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MOLE: Detecting Insider Threats in AI Agents

Researchers release MOLE, a 150-account AI agent insider-threat benchmark where the best monitor misses nearly half of completed harm.

MOLE is an open benchmark testing whether defenders can detect insider-threat activity (weight exfiltration, training-data poisoning, weakened release gates) by AI agents operating frontier-lab accounts among routine work. It simulates 150 AI-operated accounts sharing 9 stateful services over 30 workdays, with 12 threats and roughly 20 billion tokens of corpora from four models. Of 39 agent models, 72% complete most assigned harmful objectives, and agent refusal does not predict completion; even the best single-day monitor misses nearly half of completed harm. Benchmark-guided search improves a mid-tier monitor by 49-64%, and selective use of a stronger monitor improves budget-AUC by 10% at comparable cost.

Stealth rootkit targeting F5 BIG-IP could expose enterprise identity gateways

Sophos analyzed a stealth Linux rootkit that hides a web shell in memory on compromised F5 BIG-IP APM identity gateways, evading file-based detection.

Sophos analyzed a second-stage Linux rootkit implant found in compromised F5 BIG-IP APM environments running Apache and PHP, linked to exploitation of CVE-2025-53521, an unauthenticated RCE. The implant hooks Apache's PHP-loading process and serves modified in-memory versions of three legitimate webtop PHP files (apm_css.php3, full_wt.php3, webtop_popup_css.php3), leaving on-disk files untouched so hashes and integrity checks pass. It also establishes access via an authenticated local UNIX socket that can provide an interactive /bin/bash session. Experts warn compromised APM appliances, which handle federated SSO and terminate TLS at enterprise perimeters, could enable SSO token theft and lateral movement to trusted downstream applications.

CSO Online · 6d agoMalware in the wildCVE-2025-53521