Search: “rag”

When the prompt becomes the payload: A practical pen-testing guide for GenAI, LLM and RAG applications

CSO Online publishes a practical penetration-testing guide for GenAI, LLM, and RAG applications, covering prompt injection, retrieval poisoning, and tenant isolation testing.

The guide frames LLM applications as attack graphs spanning prompts, retrieval layers, vector stores, tools, identities, and downstream APIs, arguing that conventional web testing misses instruction-vs-data channel risks. It builds on OWASP prompt injection guidance (direct vs. indirect injection) and NIST's 2025 adversarial machine-learning taxonomy, noting that RAG and fine-tuning do not remove injection risk. Recommended practices include documenting trust transitions across components, using canaries and synthetic records to avoid test side effects, running multi-turn and obfuscated injection campaigns, and verifying chains from poisoned documents to observable state changes. It also details testing RAG pipelines via controlled document poisoning across metadata, OCR layers, and code comments, plus cross-tenant isolation checks on retrieved document IDs.

CSO Online·Sep 9, 10:00 UTC · 7d agoAI safety & security1

CiteShade: Citation Laundering in Multi-Source Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Its Counterfactual Defense

CiteShade attack makes RAG models cite trusted sources for attacker-chosen wrong answers, raising wrong-answer rate from 0.01 to 0.68.

CiteShade is presented as the first citation laundering attack against multi-source retrieval-augmented generation: an attacker controlling a single source induces a wrong answer falsely attributed to a trusted source, even while correct evidence remains in context. The attack is formalized via three necessary conditions (retrieval, generation, citation) constructible without any instructions, raising wrong-answer rate from 0.01 to 0.68 on multi-hop QA, with source deletion confirming the malicious source as causal driver. Vulnerability tracks a model's citation propensity rather than scale, reaching CLR 0.84 with explicit instruction and 0.64 without on the most citation-prone model. Perplexity filtering and citation-support checking prove insufficient; the authors propose a counterfactual defense verifying which source actually drove the answer.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 14, 14:41 UTC · 2d agoAI safety & security1

ToxicRAG: Compromising Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems via Single-Shot Knowledge Poisoning Attacks

ToxicRAG shows a single narrative-form poisoned document can steer RAG answers, achieving 0.61-0.91 attack success rates across four LLMs.

The attack injects one document per target question written as a coherent knowledge-update narrative that acknowledges the previously accepted answer, introduces fabricated events that appear to invalidate it, and attributes the attacker-chosen answer to purported authorities. An optional answer-focused self-validation loop revises candidates when a surrogate LLM fails to reproduce the target answer. Across 100 target questions each from Natural Questions, HotpotQA, and MS-MARCO, with four victim LLMs and four dense retrievers, ToxicRAG achieves attack success rates of 0.61-0.91 and matches or exceeds the strongest baseline by 0 to 11 percentage points.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 04:42 UTC · 6d agoAI safety & security1

InceptionRAG: Stealthy Poisoning Attack Against Retrieval-Augmented Generation

InceptionRAG fragments malicious payloads into dormant passages that trigger LLMs to self-deduce misinformation via multi-hop reasoning, bypassing existing RAG poisoning defenses.

Researchers introduce InceptionRAG, a stealthy corpus poisoning attack against retrieval-augmented generation that splits a malicious payload into a chain of individually harmless dormant passages. When retrieved together, the passages induce LLMs to self-deduce target misinformation through multi-hop reasoning, achieving over 80% attack success rate across three datasets and three LLMs under rigorous adversarial constraints. A zeroth-order suffix optimization (ZOSO) method automates authoritative suffix generation in black-box settings. The authors also propose HODOR, a document isolation defense that decouples adversarial logical dependencies.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 15, 08:22 UTC · 1d agoResearch

Atlas: Efficient Verifiable Semantic Search

Atlas delivers zero-knowledge proofs for HNSW semantic search, verifying RAG retrieval in under a second on SIFT1M and 2.0 seconds at 100M vectors.

