ZeroHour

Search: “outlook”

40 stories

Smart search ranks by meaning as well as keywords (one row per story, last 45 days).

Microsoft says Copilot buttons still missing in classic Outlook

Microsoft is still investigating a bug that makes Copilot buttons disappear in classic Outlook for affected M365 Copilot users.

Microsoft confirmed the missing Copilot and Copilot Chat buttons occur after upgrading classic Outlook for Windows to build 20026.20182 and higher, because Outlook cannot locate the MAPI property PR_PROFILE_USER_SMTP_EMAIL_ADDRESS_W. The issue affects Copilot Chat (Basic) and paid M365 Copilot (Premium) customers, and Copilot remains reachable via OWA, new Outlook, and the standalone app. A temporary workaround enables 'Show Apps in Outlook' under Advanced settings, and Microsoft also acknowledged Outlook crashes tied to Kaspersky's Mail Checker (mcou.dll).

Google's new AI model predicts the future from sales data, weather, and discount schedules

Google Research released TimesFM-3, a 330M-parameter multivariate time series forecasting model that tops Gift-Eval, FEV-Bench, and Time benchmarks and is on Hugging Face.

Google Research released TimesFM-3, a 330-million-parameter Transformer-based time series forecasting model trained on more than one trillion real and synthetic data points. It works zero-shot and adds multivariate support, ingesting related series, historical-only covariates, and known future events such as discount schedules and weather forecasts, while filling all future time steps in a single one-shot pass. Google reports first place among pretrained forecasting models on Gift-Eval, FEV-Bench, and Time, ahead of Amazon's Chronos-2, the Toto-2.0 family, and its own TimesFM-2.5. Weights are available on GitHub and Hugging Face, with BigQuery integration planned in the coming weeks.

The Decoder · 4d agoModel release2

What the AI Warning Letter Completely Missed

Opinion piece argues the recent AI warning letter identifies a risk window but omits which actors pose risks and who can mitigate.

This Dark Reading commentary critiques a recent AI warning letter for correctly identifying an approaching risk window while failing to name who is coming through it or who will close it. The piece is brief opinion commentary on AI risk discourse rather than a technical report.

Dark Reading · 12d agoAI safety & security

Threat Brief: OWASSRF Vulnerability Exploitation

Unit 42 details active exploitation of Exchange SSRF flaws CVE-2022-41080/CVE-2022-41082 via the OWASSRF method, deploying the SilverArrow PowerShell backdoor.

Unit 42 documents OWASSRF, an exploit chain combining CVE-2022-41080 and CVE-2022-41082 to achieve remote code execution on Microsoft Exchange via Outlook Web Access, bypassing Microsoft's ProxyNotShell mitigations. Active exploitation was observed in late November and early December 2022, affecting at least eight organizations. Attackers authenticated to Exchange, then executed a PowerShell backdoor tracked as SilverArrow to create admin accounts, install AnyDesk, tunnel RDP via PuTTY Link, and dump LSASS memory for credential theft. Exploitation is isolated rather than mass-scale because authentication is required.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Exploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2022-41080CVE-2022-41082CVE-2022-410401

Generative Marketing Mix Modeling: A Causal Inference Framework Linking GEO and GEM to Business Impact

Paper proposes Generative Marketing Mix Modeling to causally estimate Generative Engine Optimization and Marketing effects on business outcomes.

The authors develop GMMM, a causal inference framework for measuring how often users see and notice a firm's name in generated answers, which standard marketing data ignore. For GEO it combines repeated generated answers with question counts, shares of generative-system usage and notice probabilities; for GEM it uses sponsored placement records with notice probabilities. The framework compares expected business responses under alternative treatment sequences, establishes identification conditions, and is evaluated on simulated product-recommendation answers in English and Japanese.

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

The September 2026 Security Update Review

ZDI's September 2026 Microsoft update review lists two already-exploited Windows EoP zero-days and dozens of critical RCEs across Office, SQL Server, and Windows services.

