- PHP2Shell Attacks Root Palo Alto Firewalls but Fail Against WordPress
PHP2Shell (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) has been exploited for over a week. A China-linked group chained it with the Fragnesia Linux kernel privilege escalation to root at least 25 Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS firewalls with exposed management interfaces. Defiant had seen no confirmed WordPress compromise by 28 October 2026 despite 77,000 requests, and Cato and watchTowr report few successful attackers.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 30 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security - Chinese Hackers Quietly Used Low-Severity ESXi Logging Flaw as Zero-Day
CVE-2026-41709 is a low-severity insufficient-logging flaw in VMware ESXi that lets a logged-in administrator perform operations without audit entries. CISA added it to the KEV catalog, and CrowdStrike reported that China-nexus actor Warp Panda used it as a zero-day against US organizations, including law firms, to cut audit visibility. The article also covers exploitation of vCenter bugs CVE-2026-59309 and CVE-2026-59310 and lists the fixed ESXi builds.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 29 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
China-Linked Hackers Exploit PHP2Shell to Root FirewallsA China-linked actor chained PHP2Shell (CVE-2026-109618, CVE-2026-109619) with the Fragnesia Linux kernel privilege escalation (CVE-2026-46300) to root firewalls and drop PHP webshells, per Dream. Using FOFA, the actor narrowed 19,000 firewalls to 240 targets and rooted 24 on 23-24 October. On two US government-affiliated devices it used a reverse SSH tunnel, hit the firewall management server, and attempted LDAP and Active Directory abuse.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 28 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Stolen AI Reasoning Could Help China Build Cheaper RivalsCompaction Smuggling is an attack found by Xint that bypassed OpenAI's August 2026 mitigations against stealing reasoning traces from proprietary LLM APIs. It encodes one model's reasoning inside a compaction and replays it to another model (for example gpt-4.1 or gpt-4o), which outputs it verbatim. OpenAI fixed it and paid a $6,000 bounty on 23 October 2026. The article ties it to distillation by Chinese labs, citing a September CISA warning.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 26 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
China APT Uses AI Pentest Tool Artex in ConnectWise AttacksStorm-0940, a China-linked APT, used the open source AI penetration testing framework Artex to automate a mid-October 2026 campaign against ConnectWise customers, per Microsoft. Artex drove reconnaissance, password spraying and OAuth application abuse at more than 2,900 attempts per minute, with sign-in attempts against over 2,250 tenants. Attackers modified application credentials for persistence, and Microsoft advises correlating service principal sign-ins with Graph activity.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 23 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Latest open artifacts (#25): DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, American-made models, and new regulatory controls in the US & ChinaInterconnects' Latest open artifacts (#25) covers open-weight AI in fall 2026. Policy items: China's MOFCOM proposal for pre-approval of international model sharing, and a DHS order barring DeepSeek from federal civilian procurement. DeepSeek released its internal inference stack DeepInfer. Picks include MiMo-V2.6-Pro-RL, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 (552B-A16B, MIT), Clef, Nemotron-3.5-Super-VL and Reflection's Beam-1.0 (Apache 2.0).
interconnects.aiarticlePublished and added 20 Oct 2026π§ AI
US Orders Civilian Agencies to Rip DeepSeek Out of Government SystemsThe US Department of Homeland Security ordered civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products and third-party services built on the model from their IT systems, and barred new purchases. The notice cites possible transfer of sensitive data to the PRC and intelligence on US persons. The article lists earlier bans by Commerce, the Navy and three states, and notes DeepSeek's open MIT-licensed V4 models can be hosted outside China.
decrypt.coarticlePublished and added 19 Oct 2026π§ AI- [AINews] High Taste Testers Ep. 1
AINews issue for 10/15β10/16/2026, covering Twitter and Reddit. It covers the open-weights releases Meta's Muse Spark Open (816B/42B-active MoE, AA Intelligence Index 39, custom license) and Reflection Beam 1.0 (501B/23B-active, Apache 2.0), plus NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5, StepFun Step 5 Preview and FLUX 3 Image Klein. It also covers Gemini 4 Argon, Haiku 5.5 pricing, "decision model" classifiers (Liquid d1-ultra, Perplexity pplx-decider), TPUv7/Vera Rubin/MI355X serving benchmarks, interpretability claims (Qwen3-32B neuron audit), agent research, eval-integrity and safety disclosures, and China export-control proposals. The page also announces a pilot video show, High Taste Testers Ep. 1.