Atlas lets a search provider prove that a query was answered correctly against a committed HNSW index without revealing the index, addressing provider deviations like truncation or bias. It combines offline preprocessing, a fixed-size-state restructuring of HNSW with a correctness proof, and timestep-tagged batching of per-step arguments. The system proves queries in under a second on SIFT1M and 2.0 seconds at 100 million vectors while preserving plaintext HNSW recall, and proven retrieval maintains end-to-end RAG answer quality at lower cost than prior verifiable retrieval systems.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 10, 17:30 UTC · 5d agoResearch1

Bridging the First-Hour Gap: Evaluating AI Reliability and Benchmarking Deficiencies in Cyber Incident Response for Law Enforcement

Survey of playbooks, LLMs, RAG, and agentic AI for law-enforcement cyber first responders finds RAG most viable but benchmarks inadequate for legal requirements.

The paper surveys decision-support architectures (playbooks, LLMs, RAG frameworks, agentic AI) for frontline law enforcement during the first hour of a cyber incident, where volatile digital artifacts risk procedural errors and evidence attrition. RAG-based systems are identified as a relatively viable intermediate solution, though prompt sensitivity and confident hallucinations in legal contexts pose major risks. The authors find current cybersecurity benchmarks insufficient for law enforcement safety and legal demands, and argue for a new benchmark focused on naive query robustness and evidence preservation.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 11, 10:25 UTC · 5d agoResearch

Bulk AbuseIPDB reporting using command-line tools

A blogger shows how to bulk-report distributed botnet IPs scraping a self-hosted Gitea instance to AbuseIPDB using bash, awk, and jq.

The author's self-hosted Gitea instance was scraped by distributed bots using random IPs worldwide and randomized, often nonexistent User-Agent strings, generating heavy request load for days. The write-up demonstrates filtering Traefik access logs (CLF and JSON) with grep, awk, and jq to extract offending IPs, tagging them with AbuseIPDB category 19 (Bad Web Bot), deduplicating them, and building a CSV for the Bulk Reporter tool. Reports can then be submitted through the AbuseIPDB bulk-report API, respecting the 5,000-report daily limit.

Lobsters · security·Sep 9, 20:26 UTC · 6d agoTools1

ZDI-26-587: Ashlar-Vellum Cobalt VS File Parsing Heap-based Buffer Overflow Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

ZDI advisory ZDI-26-587 details a heap-based buffer overflow RCE (CVE-2026-19781, CVSS 7.8) in Ashlar-Vellum Cobalt VS file parsing, requiring user interaction.

The Zero Day Initiative released advisory ZDI-26-587 covering a heap-based buffer overflow in Ashlar-Vellum Cobalt's VS file parsing. A remote attacker can execute arbitrary code when the target opens a malicious file or visits a crafted page. ZDI rated the vulnerability CVSS 7.8 and assigned CVE-2026-19781.

ZDI Published Advisories·Aug 24, 05:00 UTC · 23d agoAdvisoryCVE-2026-19781

A Graph-Based Approach for Mapping Kernel-Level Telemetry to MITRE ATT&CK

Trace2ATT&CK maps eBPF kernel telemetry to MITRE ATT&CK via provenance graphs and RAG with local open-weights LLMs, validated on 347 Atomic Red Team tests.

Trace2ATT&CK collects kernel-level events via eBPF, correlates attacker commands into a provenance graph, and derives compact graph representations suitable for LLM-based reasoning, mapping behavior to MITRE ATT&CK techniques with ranked candidates and rationales. Mapping uses both pure LLM prompting and retrieval-augmented generation grounded in the ATT&CK knowledge base. It was evaluated on 347 Linux Atomic Red Team tests using locally deployed open-weights LLMs. RAG consistently improved ATT&CK mapping over pure prompting, and provenance graphs substantially outperformed raw telemetry, without compromising data confidentiality.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 11, 13:35 UTC · 5d agoResearch

Retrofitting Code Using LLMs to Support Exceptional Behavior

EXCODER combines static/dynamic analysis with LLMs to retrofit exception-handling code, achieving 85.92% pass@1 with Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B on Java benchmarks.

The paper introduces the task of retrofitting existing code with Exception Related Code (throw statements, guarding conditions, try/catch blocks) so that given Exceptional Behavior Tests pass. EXCODER performs context engineering by integrating static and dynamic program analysis output with LLMs; it was evaluated on a benchmark built from 304 methods across 75 GitHub Java projects. Combined with Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B, EXCODER achieves pass@1, 5, and 10 rates of 85.92%, 86.18%, and 86.51%, roughly 13 percentage points over baseline, and manual inspection reveals remaining limitations.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 16:18 UTC · 6d agoAI research1

Stack buffer overflow in WAD

FortiOS explicit proxy WAD daemon stack buffer overflow (CVSS 5.1) allows code execution only with Kerberos and SOCKS configured.