The review catalogs Microsoft's September 2026 fixes, marking CVE-2026-85880 (Windows ALPC) and CVE-2026-81963 (Windows Update Stack) as already exploited elevation-of-privilege issues. It also lists critical RCE flaws in Office, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, SQL Server, Windows DNS, DHCP and Failover Cluster, plus graphics component RCEs. Azure-side fixes include Entra ID, Copilot Studio, Azure AI Language and Azure AD B2C elevation-of-privilege flaws.

日本のビジネスパーソンを対象としたWiz調査で 「AI導入加速」はクラウド移行を上回ることが明らかに

Wiz survey of Japanese business professionals finds AI adoption outranking cloud migration and 60% planning AI security investment.

A Wiz survey of Japanese business people found that accelerating AI adoption now outranks cloud migration as a priority. At the same time, more than 80% feel behind in preparing for AI-driven cyber-attacks, and 60% plan to invest in AI security. The findings highlight a preparedness gap as organizations adopt AI faster than they secure it.

Wiz Blog · 22d agoIndustry

Passkey-themed social engineering leads to identity and cloud compromise

Microsoft tracks ongoing cloud intrusions where passkey-themed helpdesk lures enable AiTM credential theft, MFA persistence, and SharePoint data theft.

Microsoft Security Research is tracking active cloud-based intrusions, observed since May 2026, that begin with helpdesk impersonation calls and SMS lures urging urgent passkey, MFA, or SSO updates. The lures lead to adversary-in-the-middle phishing or device-code authentication flows that capture credentials and session tokens or grant actor access, after which the actors add authentication methods, conduct Microsoft Graph reconnaissance, and download SharePoint and OneDrive content via REST APIs. Phishing domains embed victim organization names as subdomains (e.g., contoso.add-passkey[.]com), are often registered with Nicenic, and go operational within hours. Microsoft advises revoking sessions and removing unauthorized authentication methods for confirmed compromises.

Microsoft Security Blogupdated · 2h agofirst · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild 10 sources2

The Work Now Within Reach

OpenAI argues increasingly capable and affordable AI can expand what workers and businesses accomplish, lowering the cost of growth.

An OpenAI publication frames more capable, affordable AI as a way to expand the work people and businesses can accomplish and to make economic growth more economical. The piece is presented as an exploration of AI's economic impact rather than a technical or product announcement. No specific models, benchmarks, or metrics are named in the available text.

OpenAI News · 8d agoAI industry1

Cavern C2 Uses DNS and Google Apps Script to Blend Into Legitimate Traffic

Kaspersky details Iranian Cavern Manticore's expanded C2 framework using DNS and Google Apps Script, plus APT42's TAMECAT spyware in nuclear-sector phishing.

Kaspersky reported new components in the Cavern (Cav3rn) C2 framework, used by Iranian MOIS-affiliated Cavern Manticore (with overlaps to MuddyWater and OilRig's Lyceum) against Israeli entities, monitored since December 2025. The new GoogleService.dll module performs DNS A-record queries to choose between direct HTTPS and a Google Apps Script relay per transaction, with the DNS infrastructure able to rotate the Google deployment ID; Kaspersky also found an inter-component broker (rnp.dll) and linked the framework's plugin-based pivot to late April 2026. Separately, Group-IB and Kaspersky detailed HOLLOWGRAPH, a .NET NativeAOT DLL first seen in the wild June 7, 2026, that uses Microsoft 365 calendar events via the Graph API as two-way dead drops dated May 13, 2050, with DNS tunneling refreshing Entra ID credentials. DarkAtlas also reported APT42's TAMECAT modular surveillance framework delivered via LNK masquerading as PDFs in spear-phishing targeting the nuclear energy sector in April-May 2026, with the group using generative AI to accelerate operations.

