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Quantifying the Engagement Trap: Impact of Short-form Video Recommender Systems on Users with ADHD

A 302-participant study finds engagement-optimized short-form video recommenders cause disproportionate time blindness and distress for users with ADHD.

Researchers ran a stratified Prolific study with 302 participants comparing short-form video recommendation experiences with and without ADHD. Participants with ADHD reported significantly higher time blindness, post-usage regret, and emotional distress despite perceiving recommendations as similarly relevant. The paper proposes neurodiversity-aware, human-centered design interventions to mitigate these algorithmic harms.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research

On the Regularization Landscape for the Linear Recommendation Models

Study shows leading linear recommendation models reduce to nuclear-norm or Frobenius-norm regularization, with two new closed-form low-rank solutions proposed.

The paper unifies top-performing linear recommendation algorithms under a single regularization framework, showing they effectively apply either nuclear-norm or Frobenius-norm regularizers. Nuclear-norm solutions have a rigid structure, are low-rank, and have closed form, while Frobenius-norm solutions are more expressive but full-rank or require hard-to-tune procedures such as ADMM. The authors derive two new low-rank, closed-form solutions that combine the advantages of both regularization families.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research

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 · 8d agoVulnerability in the wildCVE-2026-81963CVE-2026-858801

Distill Globally, Adapt Locally: Reasoning Distillation and Product-Type Test-Time Training for Scalable Trade-Up Recommendation

A distillation framework compresses LLM reasoning into a 15.5M-parameter trade-up recommendation model reaching AUC 0.941 with product-type test-time training.

The paper targets trade-up recommendation, which identifies higher-quality alternatives that preserve customer purchase intent. A retrieval-augmented few-shot LLM teacher generates labels and rationales that supervise a compact embedding-pair classifier; at inference the 15.5M-parameter student uses only two precomputed 768-dimensional embeddings with no LLM calls. On 8,352 annotated pairs, label-only training scored AUC 0.912, reasoning distillation reached 0.924, and product-type test-time training lifted it to 0.941 with average precision 0.940. The distilled student is roughly 5,000x faster and 10,000x cheaper than direct LLM inference on a 100K-pair proxy catalog.

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

ENISA: Frontier AI Is Changing the Speed of Cyberattacks. Europe Needs to Catch Up

ENISA warns frontier AI compresses attack lifecycles to minutes, with exploits possible within 15 minutes of disclosure and median 72-minute breach-to-exfiltration times.

ENISA's July 2026 paper 'ENISA's view on Cybersecurity in the Frontier AI Era' argues AI-assisted attackers may weaponize vulnerabilities within 15 minutes of disclosure and achieve initial-access-to-data-exfiltration in a median 72 minutes, creating a 'negative time-to-exploit' problem. The report cites one organisation whose CVE volume rose from roughly 80 in Q1 2025 to almost 500 in Q1 2026, then about 500 reports per day when frontier-AI tools were used. ENISA recommends machine-speed defence under 'Cybersecurity as Code', EPSS and VEX-based prioritisation, AI-assisted incident response with human oversight, and an assume-breached architecture.

Security Affairs · 2d agoAdvisory

AL26-019 - Vulnerabilities impacting Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway - CVE-2026-19490 and CVE-2026-19489

Canadian Cyber Centre alerts on Citrix NetScaler ADC/Gateway flaws CVE-2026-19490 (authentication bypass) and CVE-2026-19489 (buffer overflow), urging emergency patching.

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security issued alert AL26-019 covering two Citrix NetScaler vulnerabilities disclosed in a vendor advisory on August 19, 2026. CVE-2026-19490 (CWE-288) allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to bypass authentication on appliances configured as a Gateway for SSL VPN, ICA Proxy, CVPN, RDP Proxy, or as an AAA virtual server. CVE-2026-19489 (CWE-120) is a classic buffer overflow that may cause memory overflow, unpredictable behavior, or denial-of-service conditions. Affected appliances are vulnerable when configured as a SAML IdP; fixed versions include 14.1-73.32, 13.1-63.21, and 13.1-37.277 for FIPS.