Fortinet advisory FG-IR-26-161 describes a stack-based buffer overflow (CWE-121) in the WAD daemon of FortiOS explicit proxy, scored CVSSv3 5.1. Exploitation requires an attacker able to bypass stack protection and ASLR, and the explicit proxy must be configured with Kerberos authentication and SOCKS enabled. If successful, it yields arbitrary code or command execution in the WAD daemon context via crafted sockets. No exploitation is reported in the advisory.

Fortinet PSIRT·Aug 12, 07:00 UTC · Aug 12, 2026Advisory

Akamai Valkey Managed Database: Real-Time Memory for Enterprise AI

Akamai launched Valkey Managed Database, a low-latency in-memory data layer aimed at cutting AI inference costs and accelerating RAG.

Akamai introduced Valkey Managed Database, a managed in-memory data service based on the open-source Valkey project. The company positions it as real-time memory for enterprise AI, optimizing inference costs, accelerating retrieval-augmented generation, and powering real-time AI agents.

Akamai Blog·Aug 18, 13:00 UTC · 29d agoAI tools & infra

Re: Vulnerabilities fixed in libxml2-2.15.4

libxml2 2.15.4 patches two flaws including a heap buffer overflow in xmlDictAddQString tracked as CVE-2026-86137 and CVE-2026-86138.

libxml2 releases before 2.15.4 are affected by an integer overflow in xmlDictAddQString in dict.c that leads to a heap-based buffer overflow, tracked as CVE-2026-86137 and CVE-2026-86138. The oss-security post from Debian's Salvatore Bonaccorso flags the fixed release for downstream tracking. No exploitation is mentioned in the disclosure.

oss-security·Sep 5, 12:16 UTC · 11d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-86137CVE-2026-86138

Evidence-Grounded Retrieval for Investigation Hunt Lead Generation from CTI Reports

AHLERT generates environment-aware threat hunting leads from CTI reports using ATT&CK-seeded knowledge graph retrieval, roughly doubling F1 over flat-RAG baselines.

The paper introduces AHLERT, a system that converts Cyber Threat Intelligence reports into structured, investigable hunt leads via hybrid dense retrieval with multi-hop traversal over an MITRE ATT&CK-seeded knowledge graph and ontology-grounded RAG constrained to the defender's assets. It is LLM-agnostic and evaluated on public CTI reports for well-known APTs across proprietary and open-weight models. Hybrid evidence retrieval with ontology grounding raises mean F1 from 0.44 to 0.85, and AHLERT attains the highest effectiveness score (~86.95%) versus off-the-shelf LLMs.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 8, 14:21 UTC · 8d agoResearch

Meta FAIR Introduces AI Research Preference Models (RPMs): Ranking ML Experiments Before Spending GPU Hours

Meta FAIR, Oxford and UCL introduce Research Preference Models that rank unexecuted ML experiments, lifting AIRS-Bench scores from 0.684 to 0.729 and cutting compute ~1.6×.

Researchers from Meta FAIR, Oxford, and UCL introduce Research Preference Models (RPMs), which use frozen pretrained LLMs (Qwen3.6-27B backbone, no fine-tuning) to rank unexecuted experiment candidates and execute only the winner of a pairwise knockout tournament. Two variants shipped: an inference-only LLM-as-a-judge and an agentic variant that runs small pilot experiments in an H200 sandbox. On AIRS-Bench (20 tasks, 24 hours on one H200, 10 seeds), scores rise from 0.684 (random) to 0.711 and 0.729 versus a 0.748 validation oracle, and both variants reach the baseline's 24-hour score in roughly 15 hours. The team reports new SOTA on WinoGrande (94.1% with Agentic RPM) and SVAMP (95.7% with inference-only).

MarkTechPost·Sep 6, 20:25 UTC · 9d agoAI research

ReMoMask-2: Latent Retrieval-Augmented Masked Motion Generation

ReMoMask-2 rebuilds retrieval in the generator's latent space for text-to-motion generation, achieving lowest FID on KIT-ML and SnapMoGen.