The Hacker News · 29d agoThreat actor

You Can't Prefer Emotions You Don't Sample: Intensity Undershoot in DPO-Tuned LLMs

Study quantifies DPO-tuned LLMs undershooting requested emotional intensity, tracing the gap to candidate-pool extremity rather than conditioning format.

Conditioning an instruction-tuned LLM on continuous valence-arousal targets yields gain of only 0.26 for valence and 0.13 for arousal on Llama-3.1-8B, far below faithful control of 1.0. The authors attribute undershoot to neutral-heavy preference corpora like EmoBank and candidate pools lacking extreme affect, leaving DPO without extreme exemplars. Uniform target coverage with a hotter candidate pool raises valence gain to 0.40 on Llama-3.1-8B and 0.44 on Qwen3-8B, with modest in-distribution cost; arousal gains remain unstable across seeds.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research

Boston Scientific left nursing its bottom line after cyberattack

Boston Scientific says its August 25 network intrusion will materially hit third-quarter and full-year sales and earnings, likely missing guidance.

Boston Scientific detected unauthorized activity on its network on August 25 and took systems offline, disrupting order processing and shipping operations worldwide. In an SEC filing, the medical device maker warned of a material impact on Q3 and full-year results, making it unlikely to meet the net sales growth and adjusted EPS guidance issued in July. Its distribution network has been substantially restored, sterilization facilities are operational, manufacturing resumed at most sites, and an interruption affecting cardiac device remote-monitoring activations was resolved. The company has not revealed the attack vector, whether ransomware was involved, or whether data was stolen; no ransomware group has claimed responsibility and the investigation continues.

The Register · Security · 7d agoData breach

When will average people feel AI’s impact?

Interconnects essay argues AI's impact is still a rounding error for average people, comparing looming wage stagnation to Engels' pause.

An Interconnects essay argues that AI currently touches daily life far less than previous industrial revolutions, since its benefits are concentrated in knowledge work and lack tangible consumer goods. The author invokes Engels' pause (1790-1840), when British wages stagnated amid rapid GDP growth, as a warning that popular backlash could kneecap AI's development. He contends the current phase is about building compounding infrastructure, and predicts daily life may look similar even 50 years from now.

Interconnects · 7d agoAI industry1

xHunt Campaign: Attacks on Kuwait Shipping and Transportation Organizations

xHunt deployed custom backdoors Hisoka, Killua, Gon, and EYE against Kuwait shipping and transportation organizations, using DNS tunneling and email-draft C2 channels.

Unit 42 observed the xHunt campaign targeting Kuwait transportation and shipping organizations between May and June 2019, installing backdoors named after characters from the anime Hunter x Hunter, including Hisoka, Killua, Sakabota, and Netero. The tools use HTTP and DNS tunneling for C2, and Hisoka v0.9 added an unusual email-based C2 channel that abuses Exchange Web Services with stolen credentials to exchange email drafts. The Gon tool provides port scanning, file transfer, screenshots, remote command execution, and RDP session creation, while EYE acts as a cleanup failsafe if a legitimate user logs in. Related activity targeting Kuwait between July and December 2018 was reported by IBM X-Force IRIS, suggesting the campaigns are likely related.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor1

NOAH: Learning the Full Patient Journey. A Longitudinal Multimodal Time-Aware Model for Representation and Forecasting

Researchers introduce NOAH, a generative time-aware transformer trained on 559 million MIMIC clinical events to model and forecast patient trajectories.

NOAH is a task-agnostic, time-aware generative transformer designed to represent and forecast the full multimodal patient journey across medical images, time-series signals, categorical events, and clinical text. It was trained on over 559 million clinical events from 431,000 hospital visits covering 299,000 patients in the MIMIC dataset family. The architecture combines bidirectional time integration with a variational latent space to capture continuous patient state evolution and clinical stochasticity. NOAH supports autoregressive forecasting with time control, zero-shot classification, and counterfactual intervention simulation, with evaluations on 15 ICD chapters, 29 comorbidities, and time-to-event prediction.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research2

September 2026 Microsoft Patch Tuesday, (Tue, Sep 8th)

Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes a record 973 vulnerabilities, including 113 critical and two Windows privilege-escalation flaws already exploited in the wild.

