 00:00 UTC · 10d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

Researchers built a $7 gadget for anyone paranoid about hidden cameras in hotel rooms

KAIST-led researchers built SweepLED, a sub-$7 smartphone LED clip using AI to detect hidden cameras with 93.9-95.1% accuracy.

SweepLED, built by KAIST with the National University of Singapore and Singapore Management University, clips 15 LEDs to a smartphone camera and sweeps multi-angle light while the phone films reflections. A spatio-temporal AI model compares LED-on and LED-off frames to distinguish lens reflections from glossy surfaces across three viewpoints. Testing on 30 objects, 12 with hidden cameras, achieved 93.9% accuracy handheld and 95.1% static. Core components cost under $7, targeting privacy checks in hotels and short-term rentals.

Help Net Security·Sep 3, 00:00 UTC · 14d agoResearch1

Google’s Gemini Spark can now manage your Google Photos library

Google's Gemini Spark agent can now edit images, curate albums, and create calendar events in Google Photos for eligible US subscribers.

Google announced that its personal agent, Gemini Spark, can now manage Google Photos libraries, including editing images, curating albums, creating shared albums, converting concert flyer photos into calendar appointments, and running workflows. Google Photos lead Shimrit Ben-Yair said the capabilities roll out over the next few weeks to eligible Gemini AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US, in English, with no international timeline given. The move illustrates the industry's push to demonstrate consumer AI value amid criticism that labs have poorly communicated AI's benefits.

TechCrunch · AI·Sep 4, 14:47 UTC · 12d agoAI industry

Daisy-Chaining Trust: Investigating Faronics Deploy Abuse

Actors abuse Faronics Deploy in phishing campaigns to run PowerShell and deploy ScreenConnect while evading detection with trusted tools.

Huntress investigated attacks in which threat actors abuse Faronics Deploy, a legitimate remote management tool, as part of phishing-driven intrusions. The chain uses the trusted deployment tool to launch PowerShell commands and deploy ScreenConnect for remote access. Leveraging signed, legitimate software helps the actors blend in and evade detection.

Huntress·Aug 31, 21:00 UTC · 16d agoThreat actor in the wild

RelightFormer: Feed-forward Generative Transformer for Multiview Object Relighting

RelightFormer is a feed-forward generative transformer for photorealistic single- and multi-view object relighting, trained on a 90K-object dataset.

Researchers introduce RelightFormer, a feed-forward generative transformer adapted from a video foundation model that performs direct image relighting without explicit intrinsic property estimation. The architecture injects target environment maps via a latent illumination module with cross-attention and uses permutation-invariant positional encodings for unordered multi-view inputs. Training relies on the newly constructed Laval Objaverse Dataset (LOD) with 90K objects and 39K unique illuminations, and the model shows state-of-the-art quality with strong zero-shot generalization across single-view, multi-view, and novel-view relighting.

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

The VMs Powering Mobile Agents (Instinct, Claude Code)

A teardown reveals Claude Code runs in Firecracker microVMs with a Rust PID 1 and MITM'd egress, while Instinct rents E2B sandboxes with git-based memory.

The author inspects the virtual machines hosting cloud agents: Claude Code runs in a Firecracker microVM with a custom Rust init (process_api) as PID 1, a 324 MB Bun harness on a read-only disk, and 443-only MITM'd SSE egress to api.anthropic.com with host-rotated OAuth tokens and no inbound access. Instinct rents E2B sandbox-as-a-service Firecracker microVMs (Ubuntu 22.04, 2 vCPU, 1.9 GB RAM) where agent memory is a git repo of Markdown committed by the agent and pushed to S3 as a single bundle, using short-lived STS credentials. Both platforms rely on Firecracker, differing mainly in fleet operator and guest boot configuration.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 8, 04:36 UTC · 8d agoAI tools & infraHN 58↑ · 19 comments1

Litelm: LiteLLM Without the Bloat

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

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

Hacker News · AI·Sep 11, 18:10 UTC · 5d agoAI tools & infraHN 45↑ · 17 comments2

Phishing Attacks Serve Browser-in-the-Browser Pages, Rogue RMM Persistence

Phishing emails with browser-in-the-browser fake Adobe pages trick users into installing rogue ScreenConnect clients granting persistent remote access.