ReMoMask-2 is a retrieval-augmented text-to-motion framework that constructs its retrieval database directly in the generator's pre-quantization latent space and aligns text queries through a distilled lightweight projector, eliminating the representation gap. The framework combines Hierarchical Bidirectional Momentum contrastive learning, Semantic Spatial-Temporal Attention, and Topology Structured Masking to handle hierarchical motion structure. The retriever achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, and ReMoMask-2 attains the lowest FID on KIT-ML and SnapMoGen, with a single mask-transformer stage outperforming the previous two-stage pipeline while delivering the fastest inference.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 7, 20:00 UTC · 8d agoAI research

"Shut Up and Let Me Enjoy My Otome": Understanding and Measuring the Toxicity in Otome Game Communities

First large-scale study finds 22.20% of Weibo otome game posts toxic versus 3.71% on Reddit, with LLM detectors reaching 0.82 F1.

Researchers present the first large-scale measurement of toxicity in otome game communities, introducing OtomeSCAN, which collected and analyzed 620,045 posts from Weibo and Reddit over 18 months. They manually annotated 4,308 posts, identified eight target groups, and evaluated seven toxicity detectors, with their best LLM-based model reaching F1-scores of 0.82 on Weibo and 0.78 on Reddit. The study found 22.20% of Weibo posts were toxic versus 3.71% on Reddit, and toxicity rose to 37.09% within 72 hours during an external attack on Weibo. The authors also flagged 191 potential-coordination clusters, 64.40% of which targeted game developers.

arXiv cs.CR·Sep 7, 21:44 UTC · 8d agoResearch

Kimsuky Builds Offline AI Stack to Boost Phishing and Automate Malware Development

The Hacker News·Aug 10, 13:21 UTC · Aug 10, 2026Malware

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·Sep 7, 17:47 UTC · 8d agoAI research

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·Sep 7, 23:08 UTC · 8d agoAI industry1

Does Your Agent's Memory Survive a Model Upgrade? A Controlled Study of Memory Portability

A controlled study finds agent memory portability varies sharply: fixed-schema knowledge graphs survive model swaps while compressed notes degrade.

The study compares preserving an agent's history as raw long context, RAG chunks, compressed natural-language notes, or fixed-schema knowledge graphs across model upgrades, using 48 synthetic histories and two open-weight sub-10B-parameter models. Fixed-schema KG accuracy changed by only +0.0004 ± 0.0020 after a writer swap, while compressed NOTES shifted asymmetrically by +9.91 or -13.28 percentage points depending on migration direction. Mixed 50/50 embedding migrations captured only 4.96 of an 11.90-point RAG re-embedding gain; 80% of the NOTES deficit came from information lost at construction, and 81% of the RAG deficit from retrieval failures. Store-only repair of NOTES failed to reach 90% recovery in all 48 cases, while retaining raw histories enabled recovery in 34 of 48 for one direction.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:44 UTC · 11d agoAI research1

Linux Detection Engineering - Local Privilege Escalation

Elastic details a layered detection framework for Linux local privilege escalation, covering 2026's copy-on-write bug wave and LLM-assisted discovery.

Elastic Security Labs describes how most Linux local privilege escalations share a common host flow — an unprivileged process launched from a writable path becoming root — and proposes layered detections combining general outcome-based rules with per-technique rules in Elastic Defend and Auditd. It tracks 13 recent LPE disclosures, seven of which share a copy-on-write/zero-copy bug class, including Copy Fail, DirtyFrag, Fragnesia, DirtyDecrypt, DirtyClone, pedit COW, and RefluXFS. Qualys attributes RefluXFS to an LLM-assisted research effort with Anthropic using Claude Mythos Preview, and another bug is credited to an LLM-assisted workflow. Detection and endpoint rules are published in Elastic's detection-rules and protections-artifacts repositories.

Elastic Security Labs·Sep 11, 00:00 UTC · 5d agoResearch

Why 2026 is the Year to Upgrade to an Agentic AI SOC

Elastic Security Labs argues 2026 is the production inflection point for agentic AI in security operations centers.

Elastic Security Labs argues 2026 is the practical inflection point for agentic AI SOCs, noting nearly two-thirds of organizations are experimenting with AI agents while fewer than one in four have production deployments. The piece outlines operational challenges and recommendations: treat agents as non-human identities with least-privilege tool access, version-control system prompts as code, deploy unified agents with on-demand task packages, and enforce per-agent budgets and rate limits. It stresses explainability via RAG and transparent reasoning traces so analysts can verify and override autonomous decisions.

