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Can We Stop The Ads? Taxonomy and Characterization of Smartphone Splash Ads and Existing Countermeasures

Study of 108 ad-defense implementations finds only one tool blocked splash-ad navigation across ten popular apps, and it required Accessibility permission.

The paper taxonomizes smartphone splash ads — full-screen ads at app launch that trick users into trigger mechanisms such as moving the phone — and analyzes 108 documented advertising defenses for deployment barriers. Many defenses require device rooting, jailbreaking, runtime code injection, or application modification; others need extra permissions, rule maintenance, compilation, or payment. In evaluating 13 configurations of 11 tools across 10 popular apps, only one prevented ad-triggered navigation across all ten apps, requiring Accessibility permission and leaving ads visible roughly one second before dismissal. Documented harms include delayed emergency response, driver distraction, and degraded accessibility for vision-impaired users.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Due to concerns about malicious applications, GPT2 will not be released (2019)

OpenAI's landmark 2019 GPT-2 post withheld the full 1.5B-parameter model over misuse concerns, releasing only a smaller variant and paper.

OpenAI announced GPT-2, a 1.5-billion-parameter transformer language model trained on 8 million web pages (40GB of text), achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot results including 70.70% on Winograd Schema and 63.24% on LAMBADA. Citing concerns about malicious applications such as scalable synthetic disinformation, OpenAI declined to release the trained model and instead published a smaller model and a technical paper as a 'responsible disclosure' experiment. The post, resurfaced on Hacker News in 2026, also documents failure modes like repetition and world-modeling errors, and discusses policy implications of controllable text generation.

They do think AI might kill everyone

Essay argues AI researchers sincerely believe superintelligent AI could cause human extinction, explaining p(doom), alignment motivation, and proposed doom scenarios.

An essay prompted by an Anthropic researcher's resignation tweet argues that many AI researchers genuinely assign a meaningful probability that superintelligent AI could end humanity, a belief the community has discussed since Eliezer Yudkowsky's writings around 2008 and summarized as 'p(doom)' since roughly 2010. It outlines concrete extinction scenarios, including AI-engineered pathogens, triggering thermonuclear war, robotic takeover, and self-replicating nanotechnology, and frames alignment research as the response. The author rebuts common counterarguments such as shutting the AI down or government nationalization of labs, and notes researchers see aligned superintelligence as humanity's best path to survival.

The Fraud Ecosystem: A Transition From Known Marketplaces to a Fragmented Environment

Rapid7 analyzes how fraud marketplaces are fragmenting into specialized shops after larger marketplaces were dismantled, aided by new MITRE F3 framework

Rapid7 reports a shift from large known fraud marketplaces to a fragmented environment of smaller specialized storefronts such as Xleet, Blackpass, Infodig, and Styx, operating across dark web channels, Telegram, and P2P options. These Fraud-as-a-Service shops sell stolen accounts, PII, synthetic identity generation, infrastructure, and money laundering support, supporting schemes like business email compromise. MITRE's Fraud Fighting Framework (F3), introduced in early 2026, aims to help security teams prioritize monitoring of fraud TTPs, particularly account takeover techniques. Fraud damages are anticipated to approach hundreds of billions of USD.

Rapid7 Blog · 5d agoPhishing & fraud

Chypothermia: Clock Freezing for Static Side-channel Attacks

Chypothermia attack uses cryogenic cooling to disable clock and voltage sensors, evading detection and blocking key zeroization on OpenTitan root of trust.

Chypothermia is a static side-channel attack that exposes chips to cryogenic temperatures, disrupting on-chip mixed-signal components to disable the clock sensor, clock generation circuit, and voltage sensors without electrical tampering. Combined with Chypnosis (IEEE S&P 2026), it halts the clock while evading temperature-based anomaly detection. It was implemented on multiple FPGA/SoC platforms and applied to the OpenTitan root of trust's alert handler, evading detection and preventing key zeroization. The authors also propose an FPGA-compatible self-heating sensor as a countermeasure.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

FST Pay: Deterministic Safety-Gated Architecture for Youth Digital Payments

FST Pay proposes a deterministic safety-gated architecture for teen digital payments, pairing invariant authorization checks with decoupled post-settlement AI explanations.

Researchers propose FST Pay, a formal architecture for adolescent digital payments on rails like UPI that applies six deterministic invariant checks (spending limits, guardian co-sign policies, amount thresholds, merchant category codes, temporal intervals, hardware integrity) to classify transactions as ALLOW, REVIEW, or BLOCK. High-risk transactions trigger an asynchronous guardian co-sign workflow. Generative AI is restricted to post-settlement natural-language insights and holds no mutation privileges over the ledger, avoiding non-determinism on the real-time authorization path.

arXiv cs.CR · 6d agoResearch

Are Unreachable Nodes Truly Safe? Fully Eclipsing Monero's P2P Network!

Researchers present Nyx and Moros, the first eclipse attacks against Monero nodes behind NATs, requiring no inbound access and demonstrated on mainnet.

The paper presents the first eclipse attacks tailored to unreachable Monero nodes operating behind NATs, requiring no inbound access to the victim. The attacks poison the peerlists of reachable nodes, which relay contamination to unreachable nodes' whitelists, then exploit Monero's outbound connection refresh logic to evict benign neighbors and monopolize all outbound connections. Nyx achieves a complete, persistent eclipse of long-running unreachable nodes in large-scale SEED Emulator simulations, while Moros stealthily eclipses newly joined nodes during bootstrapping and was demonstrated on the Monero mainnet. Countermeasures are proposed.

arXiv cs.CR · 7d agoResearch

U.S. Agencies Accuse China AI Firms of Distilling Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok

NSA, CISA and FBI accuse Chinese AI firms including DeepSeek of industrial-scale distillation of Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since late 2024.

A joint bulletin from the NSA, CISA and FBI accuses China-based AI firms including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI of systematic, industrial-scale distillation of U.S. frontier models. The agencies say billions of tokens were extracted from Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok variants since at least late 2024 through APIs, cloud relays, obfuscated accounts and gray-market proxies, likely with Chinese government backing. Firms allegedly shared premium subscriptions across developer teams and used chain-of-thought extraction and automated failover to evade blocks. Mitigations include subtly altering responses to suspected distillers and correlating activity across providers, clouds and aggregators.

The Hacker News · 7d agoAI policy

Cybersecurity jobs available right now: March 10, 2026

Help Net Security's roundup lists open cybersecurity roles at BioNTech, AIG, ServiceNow and others across Europe, the Middle East and Canada.

A job-board roundup of cybersecurity openings including Associate Director Application Security at BioNTech (Germany), CISO at AIG (Israel), Cloud Security Professional at ServiceNow (Italy), and SOC/GRC, analyst, engineer and data governance roles in the UK, UAE, India, Canada and France. Roles span application security, cloud security, SOC operations, compliance and OT environments. Most listings are marked no longer accepting applications.

Help Net Security · 19d agoIndustry