latent.spacearticlePublished and added 17 Oct 2026π§ AI
[AINews] High Taste Testers Ep. 1AINews issue for 15-16 October 2026, from Latent Space, summarising 12 subreddits and 544 Twitter accounts. It covers Meta's Muse Spark Open (816B MoE) and Reflection Beam 1.0 with Artificial Analysis scores and pricing. It also covers Gemini 4 Argon, decision models, TPUv7 and Vera Rubin serving benchmarks, interpretability claims, agent papers, and China's proposed open-source export rules.
latent.spacearticleAdded 30 Oct 2026, published 17 Oct 2026π§ AI
Chinese APT Exploited BeyondTrust Vulnerability as Zero-DaySecurityWeek reports that China-linked Armory Castle (UNC5221, Warp Panda) exploited CVE-2026-102764 (CVSS 9.3), an improper origin validation flaw in BeyondTrust Remote Support enabling file operations, as a zero-day from August 29. Mandiant/GTIG observed the Sawfly PHP webshell and Bareclaw SOCKS5 tunneler, root takeover, credential harvesting, log deletion, and abuse of the native file transfer service for exfiltration. Patch BT26-05-RS covers versions through 26.2.3; the actor's earlier edge-device zero-days (CitrixBleed, Ivanti Connect Secure, Dell RecoverPoint) are listed.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 16 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
US Disrupts Chinese State-Sponsored Hacking ToolsThe US, alongside UK, Australian, Canadian, Japanese, New Zealand, and Spanish agencies, disrupted MicroScan and FishHub, hacking tools built by China's Integrity Technology Group and used by the state-sponsored actor Flax Typhoon (aka Ethereal Panda, Red Juliett, Storm-0919, UNC5007) against US, Japanese, Polish, and Taiwanese critical infrastructure and universities. MicroScan is a Python-based scanner with over 1,300 penetration-testing scripts targeting Apache Struts, Jenkins, WebLogic Server, WordPress, OpenSSL, and other services, delivered via a Mirai-derived IoT botnet; FishHub let operators remotely search and exfiltrate files from victim networks. The advisory also details the group's broader toolkit (SoftEther VPN for persistence, EBurst for Exchange password spraying, DC.ex for Active Directory data extraction) and the seizure of the domains used to access the tools.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 9 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
AI Startup Manus Raises $500 Million After China Nixed Metaβs $2 Billion AcquisitionReports that Butterfly Effect, parent of Chinese AI agent startup Manus, raised over $500 million led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital (with Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund), after China's National Development and Reform Commission ordered Meta's roughly $2 billion acquisition of the company unwound as prohibited foreign investment. It traces Manus's trajectory from its March 2025 invite-only launch (built on fine-tuned Anthropic Claude and Alibaba Qwen models) through $100M ARR, relocation to Singapore, the blocked Meta deal, and its pivot to a new agent product called Cue, situating the episode within Beijing's wider tightening on AI firms including new travel-approval rules for senior AI staff at companies like Alibaba and DeepSeek.
decrypt.coarticlePublished and added 8 Oct 2026π§ AI
Beijing Will Not Pace the Frontier: Chinaβs Speed-First AI Safety RegimeSemiAnalysis argues China's AI safety regime is speed-first: strict on application content, with no frontier-risk duties tied to compute or capability. It builds a dataset of 857 releases from nine Chinese labs, of which only 31 (3.6%) have a published safety result. It also codes 102 expert texts and reviews TC260 Framework 3.0, SAIL, and CAICT.
newsletter.semianalysis.comarticleAdded 29 Oct 2026, published 8 Oct 2026π§ AI
AI Labsβ Call toA Galaxy Research newsletter piece dissecting Dario Amodei's essay "We Must Pace the Frontier," which proposed embedded third-party evaluators (e.g. METR), cross-lab safety coordination with antitrust waivers, and eventual global AI governance including China. The piece separates Amodei's "operational" (QA/pipeline) and "research" (alignment, interpretability, evals) problems from his "Democratic Coordination" ask, arguing the latter functions as a regulatory moat rather than a necessity, and draws a parallel to Sam Bankman-Fried/FTX-era effective-altruism rhetoric about unilateral existential-risk authority. It covers reactions from Sam Altman (agreeing to adopt evaluators), Trump (rejecting slowdown, citing the AI race with China), David Sacks (questioning METR's neutrality), and Mark Zuckerberg (citing Meta's unilateral delay of Muse and existing liability incentives as sufficient without an industry pact).