Elastic Security Labs·Sep 8, 21:00 UTC · 7d agoIndustry

Claude Fable 5.1's language is less "load-bearing" than its predecessor's

Arena.ai found Claude Fable 5.1 writes 30% longer answers with fewer em dashes, hedges, and validation phrases than Fable 5.

Arena.ai compared tens of thousands of high-reasoning Text Arena outputs from Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and Fable 5.1. Fable 5.1's median answer length rose 30% to 414 words (from 319), remaining 21% shorter than Opus 5's 525. Em-dash usage fell from 16.2 to 11.0 per 1,000 words while semicolons rose to 6.09, hedges like 'perhaps' and 'arguably' dropped 36%, and praise appeared in 1.98% of responses versus 3.17%. Long content words fell from 42.6% to 38.6% and abstract nouns declined 25%, suggesting the successor's language is less 'load-bearing'.

The Decoder·Sep 10, 15:26 UTC · 6d agoAI research1

10 most critical LLM vulnerabilities

OWASP updated its Top 10 LLM application vulnerabilities, ranking prompt injection first and elevating excessive agency to third amid agentic adoption.

OWASP refreshed its Top 10 list of critical vulnerabilities in LLM applications, for the first time incorporating real-world incident data alongside expert voting. Prompt injection and sensitive information disclosure remain first and second, while excessive agency jumped from sixth to third as agentic systems that call APIs and execute code proliferate. Unbounded consumption of AI resources rose in prominence, while improper output handling dropped to the bottom as output sanitization becomes widespread. The list includes remediation guidance such as strict output schemas, human-in-the-loop approvals, and least-privilege credentials held in application code.

CSO Online·Sep 10, 08:25 UTC · 6d agoAI safety & security

Multi-Vector (Late Interaction) Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers

Hugging Face details building and using multi-vector late-interaction embedding models with Sentence Transformers for retrieval workloads.

Hugging Face published a guide on multi-vector, late-interaction embedding models (ColBERT-style) supported through Sentence Transformers. The post covers how practitioners can build and use these models for retrieval and RAG pipelines. It is a developer tooling and technique write-up, not a security advisory.

Hugging Face Blog·Aug 18, 00:00 UTC · 29d agoAI tools & infra1

Perplexity Details Its GPU Embedding Stack: How Ivy, Tulip and ROSE Serve pplx-embed

Perplexity details its GPU embedding serving stack (Ivy, Tulip, ROSE), which reuses LLM prefill/decode kernels, CUDA graphs, and LazyTensors to cut launch overhead.

Perplexity engineers published a deep dive on the serving infrastructure behind pplx-embed, used across Perplexity Search and its API platform. The stack comprises Ivy (Rust HTTP gateway), Tulip (gRPC scheduling and batching), and ROSE (Runtime-Optimized Serving Engine), which reuses LLM prefill and decode kernels rather than running a separate embedding engine. Optimizations include whole-model CUDA graphs with lazy capture and a LazyTensor abstraction that overlaps CPU batch preparation with in-flight GPU work. Benchmarks are reported against vLLM v0.22.0 in BF16, with FlashAttention 4 generally fastest but FlashInfer 3 winning on Qwen-based models at very long sequence lengths.

MarkTechPost·Sep 6, 03:20 UTC · 10d agoAI tools & infra1

Molecular Déjà Vu: Digit-Level Retrieval of Published Values in Frontier Language Models

Audit of 22 frontier models finds widespread verbatim retrieval of published molecular property values, with higher reasoning increasing recall of memorized numbers.

An arXiv audit tests 22 frontier LLMs across 12 molecular regression benchmarks for verbatim retrieval of published values. More than 50% of the LLMs show verbatim retrieval on five datasets, and identical experiments are flagged 89% more often at a high reasoning level than at the lowest one. Suppressing retrieval moves model prediction errors closer together in relative terms, suggesting predictive capability is not determined solely by memorized values.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 17:32 UTC · 11d agoAI research1

What 90 days and a small budget can buy in AI agent security

Versa Field CISO details hidden costs of self-hosting open-weight models and a 90-day AI agent security plan of inventory, blast-radius reduction and testing.

