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.
Learning-Guided Planning in Large Dynamic Action Spaces: Budgeted Tree Search for One-to-Many Mobile Charging
LP-BTS uses graph proposal policies, learned critics, and budgeted PUCT search to plan mobile charging across dynamic action spaces up to 2,813 stops.
LP-BTS is a learning-guided planning architecture for one-to-many mobile charging, where N=250 sensors induce roughly 1,125 initial candidate charging stops. A graph proposal policy concentrates candidate support, a learned value critic evaluates leaves, and edge-budgeted PUCT compares simulated futures, letting a single frozen checkpoint cover action universes from 736 to 2,813 stops. On a sealed 30-scenario confirmatory bank it attains the highest observed survival (0.4545) and alive-AUC (0.8031), though its +0.0066 survival edge over the strongest engineered comparator is statistically unresolved.
In most cities, nobody owns the whole network
Former Waco CIO argues cellular-connected water controllers sit outside scanned networks, and accountability plus operating-budget funding—not technology—block segmentation.
Writing as Waco, Texas's former CIO, the author describes July water-sector intrusions that CISA linked to over 100 compromised systems, typically controllers on public cellular links absent from asset lists. The FBI and EPA reported incidents at utilities in at least seven states since July 27, and a Clayton County, Georgia pump station failure triggered a boil-water advisory. He argues accountability and funding—using mechanisms like the Texas Water Development Board's new cybersecurity scoring criteria—are the binding constraints, citing Waco's 43-day segmentation of five treatment plants with operating funds.
ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO-GGUF — new model trending #3 on Hugging Face
ISTA-DASLab releases GSQ-RCO non-uniform GGUF quantizations of Qwen3.8-27B down to 2.5 bpw, with task-lossless IQ3_S matching BF16 benchmark scores.
ISTA-DASLab released GGUF quantizations of Qwen3.8-27B produced with GSQ (Gumbel-Softmax Quantization) and RCO (Riemannian Constrained Optimization), non-uniform methods that allocate per-tensor precision via gradient-based search under a total size budget. Four checkpoints range from 2.50 bpw (8.4 GB) to 3.50 bpw (11.8 GB), plus a BF16 vision projector (mmproj) enabling multimodal use. The recommended IQ3_S build is task-lossless, matching the BF16 base exactly on AIME25 (100.00) and LiveCodeBench v6 (85.71) at roughly one fifth of the BF16 size. Optional -mtp variants add a Multi-Token Prediction head for speculative decoding in llama.cpp.
Guide to Cybersecurity Budget Planning: How Much + How To | Huntress
Huntress publishes guidance on planning cybersecurity budgets and getting more value from security spend.
Huntress released a guide aimed at helping businesses plan their cybersecurity budgets without overspending. The content is promotional guidance on prioritizing security spend rather than incident reporting. No vulnerabilities, incidents, or threat activity are described.