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Leaked Russian Cyber-Operations Training Materials

Leaked Bauman university records reveal a formalized Russian pipeline training GRU cyber personnel, linking a graduate to Sandworm's Military Unit 74455.

Leaked training materials from Bauman university describe a force-generation mechanism feeding graduates into General Staff components, including the GRU and directorates responsible for protected communications, cryptography and information security. A 2024 graduate of Department No. 4, Aleksei Kondrashov, was linked to Military Unit 74455, the GRU unit known as Sandworm, which conducted destructive attacks including the 2017 NotPetya attack. Researchers say the leak shows Russian cyber capability is institutionally sustained through recruitment pipelines beyond the familiar APT28 and Sandworm brand names.

Schneier on Security · 15d agoThreat actor

Pornhub's Parent Company to Pay $120 Million to Settle Child Sexual Abuse Lawsuits

Pornhub parent Aylo will pay $120 million settling child sexual abuse class actions, without admitting liability, and adopt stricter content moderation commitments.

Aylo, Pornhub's parent company (formerly Mindgeek, acquired by Ethical Capital Partners in 2023), will pay $120 million to settle two 2021 class actions in California and Alabama alleging its platforms hosted child sexual abuse material in violation of federal trafficking and child imagery laws. The settlement fund begins with $25 million in 2026 followed by six annual installments. The class covers anyone under 18 appearing in content on Mindgeek-operated sites between February 12, 2011 and December 6, 2024. The deal, subject to court approval, adds commitments to age-verify models, conduct human and automated content review, and report suspected abuse material to authorities.

404 Media · Aug 17, 2026Policy & legal

Feature Recovery for Object Understanding After Irreversible Fire Damage

TRACE benchmark with 21.4K scenes studies post-fire object understanding; a Feature Recovery Module improves degraded-image retrieval by 12.5% and material recovery by 20.1%.

The paper introduces TRACE, a transformation-aware benchmark with 21.4K real-image-grounded synthetic scenes, 499 object identities across 189 categories, and five tasks covering degraded-object detection, pristine-state recovery, material recovery, description generation, and functional reasoning. Existing models degrade sharply: RF-DETR mAP falls 71% relative from least to most severe level, and InternVL3.5 retrieval R@1 drops from 93.85 to 28.11. The proposed Feature Recovery Module maps degraded encoder features to pristine-aligned representations while keeping the host model frozen, averaging relative gains of 12.5% for retrieval and 20.1% for material recovery across VLM hosts and severity levels.

Hugging Face daily papers · 7d agoAI research

Berlin Ransomware Leak Exposes State Secrets

Rhysida ransomware leaked 5.79 TB of Berlin state government data on the dark web after the city refused a 30 Bitcoin ransom.

The Rhysida ransomware group published 5.79 TB (about 1.44 million files) of Berlin state administration data on its leak site on August 28, 2026, after the city-state refused a 30 Bitcoin ransom. The claimed dataset includes personal data on 12,076 individuals, over 5,000 personnel files, payroll records, plaintext credentials for systems like PAYONE and Z_ADMIN, Bundesrat committee protocols, and documents allegedly containing state secrets. Leaked material reportedly covers national defense emergency plans, federal secret communication channels, a CBRN threat planning folder, and vulnerability analyses of Berlin's water supply. Berlin's government has activated a central crisis unit to review the leaked data and notify affected citizens and businesses.

Security Affairs · 9d agoRansomware

Why AI food looks like that

Experts explain why AI-generated food images look unappetizing, citing diffusion model limitations, weak structural reasoning, and stylized training data.

The Verge examines why AI-generated food imagery from restaurants and brands often appears grotesque, citing researchers from Oxford, Naples, Zurich, and London. Diffusion models recover coarse structure before fine texture, so structural errors like extra fingers or donut shrimp get baked in early. Researchers note the models are weak at thin, continuous, terminating structures such as noodles, and reproduce the glossy conventions of professional food photography without understanding the objects. Odd internet imagery and memes in training data further skew outputs toward strange textures and clustered holes.

The Verge · AI · 12d agoAI research

RenderFormer-V2: Neural Rendering with Heterogeneous Scene Primitives

RenderFormer-V2 is a transformer-based neural renderer handling caustics, volumetric scattering and out-of-distribution materials without per-scene training or specialized code.

RenderFormer-V2 is a learned transformer-based neural rendering model that models global light transport as a sequence-to-sequence transformation, handling caustics, volumetric scattering, environment lighting, textured and displaced surfaces and out-of-distribution materials. It uses a two-stage process: a view-independent stage resolving primitive-to-primitive transport, and a view-dependent stage converting the neural scene representation into pixels. Improvements include combined windowed-attention with a rendering-informed attention sink for scalability, support for heterogeneous primitives like environment maps and participating media, and a surface-reflectance-independent neural material encoding, validated across diverse scenes with extensive ablations.

Hugging Face daily papers · 13d agoAI research

Brazil orders Discord to suspend livestreaming after teen suicide

Brazil's data protection authority orders Discord to disable its Go Live livestreaming feature nationwide until child-safety safeguards are demonstrated.

Brazil's National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) found robust evidence that Discord failed to protect children from harmful content and ordered the Go Live feature suspended until effective safeguards are shown, following the July death of a 13-year-old girl during a roughly 45-minute livestream; five teenagers were arrested. Discord has three business days to implement the suspension and could face fines of up to 50 million reais (about $10 million) per violation. Regulators criticized the March addition of end-to-end encryption to Go Live for limiting real-time content detection, and are also investigating Discord's age-verification and content-removal practices, while a parallel probe tied neo-Nazi recruitment communities to Telegram.

The Record · Aug 13, 2026Policy & legal