In a Help Net Security interview, Prasad Tharippala, Field CISO at Versa, argues running open-weight models in-house improves control but shifts hardening, patching, access control, monitoring and incident response onto the buyer, with underestimated costs in GPU infrastructure, licensing review, EU AI Act compliance and scarce AI/ML security skills. On red-teaming AI agents, he recommends testing prompt injection, indirect injection, excessive permissions, data leakage, memory and RAG poisoning, malicious tool outputs, cross-agent trust abuse and infrastructure attack paths, mapped to OWASP agentic guidance and MITRE ATLAS. He highlights the handoff between chained agents as a major risk zone and stresses exercising human approval, shutdown and rollback controls under test conditions. For teams with 90 days and small budgets, he ranks inventory, blast radius reduction and ongoing testing as the priority order.

Help Net Security·Aug 28, 00:00 UTC · 19d agoAI safety & security

ShieldFont fights AI scraping by handing crawlers the wrong words

Help Net Security·Aug 7, 00:00 UTC · Aug 7, 2026Industry

Opaque recurrence, and other AI terms that you should probably know

TechCrunch updates its plain-English glossary defining common AI terms from AGI and agents to chain-of-thought reasoning.

TechCrunch maintains a regularly updated glossary of AI terminology, defining terms such as AGI, AI agents, API endpoints, chain of thought, coding agents, compute, deep learning, and diffusion. It highlights 'opaque recurrence', the reasoning technique in OpenAI's new Astra model that has drawn attention from AI safety researchers. The piece is an educational living document rather than new research or a product announcement.

TechCrunch · AI·Sep 7, 19:24 UTC · 8d agoAI industry

[0day-rubbish] QuantaStor 6.8.3.018 Command injection in the alert-mail command via the smtpPassword field (8.8)

QuantaStor 6.8.3.018 has a CVSS 8.8 command injection in its alert-mail command, exploitable via the smtpPassword field.

0day Rubbish Research Team disclosed a command injection (CWE-78) in QuantaStor 6.8.3.018's alert-mail command, reachable through the smtpPassword field. The flaw scores CVSS 8.8 (AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H). No CVE identifier or evidence of active exploitation is mentioned in the disclosure.

Full Disclosure·Sep 8, 17:31 UTC · 7d agoVulnerability 2 sources

Threat actors are coming for your AI assets to operationalize their use of AI

Google GTIG reports espionage and crime groups stealing AI models, prompts, and API credentials, plus distillation campaigns and agentic AI attack automation.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's quarterly AI Threat Tracker reports adversaries stealing proprietary models, source code, prompts, and API credentials from government, healthcare, and media targets, including China-based UNC6508 compromising clouds to run unauthorized LLM workloads. Distillation campaigns against Google's models exceeded 100 million prompts launched via thousands of stolen account credentials through proxy networks. Mandiant also observed a financially motivated actor deploy an autonomous multi-agent framework that harvested thousands of third-party credentials in under 6 hours, and a 'Recon' framework on a live C2 server managing over 23,000 stolen credentials including cloud and AI API keys.

CSO Online·Sep 15, 08:25 UTC · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild

Once popular for attacking AI, ASCII smuggling is embraced by spammers

Spammers adopt ASCII smuggling—invisible Unicode tag characters—to evade email filters, with Microsoft Defender detections spiking to 2.5 million per day.

ASCII smuggling hides text in Unicode tag characters (e.g., U+E0041 for "A") that are invisible to humans but readable by LLMs and text processors. The technique gained attention as a stealthy prompt-injection vector and is now used by spammers to obfuscate keywords from email detectors. Microsoft reported Defender for Office smuggling detections jumped from roughly 21,000 per day to over 1.3 million in early February, reaching 2.5 million within four days, before falling sharply in mid-May.

Ars Technica · Security·Sep 4, 17:18 UTC · 11d agoPhishing & fraud

nvidia/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-NVFP4 — new model trending #28 on Hugging Face

NVIDIA released an NVFP4 4-bit quantized build of Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a 125B-parameter MoE vision-language model, via Model Optimizer.