Huntress SOC investigated two August incidents where phishing links led to fake CAPTCHA checks and Adobe PDF Reader lures rendered as browser-in-the-browser (BiTB) pages spoofing legitimate domains like get.adobe.com. Victims downloaded what they believed was Acrobat Reader but actually installed ScreenConnect.ClientSetup.exe from attacker infrastructure, yielding two rogue ScreenConnect clients with service-based persistence. The attacker used cmd.exe and curl to stage a second client connecting to 144.172.115.59, leveraged a ScreenConnect Trial Relay domain for stealth, and ran HideCursor.exe as a defense-evasion binary. Incident 2 arrived via AT&T Office@Hand (RingCentral), with both chains stopped before broader impact.

Huntress·Sep 9, 13:00 UTC · 7d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild

Claude comes for Gemini with its own take on Docs and Slides

Anthropic launched Claude Docs and Slides in beta and merged chats with Cowork into 'one Claude', challenging Google's Gemini-powered productivity tools.

Claude Docs and Slides launch in beta, letting users create, edit, share, and collaboratively comment on documents and presentations from any chat, with export options. Anthropic also merged regular chats and Cowork into 'one Claude', bringing Cowork, Design, and Artifacts into a single interface. The update closes ground with Google, which has expanded Gemini inside Docs, Sheets, and Slides, and rolls out to Pro and Max users first across web, desktop, and mobile.

The Verge · AI·updated Sep 16, 18:09 UTC · 8h ago·first Sep 16, 16:30 UTC · 9h agoAI industry 5 sources

After accusations of selling ‘perv glasses,’ Meta prepares to sell a pair without a camera

Meta is preparing camera-less Luna smart glasses with microphones and an AI button to access its chatbot and Muse agent, per reports.

The Information reports Meta is developing Luna, a camera-free smart glasses model with six built-in microphones and a side button that activates Meta's AI chatbot and its Muse consumer agent, possibly unveiled at next week's Meta Connect event. The move follows consumer backlash over camera-equipped glasses that critics called 'perv glasses.' Meta's Reality Labs continues to post large losses despite the smart glasses line's relative market success.

TechCrunch · AI·Sep 16, 20:12 UTC · 6h agoAI industry

Proactive cyber defense for governments and enterprises

Google launches the Fairwind Program giving governments and enterprises access to Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber and CodeMender for autonomous vulnerability finding and patching.

Google DeepMind announced the Fairwind Program, a limited-access offering giving Google Cloud customers, government agencies, and cybersecurity partners access to Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber and the CodeMender harness to autonomously find, verify, and fix vulnerabilities. Initial access prioritizes governments, critical infrastructure operators in healthcare, telecom, energy, and finance, and core technology platforms, with over 650 partners participating. Google also raised its total global cybersecurity funding commitment above $100 million, including $36 million for 35 US cyber clinics.

Google DeepMind·Sep 2, 16:24 UTC · 14d agoAI industry

Anthropic Users Hit by Infostealer Attacks, Session Thefts

A threat actor used multiple infostealers to harvest session data and hijack Claude accounts belonging to an unknown number of users.

Dark Reading reports that a threat actor deployed a variety of infostealer families to collect session information, which was then used to access Claude accounts belonging to an unknown number of users. Anthropic has not disclosed the scale of the compromise. The incident underscores session token theft via infostealer logs as an effective route into AI platform accounts.

Dark Reading·Aug 31, 21:08 UTC · 16d agoMalware in the wild

LiteLLM Supply-Chain Attack - Technology, Banking and Healthcare the Most Affected

TeamPCP planted the SANDCLOCK credential stealer in LiteLLM PyPI releases, exposing credentials across 2,038 repositories at 898 organizations including Microsoft and NVIDIA.

Threat actor TeamPCP compromised LiteLLM maintainer credentials and published malicious versions 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 to PyPI around March 2026, creating an exposure window of several months. The SANDCLOCK credential stealer exposed full credential sets across 898 GitHub owners and 2,038 repositories, including Microsoft, Azure, IBM, NVIDIA, PayPal, Deloitte, Bosch, and S&P Global. Stolen material includes GitHub CI/CD identities, AWS/GCP/Firebase credentials, SSH keys, Kubernetes secrets, and OpenAI and Anthropic API keys; Resecurity acquired a 150GB archive with 2,146 credential records. Technology, banking/finance, and healthcare organizations are the most affected sectors, and victims must rotate all exposed credentials.

Security Affairs·Aug 17, 17:09 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Malware in the wild

Quoting Rick Brewster

Paint.NET added a clean-room Direct2D rewrite for WINE, largely written by Anthropic's Claude and described as unreviewed 'vibe coded' code.