Microsoft patched 973 vulnerabilities this month, its largest Patch Tuesday ever and far above the previous record of 664 set in July 2026, with 113 rated critical. Two Important elevation-of-privilege flaws (CVSS 7.8) are confirmed exploited in the wild: CVE-2026-81963 in the Windows Update Stack (improper link resolution, affects Windows 11 and Server 2025) and CVE-2026-85880 in Windows ALPC (heap-based buffer overflow allowing sandbox escape to SYSTEM, affects Windows 10 and Server 2012-2022). Critical unauthenticated RCEs (CVSS 9.8) were also fixed in Skype for Business Server (CVE-2026-66302), Windows Message Queuing (CVE-2026-69579), and Windows RRAS (CVE-2026-69590). SANS urges prioritizing the two exploited EoP fixes, then patching exposed MSMQ, RRAS, and Skype for Business deployments.

Explainability Assistant: A Conversational XAI Interface for Interpreting Energy Consumption Models

Researchers release Explainability Assistant, an open-source conversational XAI tool using LLM function calling, lifting intent-parsing accuracy from 76.8% to 94%.

The paper introduces the Explainability Assistant, an open-source conversational XAI system for interpreting energy consumption forecasting models such as genetic-programming symbolic regressors. It uses LLM function calling instead of rigid custom grammars, achieving 94% intent-parsing accuracy versus 76.8% for prior work TalkToModel, and adapts to different ML problem types without task-specific fine-tuning. Comparative evaluation with energy domain specialists against a traditional XAI dashboard showed improved usability, with all experts preferring the conversational interface.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research1

Microsoft’s September 2026 Patch Tuesday addresses 964 CVEs (CVE-2026-81963, CVE-2026-85880)

Microsoft's September 2026 Patch Tuesday fixes a record 964 CVEs, including two zero-days actively exploited in the wild.

Microsoft patched a record 964 CVEs in its September 2026 Patch Tuesday release, with 101 rated critical and 824 rated important, making it the largest Patch Tuesday to date. The release includes fixes for two zero-days that were exploited in the wild, with CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880 highlighted in the release. Affected products span Windows core components, Office, Exchange, .NET, Visual Studio, Active Directory services (including AD CS and AD FS) and numerous Azure services. Tenable notes the release surpasses July's as the biggest ever.

Tenable Blog · 7d agoVulnerability in the wildCVE-2026-81963CVE-2026-858801

Competence-Gated Pooling of Language Models and Priors for Event Forecasting

Paper proposes a competence gate pooling language model forecasts with external priors, improving Brier score from 0.0771 to 0.0732 across 2,357 binary questions.

The paper defines a language model's relative competence as its marginal value beyond an available external forecast, and derives conditions under Brier loss where model disagreement improves that forecast. A competence gate estimates domain-level source weights from resolved outcomes, shrinks uncertain estimates toward a global weight, and recalibrates the pooled forecast. Across 2,357 resolved binary questions and five language models, it improves the external baseline from 0.0771 to 0.0732 Brier and beats global forecast combinations, though it defers to the market on ForecastBench. Across four Qwen models, verbal confidence failed to identify when the model outperformed the external forecast, while outcome-estimated competence supported better abstention.

Hugging Face daily papers · 6d agoAI research

Certificate failures can cost firms over $250,000

DigiCert survey finds certificate failures cost firms over $250,000 per incident, with 47-day TLS certificates set to multiply management workloads by 2029.