GraphProfiler: Source-Linked Sensitive Attribute Inference via Personal Knowledge Graphs

GraphProfiler links LLM attribute inferences to source posts via personal knowledge graphs, enabling targeted redaction of privacy-leaking content.

GraphProfiler represents a user's post history as a source-linked personal knowledge graph where nodes and edges trace back to originating posts, making LLM-based attribute inference auditable. It reaches 86.7% attack success rate on the eight-attribute SynthPAI benchmark and 84.6% on PANDORA, within two points of strong text-only baselines, while citing supporting evidence for over 98% of predictions. Ablation experiments show removing cited posts reduces attack success substantially more than removing random posts, supporting targeted privacy mitigation.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch1

The hidden risks of shadow AI

UK NCSC guidance warns shadow AI use by employees risks data exposure, lost data control, and attacker exploitation of vulnerable AI agents.

The UK NCSC warns that 'shadow AI'—use of AI tools not captured in organizational approved systems—is widespread, with 71% of employees reporting unapproved AI tool use. Risks include exposure of sensitive company and customer data, loss of visibility and control when data goes to consumer AI services, and new attack opportunities if adversaries exploit vulnerabilities in AI agents with access to corporate systems. The NCSC advises reducing rather than eliminating the risk through positive security culture, understanding employee needs, offering secure alternatives, and following its joint guidance on careful adoption of agentic AI services.

NCSC UK · 9d agoAdvisory

Beyond Top-k Skill Retrieval: Diversity-Aware Skill Routing for LLM Agents

DSR reranks LLM agent skills with Determinantal Point Processes to favor complementary, non-redundant sets, improving multi-skill query coverage.

The paper proposes Diverse Skill Routing (DSR), a diversity-aware reranking framework for LLM agent skill routing that uses a Determinantal Point Process to balance query relevance and non-redundancy across large skill registries. DSR introduces a query-residual diversity kernel that penalizes redundant skill overlap while avoiding penalties arising only from shared query relevance. On the SkillRouter benchmark, DSR improves recall and full coverage over a strong pointwise reranking baseline, with the largest gains on multi-skill queries. The authors argue skill routing should be treated as complementary set selection, not just relevance ranking.

Hugging Face daily papers · 12d agoAI research

Batten the Hatches: Cybersecurity with Military Mariners

Interviews with 20 U.S. Navy and Coast Guard mariners reveal informal, safety-oriented shipboard cyber risk models that may delay attribution and containment.

The study conducts semi-structured interviews with 20 military mariners from U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels to understand how service members recognize and respond to cyber risk aboard ships. Unique consequences of compromising military systems identified include weapon takeover and purposeful geopolitical escalation. Cybersecurity is organizationally abstract on ships, so mariners build cyber risk models from informal experience rather than formal instruction. A safety-oriented incident-response model creates resilience but may delay cyber attribution and containment.

arXiv cs.CR · 5d agoResearch

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 · 6d agoAI research1

Switching Password Managers in 2026

An Apple password-management engineer (writing personally) explains switching password managers via iOS direct app-to-app export, crediting FIDO Credential Exchange for passkey portability.

Ricky Mondello, an Apple engineer in password management and authentication (writing personally, not for Apple), demonstrates moving 100 items from 1Password to Apple Passwords via the iOS system export, which transfers passwords, passkeys, verification codes, and notes directly between apps with Face ID confirmation and no intermediate files. He credits the FIDO Alliance's Credential Exchange format (first draft May 2024, now an open spec) and iOS 26/macOS 26 for enabling phishing-resistant credential transfer between apps like 1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, DuckDuckGo, and Devolutions. The post is advice rather than news, recommending bulk transfer on the existing device, switching AutoFill to the new app, and treating the new manager as the source of truth.

Lobsters · security · 8d agoIndustry1

The Frontier AEO Tracker: What Astra Chooses (and every other frontier model, and what you can do about it)

Latent Space launches an AEO tracker scoring 7 frontier models' product recommendations across 161 categories, revealing generational bias flips.

Latent Space built a tracker measuring Answer Engine Optimization by running 6 prompt variations across 7 frontier models with search enabled over 161 product categories, scoring first choices, alternatives, mentions, and anti-recommendations. It found 28 categories with a universally dominant primary choice and observed soft biases, such as models favoring their own lab's coding agents. Analysis of Anthropic's Sol→Astra and Opus→Fable generations showed newer models consulting fewer sources and being less likely to change answers when questions are paraphrased.