Rick Brewster says Paint.NET now ships a from-scratch, reverse-engineered Direct2D implementation (PaintDotNet.Windows.Direct2D1.Managed.dll) used under WINE via a /wine flag, since Direct2D was never completed well enough there. He credits the Claude coding assistant with writing most of the code, calling it largely 'vibe coded' and not thoroughly reviewed. Simon Willison shared the quote as an example of shipping AI-assisted systems code in production software.

Simon Willison·Sep 2, 05:50 UTC · 14d agoAI tools & infra1

Emerald AI, Google and NVIDIA Launch Alliance to Advance Flexible AI Data Centers

Emerald AI, Google, and NVIDIA launched the AI Energy Management Alliance to promote power-flexible, grid-responsive AI data centers.

Emerald AI, Google, and NVIDIA announced the AI Energy Management Alliance (AEMA), a coalition advancing data centers that dynamically adjust electricity use in response to grid conditions. The technology-neutral, performance-based alliance will standardize flexibility requirements, define ride-through and curtailment obligations, and create faster interconnection pathways for facilities making verifiable flexibility commitments. It plans to convene AI platforms, data center operators, utilities, power producers, and grid operators to support US AI infrastructure growth.

NVIDIA Blog·Sep 16, 13:00 UTC · 13h agoAI industry

ConnectWise warns of new ScreenConnect flaw without patch

ConnectWise warns of an unpatched ScreenConnect flaw affecting file transfer in support sessions and shares interim mitigations for MSPs.

ConnectWise disclosed a new ScreenConnect Remote Access vulnerability affecting file transfer behavior in both cloud and on-premises deployments; no CVE ID or patch is available yet, with a fix planned later this week. The vendor published temporary mitigation steps that remove TransferFiles permissions from session groups across all roles. Shadowserver tracks nearly 6,000 internet-exposed ScreenConnect instances. Previous ScreenConnect flaws, including CVE-2024-1709, were exploited by ransomware gangs and North Korea's Kimsuky, and three ScreenConnect vulnerabilities are on CISA's actively exploited catalog.

BleepingComputer·Sep 7, 10:06 UTC · 9d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2024-1709CVE-2025-3935CVE-2026-35641

UC Berkeley Researchers Release CUA-Lite, an Open Platform Unifying Sandboxes, Data, Evaluation and RL for Computer-Use Agents

UC Berkeley's CUA-Lite is an open platform unifying computer-use agent sandboxes, datasets, evaluation and RL; Lite.OSWorld cuts OSWorld memory 4.1 GB to 0.9 GB.

UC Berkeley researchers released CUA-Lite, an open platform placing agents, environments, traces, and training for computer-use agents behind one action space, one LiteSample schema, and one command across desktop, browser, and mobile. Lite.OSWorld reproduces the OSWorld task suite and evaluators in plain Docker containers (0.9 GB RAM vs 4.1 GB, cold start 23.8s, ~4.6× more parallel instances), with scores matching the QEMU/KVM VM across 13 models. The platform claims 30k+ verifiable tasks, 15+ benchmarks, 10+ agents, and 20+ datasets on Hugging Face including Aguvis, OpenCUA, and ScaleCUA. A documented SFT run lifts Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct mean episode return from 0.138 to 0.237 on the 332-task lite.osworld split.

MarkTechPost·Sep 6, 06:11 UTC · 10d agoAI tools & infra1

Malicious LiteLLM Releases Tied to Trivy Hack May Have Exposed 2,100+ Organizations

Malicious LiteLLM 1.82.7/1.82.8 PyPI releases tied to the Trivy TeamPCP campaign harvested cloud, SSH, and database credentials, potentially exposing 2,500+ organizations.

CloudSEK reported that two malicious LiteLLM releases on PyPI (versions 1.82.7 and 1.82.8, live about 40 minutes on March 24) harvested cloud keys, SSH keys, Kubernetes tokens, and database passwords, with captured loot files mapping potential exposure to more than 2,500 organizations including NVIDIA, Cisco, Deloitte, Volkswagen, FedEx, Siemens, and X Corp. The campaign is part of TeamPCP (tracked by Google as UNC6780), linked to the Aqua Security Trivy scanner compromise tracked as CVE-2026-33634 and added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on March 26. The payload used a litellm_init.pth file executed at Python interpreter startup and exfiltrated secrets to models.litellm[.]cloud; the FBI's FLASH-20260702-01 advisory urged rotation of CI/CD, publishing, and cloud credentials.