DigiCert's Certificate Management Outlook reports that 34% of companies experienced outages from expired certificates and 40% from mismanagement, with nearly one in four citing incidents costing over $250,000. The CA/Browser Forum's move to 47-day certificate lifespans by 2029 will require renewals eight times more often and 40 times as many domain validations. Over half of organizations manage more than 1,000 certificates, yet only 10% have automation in place, with budget constraints and legacy systems cited as key barriers.

Help Net Security · 2d agoIndustry

Hackers Deploy Casbaneiro Banking Trojan That Activates When Victims Open Bank Websites

Fortinet details Casbaneiro banking Trojan campaign hitting Latin American bank customers via invoice-themed PDF phishing, with AutoIt loading, RegSvcs.exe injection, and bank-site-triggered activation.

Fortinet identified an August 2026 Casbaneiro banking Trojan campaign targeting users in Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Mexico through phishing PDFs styled as urgent invoices or legal notices. The staged chain uses IP-based geo-filtering, a Base64-encoded ZIP, an HTA file, and a legitimate AutoIt interpreter before injecting into RegSvcs.exe or mobsync.exe and persisting via a Startup shortcut. The Trojan exfiltrates address book and Outlook data unencrypted, stays dormant until victims visit targeted bank sites, then accepts commands for keyboard control, clipboard pasting, file execution, and command execution. It uses an expected HTTP 403 response from a second server and malformed HTTP requests to complicate network analysis.

Cyber Security News · 2d agoMalware in the wild

A Hybrid LSTM-XGBoost Framework for Multi-Horizon Stock Return Prediction Across Diversified Equity Portfolios

Hybrid LSTM-XGBoost model predicts multi-horizon returns for 14 US equities, cutting 30-day RMSE to about one-third of a standalone LSTM baseline.

The paper combines a two-layer LSTM (64 hidden units) processing 60-day windows of five market features with an XGBoost regressor over a 78-dimensional hybrid feature vector including 14 technical indicators. It is trained on pooled data for 14 US equities across six sectors using chronological splits and per-stock MinMaxScaling to prevent look-ahead bias, and evaluated at 30, 90, 252, and 365 trading-day horizons. The hybrid achieves test RMSE of 0.0949 at 30 days, roughly one-third of the standalone LSTM, while 97.6% directional accuracy at 365 days largely tracks the base rate of positive returns.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 4d agoAI research

The August 2026 Security Update Review

ZDI's August 2026 review covers a smaller-but-still-huge Microsoft and Adobe patch batch, with Adobe shipping 51 CVEs across five bulletins.

The Zero Day Initiative's August 2026 Security Update Review covers the latest Adobe and Microsoft patches. Adobe released five bulletins addressing 51 unique CVEs. The release is smaller than July's but still large by historical standards, which ZDI notes reflects a 'new normal' in patch density.

Zero Day Initiative Blog · Aug 11, 2026Vulnerability1

Better answers, broader thinking: What students gain from ChatGPT and critical-thinking training

OpenAI published a randomized study of over 1,000 students examining ChatGPT's effects on critical thinking and performance.

OpenAI released results from a randomized study of more than 1,000 students using ChatGPT on a real-world university assignment. The research examined effects on critical thinking, originality, and student performance. Findings inform ongoing debates about AI's role in education and learning outcomes.

OpenAI News · 20d agoAI research

NOAH: Learning the Full Patient Journey. A Longitudinal Multimodal Time-Aware Model for Representation and Forecasting

Researchers introduce NOAH, a time-aware generative transformer trained on 559 million MIMIC clinical events to forecast multimodal patient trajectories.

NOAH is a task-agnostic, time-aware generative transformer trained on over 559 million clinical events from 431,000 hospital visits by 299,000 patients across the MIMIC dataset family. It uses bidirectional time integration and a variational latent space to model the stochastic evolution of patient states, natively processing medical images, time-series signals, categorical events, and structured or unstructured clinical records. The model supports autoregressive forecasting with optional time control, zero-shot classification, and counterfactual intervention simulation, with strong probing performance across clinical outcomes, 15 ICD chapters, and 29 comorbidities.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research1

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.