The checkpoint quantizes Qwen3.8-Flash-Next — a hybrid-attention (Gated DeltaNet and Qwen Sparse Attention) Mixture-of-Experts model with 125B total and 6B activated parameters, plus 51B n-gram embeddings and 4B MTP — using NVIDIA Model Optimizer v0.46.0. NVFP4 benchmarks stay close to FP8: GPQA Diamond 91.5 vs 92.0, MMMU Pro 78.3 vs 77.1, Terminal-Bench 2.1 82.9 vs 83.3. It targets Blackwell B200/B300 GPUs, runs on vLLM, supports 262K context extendable to 1M tokens, and is licensed under the NVIDIA Open Model License with Qwen Community License 1.0.

Hugging Face trending models·Sep 2, 04:03 UTC · 14d agoModel release

ZDI-26-639: Oracle VirtualBox VMSVGA Heap-based Buffer Overflow Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability

ZDI disclosed a heap-based buffer overflow in Oracle VirtualBox's VMSVGA component (CVE-2026-71116) enabling local privilege escalation.

Zero Day Initiative published ZDI-26-639, a CVSS 7.5 heap-based buffer overflow in the VMSVGA component of Oracle VirtualBox. Local attackers who already execute high-privileged code on the guest system can leverage the flaw to escalate privileges on affected installations. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2026-71116. No exploitation is reported.

ZDI Published Advisories·Sep 9, 05:00 UTC · 7d agoVulnerability 6 sourcesCVE-2026-71116

F5 enhances AI Gateway to control AI costs, access, and security

F5 integrated AI Gateway into its AI Security Platform, adding model routing, MCP governance, and guardrails, claiming up to 60% token spend reduction.

F5 announced AI Gateway enhancements combining a Model Gateway for cost optimization, an MCP Gateway for agent-to-tool access control, and AI Guardrails for prompt and response inspection. The company cited its 2026 State of Application Strategy Report finding 77% of organizations now treat inference as their dominant AI activity and manage an average of seven AI models. F5 claims smart routing, semantic caching, and GPU-aware load balancing can cut token spend by up to 60% without application changes. The gateway enforces budgets, model routing policies, and agent access controls centrally across SaaS, hybrid SaaS, and hybrid multicloud deployments, with air-gapped support planned.

Help Net Security·Aug 19, 00:00 UTC · 28d agoAI tools & infra

Show HN: LLM Attention Visualization

A developer released a browser-based tool that visualizes which past tokens influence each LLM output token using aggregated, value-weighted attention scores.

A Show HN project presents a React application built on Transformers.js that renders per-token attention influence by aggregating attention weights scaled by value-vector magnitudes across all attention heads and layers. To expose internal tensors, the author instrumented the ONNX computation graph, hosted a modified model on Hugging Face, and pre-generated prompts to avoid long model downloads in the browser. Demos with a 600-million-parameter model show how verbatim copying draws heavily on source tokens and how single outputs blend information from multiple phrases.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 8, 16:59 UTC · 7d agoAI tools & infraHN 41↑ · 9 comments

Architecting memory and storage in the AI era

Analysis argues AI inference shifts data-center bottlenecks to memory and storage, urging balanced compute, memory, storage, and network architecture over raw compute.

MIT Technology Review, citing Tirias Research principal analyst Jim McGregor, argues that AI inference and agentic workloads make data movement the key constraint, elevating memory and storage from background hardware to strategic assets. The piece says RAG and real-time inference require continuous data retrieval and caching that legacy infrastructure cannot support. It frames infrastructure planning as a business decision balancing performance, efficiency, cost, and scalability in healthcare, finance, and customer-facing AI.

MIT Technology Review · AI·Sep 4, 18:39 UTC · 11d agoAI industry

PACE: Perceived-Latency-Aware Cascading Service Routing and Filler Control for QoE-Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Dialogue Serving

PACE cuts perceived latency in retrieval-augmented dialogue serving via cascading routing and filler control, reaching 0.41s P95 under load.

PACE is a serving framework for retrieval-augmented dialogue that optimizes Perceived Time-to-First-Response (PTFR) under quality and cost constraints. It combines a load-adaptive cascading router, a joint path-filler controller, and volatility-aware cache admission, deployed on a humanoid-robot sales service. On 75k CarQA requests, the cascade halved pure-LLM P95 PTFR (0.29s vs 0.53s) and the adaptive controller reached 0.41s P95, 2.4x better than RAG at high load; filler calls dropped 94% and stale answers fell from 86% to 0%.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 9, 16:02 UTC · 6d agoAI tools & infra