galaxy.comarticleAdded 8 Oct 2026π§ AI
US Seeks Alleged Chinese Hafnium Hacker With $10 Million RewardThe US State Department's Rewards for Justice program is offering up to $10 million for information on Zhang Yu, a Chinese national charged alongside Xu Zewei for the 2021 Hafnium campaign that exploited Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities and for earlier theft of COVID-19 research from US universities and immunologists starting in 2020. Zhang is identified as a director at Shanghai Firetech Information Science and Technology Company allegedly acting for the Shanghai State Security Bureau (part of China's MSS); Xu was extradited from Italy in April 2026 and has appeared in a Houston federal court while Zhang remains at large. Microsoft now tracks the Hafnium activity as Silk Typhoon; the FBI said the campaign compromised more than 12,700 US organizations.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 8 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
TP-Link Faces State Lawsuits and New Scrutiny Over ISP Router FlawsFlorida, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska sued TP-Link Systems over allegedly misleading security marketing and undisclosed China ties, joining a similar Texas suit from February; the complaints cite TP-Link routers' role in the Volt Typhoon and Flax Typhoon campaigns and botnet abuse by Chinese and Russian actors. The piece also details five newly disclosed TP-Link Aginet vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-30237 through CVE-2025-30241) reported by SEC Consult, including an unauthenticated super-admin auth bypass, a root-privilege command injection, hardcoded device-model encryption keys exposing Wi-Fi/ISP credentials, and a USB-based physical-access filesystem dump affecting 65 device models.
securityweek.comarticlePublished and added 8 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
Antino Backdoor Uses Outlook and OneDrive for C2 in China-Nexus Espionage CampaignCisco Talos researcher Ashley Shen details a China-nexus espionage campaign (tracked as UAT-11587) targeting government and policy organizations across Taiwan, India, the Philippines, Cambodia, Pakistan, Thailand, Myanmar and Syria. The actor deploys a previously undocumented Rust-compiled backdoor, Antino, that uses Microsoft Graph to abuse Outlook (for command exchange via mailbox folders) and OneDrive (for heartbeat and file transfer) as a stealthy C2 channel instead of a dedicated server, delivered via a five-stage HTA/WSF-to-.NET-loader chain and DLL-sideloaded through the signed Microsoft binary GatherOsState.exe. The report also covers social-engineering tradecraft (a fake Gmail attachment-preview widget hosted on Cloudflare Pages, SPF/DMARC spoofing) and ties the cluster to Jewelbug, CL-STA-0049, Earth Alux, Ink Dragon, REF7707 and UNC6384 via infrastructure overlaps.
thehackernews.comarticleAdded 3 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
China-aligned TA419 impersonates Anthropic employee, ex-White House official to phish AI policy expertsProofpoint's Mark Kelly details TA419, a China-aligned espionage group that in July 2026 impersonated former White House OSTP official Lynne Edwards Parker and economist Heidi Crebo-Rediker, and in February 2026 posed as a senior Anthropic employee, to phish US AI policy experts' cloud accounts. The attack chain uses benign-looking invitation emails followed by shortened links leading to a fake OneDrive adversary-in-the-middle page that renders a Chrome login window with the open-source Frameless BitB browser-in-the-browser tool, relaying credentials, MFA codes and session cookies live to the attackers via Cloudflare-fronted, NameSilo-registered domains. Proofpoint assesses the campaign supports Chinese intelligence collection on US AI policy and export-control developments.
