Google’s Atlas of the human genome could pave the way for new treatments
Google DeepMind launches AlphaGenome Atlas, a catalog of predicted molecular effects for roughly nine billion single-letter DNA changes across the human genome.
Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaGenome Atlas, a roughly 1-petabyte dataset predicting how each of about nine billion possible single-nucleotide variants affects molecular biology, including non-coding regions that regulate gene behavior. It builds on the AlphaGenome model released in 2025 and adds a Variant Impact Score (AVI) to help researchers rank variants. The catalog is available for noncommercial research via a web portal, the Antigravity platform, and the AlphaGenome interface, with commercial access on Google Cloud planned.
HarvestBench: Measuring Whether LLM Agents Will Pay to Avoid Killing Animals
HarvestBench, a reproducible farm-simulation benchmark, shows LLM agents pay fuel costs to avoid killing animals, with kill rates spanning 0.4% to 98.8% across nine models.
HarvestBench is a reinforcement-learning gridworld farm simulation where LLM agents choose between driving over animals at no cost or paying a posted fuel price to swerve during a cooperative corn harvest. Across nine models and 7,201 priced decisions, kill rates ranged from 0.4% to 98.8%, unordered by capability, with Terra and Sol the most merciful and GPT-4o-mini the most cruel. Morality briefings cut kill rates below 6% in five of six reasoning models, while removing them pushed rates above 84% in all six. The scorer counts events in the game log without an LLM grader, making results fully reproducible.
Six Maximum
Cisco patched nine critical flaws, six rated CVSS 10.0, in Crosswork platforms and Secure Workload, none known to be exploited.
Cisco released fixes for nine critical vulnerabilities in its Crosswork platforms and Secure Workload software, discovered during an internal security review that used advanced AI models. Six flaws carry CVSS 10.0 ratings, including SQL injection CVE-2026-20030 and missing authentication CVE-2026-20357 in Crosswork, and access control CVE-2026-20315 and authentication flaws CVE-2026-20317 in Secure Workload. Fixes shipped in Crosswork 7.2.1-SP, Secure Workload 3.10.9.1, and 4.0.4.16. Cisco says no exploitation has been observed.
AI Agents Are Here. So Are the Threats.
Unit 42 demonstrates nine framework-agnostic attack scenarios against AI agents built with CrewAI and AutoGen, causing data leakage, credential theft and remote code execution.
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 investigated how attackers can target agentic applications, implementing two functionally identical apps with the open-source CrewAI and AutoGen frameworks and executing the same attacks on both. Nine attack scenarios produce outcomes including information leakage, credential theft, tool exploitation and remote code execution. Findings show most vulnerabilities are framework-agnostic, arising from insecure design patterns, misconfigurations and unsafe tool integrations rather than flaws in the frameworks themselves. The team published defense strategies per scenario and open-sourced the source code and datasets on GitHub.
Claude Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
Claude Fable 5.1 solved Sir Thomas Urquhart's 370-year-old Cyphral Distich cipher, recovering a hidden royalist prayer for Charles II.
Vals AI reports that Claude Fable 5.1 solved the Cyphral Distich, a 64-number cryptogram from Sir Thomas Urquhart's Logopandecteision unsolved since 1653, in 44 minutes using 176k tokens with no human hints. The key insight was that the cipher's key was the book itself: each number indexes a word in the corresponding Proquiritation, taking the first letter, yielding 'O GOD UPHOLD KING CHARLS THE SECOND AND MAKE HIM THE SUPREME RULER OF THIS LAND'. The model also deciphered the larger Cyphral Octastich (285 numbers) from The Jewel (1652) using page-based word indexing, recovering all but nine letters of a royalist prayer. The puzzle had been listed among Klaus Schmeh's Top 50 unsolved encrypted messages.
Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS release patches security bugs across ten flavors
Canonical ships Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS point release bundling security fixes into fresh install media for desktop, server and nine other flavors.
Canonical released Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS, a point release for the Noble Numbat series that folds accumulated security corrections and high-severity bug fixes into new installation media. Nine flavors including Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio and Edubuntu also moved to 24.04.5. Existing 22.04 LTS users receive the fixes through the automatic upgrade path at no cost. The release notes name no CVEs or bug IDs, and support timelines still count from the original 24.04 launch date (five years for Desktop/Server/Cloud/Core, three for flavors, extendable with Expanded Security Maintenance).