Latent Space · 8d agoAI research

When the Whole Company Adopts AI: What It Does to Your SOC

Analysis of 16.9 million SOC alerts finds AI-related alerts at 0.43%, growing 685% since February, with 94.1% noise and 0.02% real attacks.

A review of roughly 16.9 million SOC alerts found about 73,000 (0.43%) were AI-related, a share that grew 685% between February and June 2026. Of AI-related alerts, 94.1% were noise, 5.8% genuine risks, and 0.02% real attacks; 79.8% received benign verdicts, 81.7% were automatically suppressed, and only 5.4% reached a human analyst. The only confirmed attacks were phishing campaigns that weaponized AI brand names as lures, while developer coding agents spawning shells and reading credential stores routinely tripped detections written before AI agents existed.

The Hacker News · 4d agoResearch1

ReCite: Agentic Reasoning for Faithful Citation

ReCite is an agentic citation framework using claim-level reasoning and verification, outperforming large generative models in strict citation accuracy.

ReCite is a decoupled agentic framework that orchestrates location perception, intent-aware query planning, and reflective verification for citation recommendation. Trained on synthesized reasoning trajectories, the agent verifies claim-evidence consistency and triggers self-correction loops when retrieved candidates lack logical support. Experiments show the lightweight framework outperforms state-of-the-art massive generative models in strict citation accuracy, addressing misattribution where cited papers are real but logically unsupportive.

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

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: April 14, 2026

Help Net Security lists active cybersecurity job openings at employers including MANTECH, Honeywell, SMBC Group and SBS Transit across multiple countries.

The roundup aggregates cybersecurity vacancies spanning application security, GRC consulting, cyber threat intelligence, digital forensics, SOC analysis and OT security. Openings were posted in India, the United Kingdom, Italy, the USA, Singapore, France, Germany, Ireland and the UAE. Most roles were no longer accepting applications at publication. Named employers include Honeywell, MANTECH, TENEX.AI, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, SMBC Group, SBS Transit and VINCI Energies.

Help Net Security · 21d agoIndustry2

Bag of Tricks or Bag of Myths? Reducing Modeling Complexity with Task Knowledge in Explainable Suicide Risk Assessment

Researchers audit 31 NLP techniques for clinician-annotated suicide risk prediction, finding only 5 of 31 comparisons yield reliable gains.

A study of 1,635 clinician-annotated social media posts ran roughly 300 controlled experiments across 7 methodological families, auditing techniques such as model scaling, synthetic data, ensembling, and threshold tuning under severe class imbalance. The proposed system reformulates risk factor prediction as entailment between posts and codebook definitions, using architecturally diverse ensembles with class-balanced training and deployment-consistent calibration. It scores 0.8203 for risk, 0.7953 for evidence, and 0.7045 macro-F1 for factors, ranking third among 53 teams.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research

U.S. Offers $10 Million Reward for Iranian IRGC Cyber Chief Linked to Critical Infrastructure Attacks

The U.S. State Department offered up to $10 million for information on Amir Yaryab, an IRGC cyber chief linked to critical infrastructure attacks.

The U.S. State Department's Rewards for Justice program offers up to $10 million for information identifying or locating Amir Yaryab, who allegedly oversees the Cyber Operations Command of Iran's IRGC Cyber-Electronic Command (IRGC-CEC). Officials tie him to units called Shahid Hemmat and Shahid Shushtari conducting cyber and information campaigns against defense, telecommunications, energy, and finance sectors across the US, Europe, and the Middle East, and to groups including CyberAv3ngers and Dadeh Afzar Arman. CyberAv3ngers compromised at least 75 Unitronics Vision Series PLCs, including 34 in US water and wastewater facilities, between November 2023 and January 2024.

Cyber Security News · 8d agoPolicy & legal

Unifying Conformal Language Tasks with In-Context Ensembles

Researchers propose Conformal Relevance, which builds conformal score functions via in-context example curation and ensembling to improve conciseness across seven NLP tasks.