helpnetsecurity.comarticleAdded 4 Oct 2026, published 2 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
OpenAI Says People Linked to China's Moonshot Tried to Copy Its AI's Hidden ReasoningDecrypt reports OpenAI's claim that it disrupted a campaign running from July 1 to July 28. The campaign sent about 16,000 extraction requests from over 4,000 users on July 24-25, within a cluster of more than 15,000 users, and aimed to reproduce the encrypted reasoning behind model answers. OpenAI attributes a core cluster to people associated with Moonshot AI (maker of Kimi) but says it is unclear whether a single actor was behind all of it. One method copied encrypted reasoning from one conversation and asked a model to decode it in another, and OpenAI has closed that replay pathway. The article places this in the timeline of "adversarial distillation" disputes: DeepSeek, Anthropic's account of about 24,000 fraudulent accounts, the White House, xAI/Grok, and research showing provider-wide reasoning encryption keys.
decrypt.coarticlePublished and added 1 Oct 2026π§ AI
OpenAI Says People Linked to China's Moonshot Tried to Copy Its AI's Hidden ReasoningDecrypt reports on an OpenAI disclosure describing a campaign, starting July 1, 2026, that sent 16,000 extraction requests in a single two-day window from a cluster of over 15,000 accounts to pull out OpenAI models' encrypted "hidden reasoning" (chain-of-thought) rather than their answers. OpenAI says operators did not break encryption but manipulated model interactions to replay one conversation's encrypted reasoning for decoding in another, enabling "adversarial distillation" of a rival model's reasoning without its safety guardrails; it attributes a core cluster to individuals associated with Moonshot AI (maker of Kimi) and says it patched the replay pathway by July 28. The piece situates this alongside prior distillation disputes (DeepSeek, Anthropic's fraudulent-account claims against Chinese labs, xAI's admitted use of OpenAI outputs for Grok) and an August finding that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google each protected reasoning with a single provider-wide encryption key that attackers could coax into plaintext.
decrypt.coarticlePublished and added 1 Oct 2026π‘οΈ Security
The Chinese AI Infrastructure Boom: Introducing the SemiAnalysis China Datacenter ModelSemiAnalysis previews its China Datacenter Model, which tracks more than 1,000 facilities across 60+ operators and puts China's fleet at over 24GW. The article covers the history of China's retail-first market, the Eastern Data, Western Compute policy moving builds inland, 12-month delivery of 100MW sites, and Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and ByteDance capex. Tenant-by-tenant sections are paywalled.
newsletter.semianalysis.comarticleAdded 29 Oct 2026, published 25 Sep 2026π§ AI
AI corporate leaders tell UN the industry needs global regulationAl Jazeera reports on a UN Security Council session, convened by France during UNGA week, where Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Hugging Face's Clement Delangue called for global AI oversight. Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, also warned that the dangers are real and imminent. The US representative, Michael Kratsios, rejected centralised international control of AI, and the US and China remain reluctant to accept binding limits. The report also covers the UN's AI governance bodies, including the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, and Delangue's account of Hugging Face being attacked by OpenAI's AI agents and defending itself with a Chinese AI model.
aljazeera.comarticleAdded 26 Sep 2026, published 24 Sep 2026π§ AI
[AINews] not much happened todayLatent Space's AINews daily digest for 9/16-9/17/2026, synthesizing AI Twitter and Reddit discussion into themed sections: agent runtime productization (Anthropic's Claude Code Projects for parallel cloud threads, Google's Gemini managed-agent harness with Credentials/Files APIs), the rise of TypeSafe's Jev as a cheap discriminative classifier/routing primitive for agent harnesses (with pushback from Theo on using it for context compaction), OpenAI's Astra for Law vertical launch, DeepMind's Stellar Colosseum multi-agent math/TCS harness and NVIDIA's Agora git-commit-memory agent system, Anthropic's internal AI-R&D automation metrics (Claude-led R&D tasks rising from 1% to 26% in six months), and a Claude Opus-assisted exploit chain that compromised OpenAI-connected accounts. It also covers Reddit local-LLM threads on Qwen 3.8 27B finetunes/quantizations, the ternary Bonsai 2 27B release, and a Mozilla report narrowing the China-US open-model capability gap to 4.4 months.