The Hacker News·Aug 12, 08:05 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Data breach in the wildCVE-2026-33634

Citrix expands Platform Flex with observability and secure developer services

Help Net Security·Aug 11, 00:00 UTC · Aug 11, 2026Industry

Your security vendor gets the frontier cyber model, you get the findings

Help Net Security·Aug 11, 00:00 UTC · Aug 11, 2026Vulnerability

Introducing agentic video understanding with Gemini

Google DeepMind launches agentic video understanding for Gemini 3.7 Flash, 3.6 Flash, and 3.5 Flash-Lite, cutting video-analysis tokens up to 88%.

Google DeepMind launched agentic video understanding across Gemini 3.7 Flash, 3.6 Flash, and 3.5 Flash-Lite via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The feature replaces static fixed-FPS ingestion with an agentic loop that dynamically searches frames, audio, and transcripts, cutting token consumption by up to 88%, reducing costs by up to 66%, and improving accuracy by up to 7%. Gemini 3.7 Flash with the feature sits at the accuracy-to-cost Pareto frontier on tested video benchmarks, and the capability will later power YouTube's Ask YouTube feature.

Google DeepMind·Sep 1, 17:08 UTC · 15d agoAI tools & infra

PHAT: PHotonic Accelerator for TFHE

PHAT photonic accelerator using optically addressed phase-change memory speeds TFHE bootstrapping FFTs 2.14x-5.10x over the prior ASIC accelerator.

Researchers propose PHAT, an electro-photonic accelerator for TFHE fully homomorphic encryption built on optically addressed phase-change memory (OPCM) processing-in-memory. The architecture adds OPCM-based FFT units, a twiddle-stationary dataflow, and a scheduling mechanism to maximize FFT utilization for TFHE bootstrapping. It achieves 2.14x-5.10x speedups across four real-world TFHE workloads versus the state-of-the-art ASIC accelerator, improving feasibility of privacy-preserving computation in the cloud.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 14:30 UTC · 6d agoResearch

Up to 30x More Work Per Watt: NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 Sets a New Efficiency Standard for AI Agents

NVIDIA claims Vera Rubin NVL72 delivers up to 30x more work per watt, citing OpenRouter data that agentic workloads use 15x more tokens than chat.

NVIDIA positions the Vera Rubin NVL72 as a new efficiency standard for AI agents, claiming up to 30x more work per watt. The company cites OpenRouter data showing agentic AI workloads consume 15x more tokens than a simple chat request, using a financial-research agent example that spawns sub-agents and multiple tool calls. The piece is largely a product efficiency narrative rather than independent benchmarking.

NVIDIA Blog·Aug 24, 15:00 UTC · 23d agoAI industry

Off Guard: Breaking LiteLLM from authentication bypass to cloud compromise

Wiz found LiteLLM auth bypass (CVE-2026-59822) and post-auth RCE (CVE-2026-59821) chainable to cloud compromise; the bypass is in CISA KEV with in-the-wild exploitation.

Wiz scanned roughly 3,074 internet-facing LiteLLM deployments and found 9.6% accepted the default master key sk-1234 or required no authentication, making post-auth attacks effectively pre-auth. The MCP endpoint accepts any Bearer token and grants a valid session (CVE-2026-59822), confirmed exploited in the wild via honeypots and added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Custom code guardrails allow post-auth root-level RCE via exec(compile(...)) (CVE-2026-59821), while pass-through endpoints lack URL validation, enabling cloud credential theft in post-auth scenarios. All assigned vulnerabilities have been patched; the research was presented at DEF CON 34.

Wiz Blog·Sep 9, 16:06 UTC · 7d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-59822CVE-2026-598211

My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

A developer's business partner shipped a 5,236-line untested vibe-coded payments backend PR whose endpoints failed basic testing.

The author describes reviewing a pull request with 5,236 additions for a payments backend that a business partner generated largely with AI in a single day without testing. The PR's AI-written documentation included redundant boilerplate (e.g., 'returns 400 on error') but omitted operational details like where to obtain API keys, and the endpoints failed when tested. The post is a critical opinion piece on vibe coding and perceived skill atrophy among developers who rely on AI for everything.

Hacker News · security·Sep 8, 01:48 UTC · 9d agoAI industryHN 46↑ · 75 comments1