The paper targets NLP tasks like summarization and extractive QA that reduce to retrieving content under coverage and conciseness constraints. Conformal Relevance replaces hand-engineered LLM scoring prompts with curated in-context examples and ensembles, maintaining coverage guarantees while improving conciseness with minimal manual input. The authors demonstrate the framework on seven NLP tasks and contribute theory, including a complementarity condition for when ensembling improves worst-case sentence scores and a saturation bound on ensemble gains.

Hugging Face daily papers · 15d agoAI research1

CISA Warns of Chromium Type Confusion 0-Day Vulnerability Actively Exploited in Attacks

CISA added the actively exploited Chromium V8 type confusion zero-day CVE-2026-85046 to its KEV catalog, urging patching of Chrome, Edge, and Opera.

CISA added CVE-2026-85046, a V8 type confusion flaw (CWE-843) in Chromium-based browsers, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. A remote attacker can trigger arbitrary code execution inside the browser sandbox via a specially crafted HTML page. Google Chrome is directly affected, and Microsoft Edge, Opera, and other Chromium-based browsers may also be impacted depending on their V8 version. Google has released a Stable channel Chrome update, and CISA directs mitigations under Binding Operational Directive 26-04.

Cyber Security News · 8d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2026-85046

What Does an LLM-Agent Leaderboard Rank Actually Compare?

A methodological study shows close LLM-agent leaderboard rank gaps on SWE-bench and similar benchmarks often do not support superiority claims.

The paper defines an estimand-aware pairwise procedure for comparing agents, checking common support and applying explicit uncertainty rules and practical margins. Across SWE-bench, AgentRewardBench, and tau2-bench, close rank differences are frequently unresolved, and proxy labels or utility rules can change which system is selected. The authors argue a leaderboard score summarizes a released evaluation but does not by itself justify pairwise superiority conclusions.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research

Sandworm-Linked UAC-0145 Uses Fake Job Interviews to Push VPN That Can Run Commands

CERT-UA says Sandworm-linked UAC-0145 poses as recruiters in fake job interviews to deliver a trojanized WireGuard VPN that runs attacker commands on victims' hosts.

CERT-UA attributes the campaign, ongoing since May 2026, to UAC-0145, a subgroup within GRU-affiliated Sandworm (APT44). Posing as HR staff of firms like ATLAS Business Group and Sopra Steria Bulgaria, attackers lure Ukrainian IT specialists into Zoom interviews, then share failing WireGuard configs and push a custom SopraVPN client from SourceForge. The modified WireGuard build supports a non-standard SymmetricKey option holding AES-256-GCM-encrypted PowerShell, decrypted with the decoded PrivateKey and executed via runScriptCommand. A scheduled task then downloads a second-stage payload on Windows, while the Linux variant fetches it via cURL.

The Hacker News · Aug 12, 2026Threat actor1

Benchmark Radar: A Living Database and Search Engine for AI Benchmarks and Evaluation

Benchmark Radar provides a living searchable database of 1,283 AI benchmark records and 12,916 score observations drawn from 37 daily discovery sources.

Benchmark Radar combines daily discovery of benchmark papers, repositories, datasets, and releases from 13 direct connectors and 24 first-party feeds into a searchable catalog with model card mentions and score histories. The catalog contains 1,283 source records drawn from 4 benchmark catalogs plus 12,916 numeric observations on 790 records. The release includes a web dashboard with leaderboard, Pareto frontier of score versus usage, saturation and trend views, daily feeds, a CLI, and reproducible analysis. The paper audits the full catalog and examines benchmark saturation and limits of score comparisons.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

U.S. CISA adds a Ray-Project Ray flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

CISA added actively exploited Ray RCE flaw CVE-2025-62593 (CVSS 9.4) to its KEV catalog, ordering federal agencies to patch by August 20, 2026.

CISA added CVE-2025-62593 (CVSS 9.4), a critical remote code execution flaw in the Ray AI compute engine, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog with a due date of August 20, 2026. Versions before 2.52.0 relied on a User-Agent header check to guard the dashboard/API, which combined with DNS rebinding allows arbitrary code execution on developers' machines via malicious websites or ads. Aviatrix's analysis describes privilege escalation, lateral movement, command and control, and data exfiltration following exploitation. Federal civilian agencies must remediate under BOD 22-01; the flaw affects Firefox and Safari.