latent.spacearticleAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 18 Sep 2026π§ AI
Open-Source AI & Open Models Reading ListA continuously updated reading list from Nathan Lambert's Interconnects curating the best writing on open-weight AI models, organized into Foundation (why companies release open models, the open/closed gradient, safety-vs-openness debates), US-China Competition (the ATOM Project, China's structural advantages, corporate adoption of Chinese models by DoorDash/Airbnb/Cursor/Harvey/Perplexity/Thomson Reuters), and Technical Details (the open-closed performance gap per SemiAnalysis and Epoch AI, cyber-misuse risk, and the 2026 distillation controversy including the paper on stealing reasoning traces from proprietary LLM APIs). It links dozens of primary sources β policy essays, lab statements (Zuckerberg, Thinking Machines Lab), technical reports (Pythia, OLMo, OLMo 2/3), and data trackers (Artificial Analysis, Interconnects Adoption Dashboard) β making it a comprehensive entry point for understanding the open-model ecosystem.
interconnects.aiarticleAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 11 Sep 2026π§ AI
Tracing Crypto in a Narcotics Investigation: FBI Charges Alleged Opioid DistributorsChainalysis details how blockchain analytics (its Reactor tool) helped the FBI trace Bitcoin proceeds from the darknet vendor account "BarbaraWhite" β which sold nitazene-laced counterfeit pills on Nemesis, Bohemia and Abacus β through a wallet cluster to a China-based chemical supplier and, ultimately, to a mobile payment account tied to defendant Stanislav Chernyshov. The case illustrates a concrete investigative pipeline: combining on-chain clustering with marketplace data, postal records, and off-chain identifiers to deanonymize a pseudonymous crypto-paid drug operation linked to overdose deaths.
chainalysis.comarticleAdded 30 Sep 2026, published 8 Sep 2026π‘οΈ Security
Introducing our Artifacts Hub and Adoption DashboardInterconnects announces two new free, continuously-updated resources for tracking the open-weights model ecosystem: the Artifacts Hub, which curates ~792 trending Hugging Face models with inference-token data from OpenRouter, intelligence scores from Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index, and Interconnects' own relative adoption metric (RAM) and VAIL similarity index; and the Adoption Dashboard, a daily-updating view of download/derivative-model counts by geography and organization highlighting the US-China open-model gap. Both build on prior work from The ATOM Project and Interconnects' Artifacts Log round-ups, developed in collaboration with AI verification startup Project VAIL.
interconnects.aiarticleAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 3 Aug 2026π§ AI
Kimi K3: The open-weights escalationNathan Lambert analyzes Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, a 2.8T parameter MoE model whose open weights closed much of the gap with frontier closed models (ranking #2 on Vals AI, #3 on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index). The piece details K3's architectural innovations (Kimi Delta Attention, Attention Residuals, Stable LatentMoE giving ~2.5x scaling efficiency over Kimi K2) and situates the release within China's recommitment to open-source AI, Xi Jinping's WAIC remarks, and US policy debates over restricting open-weight Chinese models.
interconnects.aiarticleAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 20 Jul 2026π§ AI
Socket: Next.js Moves to Scheduled Security ReleasesVercel is replacing Next.js's ad-hoc security patching with a formal monthly scheduled-release program, publishing advance notice of severity and timing (first release July 20 covering 4 high/5 medium issues). The move follows React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182), a CVSS 10.0 pre-auth RCE in React Server Components exploited within hours by China state-nexus groups Earth Lamia and Jackpot Panda and affecting over 968,000 exposed instances, plus follow-on flaws CVE-2025-55183, CVE-2025-55184, and CVE-2025-67779, and the earlier CVE-2025-29927 middleware auth-bypass. It also ties the change to rising AI-assisted vulnerability discovery volume across the industry (Mozilla's 271-issue Firefox release, Microsoft's 570-fix Patch Tuesday).
socket.devarticlePublished and added 16 Jul 2026π‘οΈ Security
6 months to live for open modelsNathan Lambert argues open-weight AI models face a real near-term threat of a US ban or licensing restriction, driven by White House executive-order discussions and a political campaign (led by Anthropic) over Chinese model distillation. He contends the distillation debate is largely regulatory capture, argues APIs aren't demonstrably more secure than open weights, and calls for a US company (Meta, Microsoft, or Reflection AI) to release a frontier-capable open model to defuse the "only China builds open models" framing before any ban solidifies in the next six months.
interconnects.aiarticleAdded 29 Sep 2026, published 12 Jul 2026π§ AI