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Forging Tree-Ring: Reproducing and Instrumenting Black-Box Semantic Watermark Forgery
Reprompt watermark forgery reproduces on Stable Diffusion XL using free-tier T4 GPUs, with forged images accepted by the genuine detector 5 of 6 times.
The authors reproduce the Reprompt forgery attack of Müller et al. against Tree-Ring watermarking on Stable Diffusion XL using the released code on free-tier dual T4 GPUs with 14.6 GB usable memory, versus the A40 hardware of the original study. Over six trials, the genuine detector flagged genuine images 6/6, clean images 0/6, and forged images 5/6, at 325-332 seconds per attack. They also recovered the detector's discarded non-central chi-square statistic and built two natural scores separating forged images from the clean null at AUC 0.861 and 0.972. The notebook, pinned fork, and all measurement artifacts are released with the paper.
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ChatGPT Astra is now rolling out to $20 Plus subscription
OpenAI has begun rolling out ChatGPT Astra, its most powerful model to date, to $20 Plus subscribers; free-tier timing is unannounced.
OpenAI started rolling out ChatGPT Astra, described as its most powerful model to date, to customers on the $20 Plus subscription tier. The company has not announced when or whether free users will gain access. The rollout is a product launch event with no security incident involved.
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12 Best Patch Management Software Compared (2026): Features & Pricing
GBHackers ranks NinjaOne, ManageEngine, and Automox atop twelve patch management tools for 2026, emphasizing third-party application coverage.
GBHackers scored twelve patch management platforms on coverage, automation, visibility, deployment, and value, with NinjaOne ranked highest at 4.55. Action1 is highlighted for its genuinely usable free tier, ManageEngine for third-party catalog breadth, and Automox for cloud-native cross-OS automation. The piece notes that unpatched known vulnerabilities remain a top initial-access vector, citing CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.
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APT28-Linked HOOKEDGE Backdoor Targets European Government and Diplomatic Organizations
Recorded Future links new HOOKEDGE batch-script backdoor campaigns against Romanian, Spanish and Turkish government targets to Russia's APT28 (BlueDelta).
Recorded Future's Insikt Group identified campaigns deploying the previously undocumented HOOKEDGE backdoor against government and diplomatic organizations in Romania, Spain and Türkiye from late September 2025 to early April 2026. The lightweight Windows batch backdoor is delivered via macro-enabled Word documents and attributed with moderate confidence to APT28 (Fancy Bear, tracked as BlueDelta), described as the evolutionary successor to HEADLACE, using webhook.site for C2, payload staging and exfiltration. HOOKEDGE fetches .cmd payloads and returns output through headless Microsoft Edge HTTP requests, maintains a 30-minute scheduled task, and a second-stage implant gives high-value targets five-minute beaconing for interactive operator tasking.
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Google researchers uncover criminal zero-day exploit likely built with AI
Google links a likely LLM-built criminal zero-day for an open-source admin tool to planned mass exploitation and maps AI-assisted threats.
Google Threat Intelligence Group linked a zero-day exploit for a popular open-source web-based administration tool, enabling 2FA bypass with valid credentials via a semantic logic error, to a criminal group, citing educational docstrings, a hallucinated CVSS score, and textbook Python as signs of LLM authorship; the vendor was notified before a planned mass exploitation campaign. The report also details Russia-nexus malware families CANFAIL and LONGSTREAM using AI-generated decoy code, the PROMPTSPY Android backdoor driving the UI through the Gemini API, APT27 using Gemini to build relay tooling, and the TeamPCP (UNC6780) supply chain compromise of LiteLLM and Trivy repositories that planted the SANDCLOCK credential stealer.
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