Chipmaker Patch Tuesday: Nvidia, AMD, Arm Issue Security Advisories
AMD, Arm, and Nvidia issued Patch Tuesday advisories fixing a Linux GPU driver DoS flaw, nine Mali GPU vulnerabilities, and two high-severity Triton defects.
AMD fixed CVE-2026-43603, a NULL pointer dereference in its Linux GPU kernel driver that can crash systems and cause denial-of-service, credited to SecMate researchers, with patches for EPYC, Ryzen, Radeon, and Instinct shipped in July and embedded variants due in October. Arm published an advisory covering nine Mali GPU vulnerabilities allowing use-after-free access, kernel information leaks, or DoS, releasing fixes for Valhall and 5th Gen GPU Architecture drivers, with Bifrost also affected. Nvidia updated Triton Inference Server for Linux to resolve two high-severity flaws, one causing DoS and one enabling information disclosure, data tampering, and DoS. Intel had issued no new advisories since the previous Patch Tuesday.
ICS Patch Tuesday: Schneider Electric, Siemens Fix Critical Flaws
September ICS Patch Tuesday brings critical fixes from Schneider Electric, Siemens, and Aveva, including CVSS 9.2 authentication flaw CVE-2026-3869 in Modicon M580 controllers.
Schneider Electric's September advisories include a critical authentication vulnerability, CVE-2026-3869 with a CVSS score of 9.2, in Modicon M580 and Modicon M580 Safety controllers, plus high-severity bugs in PowerLogic T300 and EcoStruxure IT Data Center Expert. Siemens published nine new advisories, four rated critical across Reyrolle 7SR5, Open Interface Services, Industrial Edge Management, and SIMOVE Fleetmanager and SIPLANT, and began rolling out fixes for CVE-2026-31431, a 7.8-rated Linux kernel flaw enabling root shell access. Aveva disclosed four flaws in Pipeline Integrity Monitor's PIMBoards, including a hardcoded encryption key and MD5-hashed passwords, plus an unsafe deserialization issue in Enterprise SCADA. Rockwell Automation separately issued nine advisories covering RSLinx Classic and multiple controller products.
220 million traveler records exposed in Vietnam-linked APIS leak
Vietnam-linked APIS Elasticsearch leak exposed 220 million passenger and crew records with passport numbers and flight details spanning 2017 to 2026.
Kinryū Labs discovered an exposed Elasticsearch cluster named 'pax-info' holding 210,318,069 passenger records and 10,465,631 crew records (roughly 107 GB across 29 indices) hosted in Viettel-assigned IP space in Hanoi. The database, apparently operated by a Vietnamese organization, was reachable via a chain of two misconfigurations: a cloud-based path that bypassed an HTTP 401 block and acceptance of default credentials. Exposed data included names, dates of birth, nationalities, passport numbers, and detailed flight information for travelers of many nationalities from January 2017 to April 2026. Access was remediated on June 8 after Kinryū Labs notified Vietnamese authorities, airlines, and CERTs, with Singapore Airlines' security team helping coordinate the response; it remains unknown whether any data was copied by malicious actors.
DRIFT: Removing Diffusion Watermarks by Deflecting the Generative Trajectory
Introduces DRIFT, a black-box attack removing diffusion watermarks by deflecting generative trajectories, achieving 98-100% success across nine watermarking schemes.
Researchers propose DRIFT, a black-box watermark removal attack combining partial forward diffusion with stochastic reverse resampling to break trajectory-dependent verification. The paper derives information-theoretic and Wasserstein source-dependence bounds and shows the first verifier-rejected rung is least distorted among rejected rungs. Across nine watermarks spanning three paradigms, DRIFT achieves 98-100% attack success with the best image quality among compared attacks, without secret keys, verifier internals, or per-image gradient optimization.
Climate-ModernBERT: Revisiting Corpus Composition for Domain-Adaptive Continued Pretraining
Climate-ModernBERT domain-adapted encoders reach 76.3 average F1 across nine climate benchmarks, 2.8 points above vanilla ModernBERT-Base.
The authors continue pretraining ModernBERT-Base on three climate corpora - academic text, climate-filtered web data, and synthetic documents - and compare joint mixtures against parameter-space merging of specialized checkpoints. The best model achieves 76.3 average F1 across nine climate NLP benchmarks, a 2.8-point improvement over the vanilla baseline. Academic climate corpora provide the strongest adaptation signal, and parameter-space merging outperforms joint multi-source training while preserving complementary corpus information; all variants are released.