I wrote an AI textbook — how long until AI can do it better?

AI researcher Nathan Lambert argues LLMs remain weak at long-form technical writing, questioning whether models can autonomously organize scientific knowledge for breakthroughs.

Nathan Lambert describes writing a post-training textbook, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, and finds today's LLMs weak at organizing long-form technical content despite becoming superhuman at coding and math. He notes GPT 5.5 Pro found deep typos across a 200-300 page manuscript while Claude models proved more useful as editors. He argues that compressing knowledge through writing is a prerequisite for autonomous scientific insight and tempers expectations for near-term AI-driven open science.

Interconnects · Aug 12, 2026AI research

Microsoft security advisory – September 2026 monthly rollup (AV26-896) – Update 1

Canada's Cyber Centre relays Microsoft's September 2026 rollup; CISA added exploited zero-days CVE-2026-85880 and CVE-2026-81963 to KEV.

Advisory AV26-896 from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security summarizes Microsoft's September 2026 monthly security rollup, listing affected products across Windows, Office, .NET, Azure, Exchange and SQL Server. It notes Microsoft confirmed CVE-2026-81963 and CVE-2026-85880 have been exploited. On September 8, 2026, CISA added both CVEs to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, and administrators are urged to apply the updates.

What do CISOs need to rest easy about future AI risks?

IANS survey of 113 CISOs finds optimism about managing future AI security risks hinges more on organizational readiness and leadership support than current controls.

An IANS AI Security Survey of 113 CISOs fielded in April and May found 41% optimistic and 38% pessimistic about their organization's ability to manage AI security risks over the next 24 months. Six organizational signals—leadership understanding of AI risk, defined governance ownership, security team effectiveness with AI tools, CISO ownership of the AI-security budget, sustainable workloads, and staffing—separate confident CISOs from pessimistic ones. Interviewed analysts cautioned that these readiness signals measure self-assessed confidence rather than actual security, and recommended hands-on AI use by security teams plus governance of third-party models.

CSO Online · 9d agoIndustry

NCP-ArchPreview Technical Report: Moving towards Latent Space Language Models through Next Concept Prediction

An 8.9B-parameter latent-space language model using next-concept prediction matches OLMo-3-7B pretraining loss with only 51.3% of the training tokens.

NCP-ArchPreview augments next-token prediction with Next Concept Prediction over a product-quantized concept vocabulary built from hidden states, trained jointly end-to-end. The 8.9B model was trained on 5.73T tokens from the Dolma-3 dataset, the largest latent-space language model demonstration to date. It consumes 51.3% of the tokens to reach OLMo-3-7B's final pretraining loss and outperforms it by 2.45 points on the downstream macro-average, including a 5.99-point GSM8K gain. The learned latent space also enables lightweight domain adaptation via a 17M-parameter VQ module and improves speculative drafting accepted length by 4.17%.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research1

Hackers Use Fake LinkedIn Job Offers to Infect Developers With New Cross-Platform RATs

Iran-linked Mirage Kitten uses fake LinkedIn job challenges to deliver new cross-platform RATs NodeRabbit and PollCat to developers in fintech, aviation, and aerospace.

PolySwarm documented a campaign by Iran-linked Mirage Kitten (UNC1549) that uses fake recruiter personas and technical hiring challenges on LinkedIn to deliver the newly documented RATs NodeRabbit and PollCat, which run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. A challenge archive bundles a fake npm package (colorized_terminal 2.1.0) in node_modules that loads NodeRabbit, while a React-based challenge delivers PollCat with an attacker-controlled OTP screen. NodeRabbit persists through a malicious Visual Studio Code extension and Git post-merge/post-checkout hooks; PollCat persists via scheduled tasks, cron, and LaunchAgents. Victims were observed in fintech, aviation, and aerospace, with confirmed targets in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan.