Security Affairs · 29d agoExploit / PoC in the wildCVE-2025-62593

Learning Sparse Decision Trees via Transformer Variational Auto-Encoders

TREVIS uses a Tree Transformer VAE latent space to learn decision trees matching near-optimal predictive performance while improving structural sparsity.

TREVIS learns decision trees optimized for complex objectives by exploring the latent space of a Tree Transformer Variational Auto-Encoder (TTVAE). Mapping trees to continuous latent representations replaces the discrete search space with a continuous one, enabling gradient-based optimization through a differentiable surrogate model. Experiments show TREVIS matches the predictive performance of near-optimal algorithms while improving structural sparsity, targeting high-stakes contexts needing transparent decision logic.

Hugging Face daily papers · 16d agoAI research

Microsoft Offers Up to $30,000 for Critical AI Flaws in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform

Microsoft expands AI bug bounty to Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, paying up to $30,000 for critical inference manipulation flaws.

Microsoft's bug bounty program offers up to $30,000 for critical 'Inference Manipulation' or 'Inferential Information Disclosure' bugs in Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, including Copilot Studio, AI Builder, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse. Payouts scale by report quality ($30,000/$20,000/$12,000 for critical) with important-severity AI flaws earning $6,000-$20,000, plus 20% multipliers for Dataverse privilege escalation and Plugin Sandbox escapes. Prompt injection affecting only the attacker, hallucinated execution, and system-prompt disclosure are excluded from scope.

Cyber Security News · 2d agoIndustry

AgentGrad: Intervention-guided Prompt Optimization for Multi Agent Systems

AgentGrad introduces intervention-guided prompt optimization for LLM multi-agent systems, achieving state-of-the-art results with 2.5x faster optimization.

AgentGrad is a prompt optimization framework for LLM-based multi-agent systems that addresses limitations in textual gradient extraction and aggregation. It uses sequential intervention to identify the agent whose prompt modification resolves a given failure, then applies agent-level supervision and semantic gradient clustering to build generalized gradients. Experiments report state-of-the-art performance across five MAS benchmarks and a 2.5x average reduction in wall-clock optimization time versus the next-fastest baseline.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

1.1.1.1 now supports post-quantum DNSSEC, all 2,420 bytes of it

Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 resolver now validates post-quantum DNSSEC signatures using ML-DSA-44, a 2,420-byte NIST algorithm, preparing DNS for post-quantum migration by 2029.

Cloudflare enabled 1.1.1.1 to validate DNSSEC signatures using ML-DSA-44 (algorithm 18), a NIST-standardized post-quantum signature with 1,312-byte public keys and 2,420-byte signatures, roughly 38x larger than ECDSA P-256. The large signatures exceed common DNS-over-UDP limits, forcing fallback to TCP and creating downgrade risks while conventional algorithms must be published alongside. Cloudflare cites the risk of a quantum computer breaking RSA/ECDSA signatures by 2030 and plans full post-quantum security by 2029.

Cloudflare Blog · 6d agoTools1

Guiding Worker Self-Selection in Crowdsourcing Contests: An LLM-Augmented Algorithmic Approach

Researchers introduce GRAF, a greedy framework for crowdsourcing contest self-selection, and LLMScore, an LLM-driven method that auto-designs its scoring algorithm.

The paper studies self-selection in Tullock contests (SSTC), where workers choose contests and then compete within them. GRAF is a greedy polynomial-time framework that orders workers by a score vector with zero worker regret and platform optimality guarantees in special cases. LLMScore is an LLM-driven evolutionary framework that produces human-readable, inspectable scoring code, jointly optimizing platform utility and worker satisfaction. Across 1,000 synthetic instances in four settings, GRAF with LLMScore achieves high-quality, often near-optimal outcomes with low worker regret, transferring from small training instances to larger, structurally different settings.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research1

ChatGPT flaw lets attackers pull Gmail data across accounts via a hidden channel

Check Point found a ChatGPT flaw letting attackers read victims' Gmail and connected-app data via hidden cross-session instructions; OpenAI patched it.