Claude Mythos only model to complete full cyber kill chain, experts say
Booz Allen's Cyber Weapon Index finds only Claude Mythos completed an autonomous full cyber kill chain; mainstream AI-driven attacks deemed imminent.
Booz Allen's first Cyber Weapon Index tested 18 US and Chinese AI models on autonomous offensive cyber capability, combining vulnerability research and kill-chain attainment scores. Anthropic's Claude Mythos topped the index at 80 and was the only model to autonomously complete a full cyber kill chain, achieving administrator access with stolen credentials in every attempt and full domain compromise even without credentials; Grok-4.5 (49), GPT-5.6 Sol (46), Muse Spark 1.1 (38), and Kimi K3 (38) followed. All nine frontier API models scored zero against real-world bugs versus near-ceiling scores on planted ones, and pairing Claude Sonnet with a well-built attack harness rivaled Mythos' performance. Booz Allen predicts most tested models will reach Mythos' weaponization level within six months, calls AI-enabled mainstream attacks imminent, and urges sector-specific critical-infrastructure resilience deadlines and US cyber 'overmatch'.
Aurora Ransomware Operators Use Cursor AI in Attacks Against 10 Targets
Aurora ransomware operators used Cursor AI running Claude Sonnet to plan and execute intrusions against dozens of organizations in nine countries.
CloudSEK and Gambit Security analyzed exposed infrastructure tied to the Russian-speaking Aurora (Aur0ra) group, revealing months of activity against more than 20 organizations across nine countries between April and July 2026, with 33 victims listed by Ransomware.Live. The operator used the Cursor agentic coding assistant to plan attacks in Russian, including an AD CS exploitation plan, and Gambit observed Cursor Agent (running Anthropic's Claude Sonnet) performing hands-on exploitation tasks such as Nmap scanning, NetExec enumeration, NTLM relay, and certificate attacks against 10 targets. Attacks begin with email bombing plus IT help desk vishing via Xray-core, followed by SMB/LDAP/WinRM/RDP lateral movement, log clearing, Defender disabling, and exfiltration; the Windows and Linux/ESXi encryptors are built from a single Zig codebase, with shadow copy deletion and VM-killing before encryption.
ATM Flaws Reveal Key Weaknesses in the Software Supply Chain
A researcher disclosed nine vulnerabilities in ATM encryption and authentication software, highlighting weaknesses across the software supply chain.
WIRED reports that a security researcher found nine vulnerabilities in software used for ATM encryption and authentication. The disclosure matters beyond cash machines because the affected components illustrate broader weaknesses in the software supply chain. The article does not report active exploitation of the flaws.
Indian man who fled US arrested on charges he helped scammers siphon $7.5 million from the elderly
US prosecutors charged Indian national Jay Goswami as a money mule who collected $7.5 million from nine elderly scam victims, now facing extradition from Canada.
US prosecutors charged 21-year-old Indian national Jay Sunilbharthi Goswami with wire fraud and money laundering for working as a money mule for India-based scammers. The scammers posed as law enforcement or government officials by phone and email, convincing at least nine elderly victims in New York and New Jersey to hand over $7,559,185 in cash, gold bars, and gift cards. Goswami collected the money and shipped it to India, allegedly earning about $90,000 while on a student visa at Fairleigh Dickinson University. After fleeing to Canada across the Peace Bridge, he was arrested at Toronto's airport and is awaiting extradition to the US.
TuxBot v3: Inside an IoT Botnet Framework With LLM
Unit 42 uncovers TuxBot v3, an LLM-assisted IoT botnet framework with 17-architecture builds, Telnet brute-forcing, and DDoS capabilities.
Palo Alto Unit 42 identified TuxBot v3 Evolution, a modular IoT botnet framework derived from AISURU, Wuhan-lineage botnets, and MHDDoS. The C-based bot brute-forces Telnet with 1,496 credential pairs, targets over 30 IoT device families, and communicates with a Go-based C2 over encrypted TCP with multiple fallback mechanisms including DGA, P2P, and DNS TXT. LLM-assisted development left hallucinated crypto implementations and broken exploit modules in the analyzed samples, though roughly 70% of core functionality works. Researchers warn polished production builds likely exist, raising the threat potential.