Cyber Security News · 7d agoMalware in the wild

CareMirror: Bringing Caregiver Wellbeing into the Dementia Care Ecosystem

Interview study with 14 dementia caregivers probes CareMirror wellbeing ecosystem, revealing demands for control over clinical sharing and AI boundaries.

CareMirror is an envisioned caregiver wellbeing ecosystem with interconnected caregiver- and clinician-facing interfaces for longitudinal reflection, personalized support, and caregiver-controlled sharing. Semi-structured interviews with 14 family caregivers used the system as a design probe. Caregivers valued wellbeing attention and clinical visibility but found repeated reflection burdensome and worried automatic clinical sharing would inhibit candid disclosure, expecting AI to support rather than replace caregiver and clinician judgment.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 21h agoAI research

Tracking OceanLotus’ new Downloader, KerrDown

Unit 42 identifies KerrDown, a new OceanLotus (APT32) downloader active since 2018 targeting Vietnamese speakers via malicious macros and DLL side-loading.

Unit 42 tracks KerrDown, a previously undocumented downloader family used by OceanLotus (APT32) since at least early 2018, primarily targeting Vietnam or Vietnamese-speaking individuals. Delivery uses macro-laced Microsoft Office documents embedding base64-encoded 32-bit and 64-bit DLLs, and RAR archives containing a legitimate program abused for DLL side-loading. KerrDown is dropped as main_background.png, downloads a DES-encrypted payload from a URL, and executes it directly in memory. Researchers used Jaccard-index similarity analysis to identify the new family, connect campaign samples, and infer patterns in the group's working hours and days.

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

From assistance to execution: How enterprises put AI to work

OpenAI reports enterprise adoption patterns of agentic AI through ChatGPT and Codex, with frontier firms pulling ahead in deployment.

OpenAI published a report on how enterprises are moving from AI assistance to autonomous execution, focusing on agentic AI deployments. It highlights the use of ChatGPT and Codex in enterprise workflows and argues that frontier firms are pulling ahead of peers in AI adoption. The piece is adoption research and marketing rather than a security disclosure.

OpenAI News · Aug 12, 2026AI industry1

[AINews] OpenAI reports Navier-Stokes singularity find in 88 hours using Astra-next, roughly 10,000 agents and 130B tokens (>$40M), a contender for second ever Millennium Prize awarded

OpenAI-linked accounts claim roughly 10,000 AI agents produced a Navier-Stokes singularity result in 88 hours, pending mathematical verification.

OpenAI-affiliated accounts claim a system of roughly 10,000 agents, trained over about a year with multi-agent reinforcement learning, produced a finite-time singularity result related to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem. The claimed 88-hour runtime and 130B-token cost circulate only via social posts, and no preprint, theorem statement, or proof artifact is available. Acceptance by the mathematics community is unresolved, so the claim's epistemic status remains unknown. The roundup also notes Cognition's $48B and Mistral's $24B fundraises, GPT Image 2.5, and Meta's Muse agent relaunch.

Latent Space · 7d agoAI research1

Large Language Models Develop Belief State Geometry In-Context

Probing six open-source LLMs on HMM-generated data shows belief states are linearly decodable (R² 0.83–0.99), suggesting in-context learning approximates Bayesian prediction.

Researchers prompted six open-source LLMs with data from 40 hidden Markov models selected for non-trivial belief structure and probed residual-stream activations for belief states (posteriors over hidden states). Belief states were linearly decodable with peak R² values of 0.83–0.99 across HMM/LLM combinations, spanning early to late layers. Patching and steering the probe-identified subspace preserved downstream prediction quality while control interventions degraded performance substantially, establishing functional relevance. The results provide representation-level evidence that in-context learning approximates optimal Bayesian prediction over a context-inferred generative model.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 22h agoAI research