Check Point Research discovered a covert cross-account command channel in ChatGPT's code execution environment, where containers meant to be isolated shared metadata through an internal service based on JFrog Artifactory. In a proof of concept, a victim's session was tricked into retrieving Gmail email data and relaying it to an attacker-controlled session during an ordinary-looking interaction, with reach extending to any connected apps the session was authorized for, including Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, and GitHub. OpenAI fixed the issue and decommissioned the internal service; the same shared infrastructure was also involved in the separately disclosed Hugging Face compromise, though via different techniques.

CSO Online · 7d agoAI safety & security

LongAgent: History-Guided Agentic Search for Longitudinal Outcome Prediction

LongAgent autonomously searches variable sets and temporal windows to predict longitudinal medical outcomes, beating the strongest non-agent baseline on synthetic data.

The paper proposes LongAgent, an agent-based method that searches over combinations of variable sets, temporal windows and aggregation functions for outcome prediction on heterogeneous medical longitudinal data. It uses a history memory of previous searches and numerical evidence to guide exploration. On synthetic data it achieves mean RMSE 1.7376, improving over the best non-agent baseline by 0.0151 (95% CI [0.0045, 0.0260]; p=0.0273), and performs comparably to the best baseline on a real clinical dataset.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 2d agoAI research

Impersonating IT support: how threat actors turn a remote session into enterprise-wide access

Microsoft details Teams IT-support impersonation campaigns deploying Node.js implants, AD reconnaissance, and WinRM lateral movement toward domain controllers.

Microsoft Threat Intelligence describes a human-operated campaign where attackers impersonate IT/helpdesk staff via Microsoft Teams external collaboration, talk users into granting remote sessions, and use RMM tools for interactive access. During the session they run PowerShell to silently install a malicious MSI that stages a portable Node.js runtime and obfuscated JavaScript implant for C2, executing follow-on payloads via rundll32. Operators then perform host and Active Directory reconnaissance, capture desktop screenshots, and pivot via WinRM on port 5985 to domain controllers and certificate authorities. The hands-on-keyboard chain, which can precede data theft and ransomware, blends into normal operations by relying on Teams, Quick Assist, msiexec, and Node.js; Microsoft shares hunting and mitigation guidance.

Microsoft Security Blog · 13d agoThreat actor in the wild

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 · 6d agoAI research

Risky Bulletin: BEC campaign steals €35 million from French notaries

Hackers stole over €35 million from 500+ French notary offices in a four-year BEC campaign; ANSSI spent two years helping evict the attackers.

A business email compromise campaign breached more than 500 French notary offices — about 7% of all French notaries per the Conseil Supérieur du Notariat — over four years, stealing more than €35 million by phishing initial access and silently modifying wire transfer details. France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI worked for two years behind the scenes to help notaries remove the persistent attackers, who had deep access; officials also feared hackers could issue fake notarized acts such as marriage certificates or forged real estate deals. No forged documents have been found so far, but notaries have added two-factor authentication and in-person requirements for banking details, and banks added extra checks in 2024. The newsletter also notes other incidents, including a $320 million Bitcoin extraction from Blockstream's Liquid Network and a JetBrains Cadence breach via TeamCity servers.

Risky Business News · 9d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

ScienceBuddy: Recursive-in-Recursive Self-Improvement for Interactive Scientific Agents

ScienceBuddy couples harness evolution with model reinforcement learning so scientific agents continually self-improve from researcher feedback in an interactive workspace.

The authors release ScienceBuddy, an interactive scientific research workspace that transforms researcher requests, feedback, and execution evidence into tasks and evaluation rubrics for continual learning. Its recursive-in-recursive self-improvement paradigm couples harness evolution (inner recursion, model fixed) with model reinforcement learning under the improved harness (outer recursion). Case studies span four scientific task families, and the system is released to the scientific community as a research product.

NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE, and EPA Warn of Active AI

Five US agencies warn of active AI-assisted attacks on internet-exposed Siemens S7 PLCs across critical infrastructure, using disguised snap7 scripts for pre-positioning reconnaissance.

NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE, and EPA issued joint advisory CISA AA26-231A warning of an active hacking campaign against Siemens S7-series PLCs, from S7-200 through S7-1500 F-series, across US critical infrastructure. Threat actors use internet scanning services such as Censys and ZoomEye to locate exposed controllers, then perform read operations over S7comm on TCP port 102 using the legitimate snap7.dll and python-snap7 libraries, disguising AI-generated exploitation scripts as monitoring tools. The agencies assess the activity as pre-positioning ahead of possible process disruption, equipment damage, or safety incidents in Energy, Water, Critical Manufacturing, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities sectors.

Security Affairs · 27d agoExploit / PoC in the wild

ActReview: Rebuttal-Guided Training Data and Rubric Rewards for Actionable Peer Review Generation

ActReview post-trains Qwen3-8B-Base on 40K rebuttal-derived instances with rubric rewards to generate actionable, grounded peer-review feedback, plus a 1,000-instance benchmark.

The framework builds ActReview-40K from real OpenReview review-rebuttal threads, aligning reviewer weaknesses with author responses and grounding feedback in localized paper evidence. Qwen3-8B-Base is post-trained with multi-task supervised fine-tuning followed by GRPO using candidate-aware, weakness-specific rubric rewards. Experiments show improved actionability and grounding over prior specialized review-generation models, supported by ActReview-Bench, a human-curated 1,000-instance evaluation set. Human evaluation confirms better revision usefulness while noting a remaining gap in technical accuracy.

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

New GPUThor Rowhammer Defeats ECC on NVIDIA RTX A6000 to Gain Host Root Access

University of Toronto researchers present GPUThor, a Rowhammer attack that defeats ECC on NVIDIA RTX A4000-A6000 GDDR6 GPUs and achieves host root access.

GPUThor uses non-uniform hammering to bypass Target Row Refresh and overcome SECDED ECC on NVIDIA Ampere workstation GPUs with GDDR6 memory, inducing 72,000 to 377,552 bit flips per gigabyte across RTX A6000, A5000, A4500, and A4000 cards. Triple-bit silent data corruption enables host privilege escalation to root with the IOMMU enabled, reusing GPUBreach page-table corruption techniques, and double-bit DUEs allow escalation when the IOMMU is disabled during a ~10 ms lazy-service window. The attack cut end-to-end escalation time on the A6000 from 21.9 hours to 1.1 minutes. Reported to NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft, and AWS on April 29, 2026; findings were embargoed until August 25, 2026, and no CVE identifier was assigned.

The Hacker News · 8d agoResearch1

RetroThinker: Enabling Retrospective Thinking in Speech LLMs

RetroThinker is a post-training framework letting the Moshi speech LLM self-correct reasoning mid-stream, adding 11% GSM8K accuracy at similar latency.

Researchers introduce RetroThinker, a multi-stage post-training framework that equips the Moshi speech LLM to verify and forward-correct chain-of-thought steps during streaming inference. It combines supervised fine-tuning on curated retrospective thinking data with length-based direct preference optimization (DPO). On GSM8K it achieves an 11% absolute accuracy gain over non-retrospective baselines at comparable latency.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research1

NASA AIT-GUI Flaws Could Let Unauthenticated Attackers Issue Spacecraft Commands

Researchers disclosed 9.4-CVSS flaws in NASA/JPL's AIT-GUI allowing unauthenticated attackers to issue arbitrary spacecraft commands via exposed command endpoints.

Cycode disclosed a flaw chain in AIT-GUI, the browser-based operator console for NASA/JPL's open-source AMMOS Instrument Toolkit, tracked as GHSA-p9r8-2q67-fp86 with CVSS 9.4, affecting versions 2.5.1 and earlier. The server binds to 0.0.0.0:8080, issues sessions without credential checks, and lets unauthenticated users issue spacecraft commands via POST /cmd and reach files outside intended directories via /script/run and /seq (CWE-306, CWE-352, CWE-22). Version 2.5.2 adds host binding and same-origin checks but does not add authentication, and a related missing-authentication flaw was published separately as CVE-2026-60112 with CVSS 9.3.

The Hacker News · 27d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2026-601121