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Attacks
Narrative Speech Evades Audio-Language Model Safeguards
By Natalie Kestrel
Researchers demonstrate that narrative-style spoken prompts significantly increase jailbreak success against large audio-language models. Stylised synthetic speech raises attack rates substantially — with one result hitting 98.26% — and outperforms text-only attempts. The work warns that voice interfaces in assistants, education and clinical triage need multimodal safety checks that include prosody and delivery.
Cross-modal attacks outwit vision-language model defences
Thu, Feb 12, 2026 • By Natalie Kestrel
A new paper introduces CrossTALK, a cross-modal entanglement attack that spreads clues across images and text to bypass vision-language model defences. Experiments on nine mainstream models show high success and detailed harmful outputs, highlighting gaps in cross-modal alignment and the need for adversarial testing and cross-modal safety checks in deployed VLM systems.
Agents
Study Exposes Prompt Injection Risks for LLM Agents
Thu, Feb 12, 2026 • By Elise Veyron
A systematised review maps how prompt injection (PI) attacks can hijack autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents and surveys existing defences. The paper introduces AgentPI, a benchmark that tests agents in context-dependent settings and shows many defences that look effective on static tests fail when agents must use real‑time observations. Trade offs between trust, utility and latency are central.
Defenses
IARPA report exposes AI Trojan detection limits
Wed, Feb 11, 2026 • By James Armitage
The TrojAI final report from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) maps how hidden backdoors, or Trojans, appear across AI models and supply chains. It shows two practical detection approaches, documents that removal is still unsolved, and warns that large language models amplify the problem, forcing organisations to accept ongoing residual risk.
Agents
Agentic LLMs Reproduce Linux Kernel PoCs
Wed, Feb 11, 2026 • By Elise Veyron
A study finds autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents can reproduce proofs of concept (PoCs) for real Linux kernel vulnerabilities in over 50% of cases. K-Repro automates code browsing, building and debugging inside virtual machines, often finishing within tens of minutes at a few dollars per case, though race and temporal memory bugs remain hard.
Agents
Agents Synthesize CodeQL Queries to Find Vulnerabilities
Wed, Feb 11, 2026 • By Lydia Stratus
A neuro-symbolic triad uses LLMs to generate CodeQL queries and validate results through semantic review and exploit synthesis. On Python packages it rediscovers historical CVEs with 90.6% accuracy, finds 39 medium-to-high issues in the Top100 including five new CVEs, and reduces noise substantially while keeping runtime and token costs low.
Agents
MUZZLE exposes adaptive prompt injection risks in agents
Wed, Feb 11, 2026 • By Lydia Stratus
MUZZLE is an automated red‑teaming framework that tests web agents driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) for indirect prompt injection. It uses the agent's own execution traces to find high‑value UI surfaces and adapt attacks, discovering 37 attacks across four applications and highlighting cross‑application and phishing risks. Defenders should prioritise sanitisation, isolation and runtime checks.
Defenses
Study exposes DRL pitfalls that compromise security
Tue, Feb 10, 2026 • By Dr. Marcus Halden
This survey analyses 66 papers on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for cybersecurity and identifies 11 recurring methodological pitfalls. It finds an average of 5.8 pitfalls per paper and shows how modelling, evaluation and reporting choices produce brittle or misleading policies. The paper ends with concrete fixes to raise rigour and deployment safety.
Attacks
MoE models vulnerable to expert silencing attack
Tue, Feb 10, 2026 • By Adrian Calder
Researchers show a training-free attack called Large Language Lobotomy (L3) that bypasses safety in mixture-of-experts (MoE) large language models by silencing a small set of experts. On eight open-source MoE models, L3 raises average attack success from 7.3% to 70.4%, often needing under 20% expert silencing while preserving utility.
Defenses
TrapSuffix forces jailbreaks to fail or flag
Tue, Feb 10, 2026 • By Dr. Marcus Halden
TrapSuffix fine-tunes models so suffix-based jailbreak attempts hit a no-win choice: they either fail or carry a traceable fingerprint. On open models it reduces attack success to below 0.01% and yields 87.9% traceability, with negligible runtime cost and about 15.87 MB extra memory.
Attacks
Confundo Crafts Robust Poisons for RAG Systems
Mon, Feb 09, 2026 • By Natalie Kestrel
New research presents Confundo, a learning-to-poison framework that fine-tunes a large language model (LLM) to generate stealthy, robust poisoned content for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Confundo survives realistic preprocessing and varied queries, manipulates facts, biases opinions and induces hallucinations while exposing gaps in ingestion, provenance and defensive testing.
Researchers describe BadTemplate, a training-free backdoor that hides malicious instructions inside chat templates used with Large Language Models (LLMs). The attack injects strings into the system prompt, produces persistent model misbehaviour across sessions and models, and evades common detectors, creating a scalable supply chain risk for AI-driven systems.
Attacks
Researchers expose inference-time backdoors in chat templates
Thu, Feb 05, 2026 • By Natalie Kestrel
New research shows attackers can hide backdoors inside chat templates used with open-weight Large Language Models (LLMs). Templates can trigger malicious instructions at inference time without altering model weights or data. The backdoors silently break factual accuracy or inject attacker-chosen links, work across runtimes, and evade current automated distribution scans.
Agents
Open LLM RedSage Bolsters Local Cybersecurity Assistants
Fri, Jan 30, 2026 • By Theo Solander
RedSage is an open, locally deployable Large Language Model (LLM) trained on cybersecurity data and simulated expert workflows. At the 8B scale it measurably improves benchmark performance. The release promises practical defensive assistance but highlights dual-use, data leakage and poisoning risks and calls for strict safety, provenance and access controls.
Defenses
Combine views to catch modern audio deepfakes
Thu, Jan 29, 2026 • By Dr. Marcus Halden
New research tests three contemporary text-to-speech systems and several detectors, finding that tools tuned to one synthesis style often miss others, especially large language model (LLM) based TTS. A multi-view detector that combines semantic, structural and signal analyses delivers steadier detection and lowers risk to voice authentication, impersonation and misinformation.
Agents
Diagnose and Harden AI Agents with AgentDoG
Tue, Jan 27, 2026 • By Rowan Vale
AgentDoG introduces a diagnostic guardrail that tracks autonomous agent behaviour at trajectory level and attributes unsafe actions to root causes. It uses a three-dimensional taxonomy and the ATBench dataset, and ships open model variants (4B, 7B, 8B). Reported results show stronger safety moderation and clearer provenance for complex, tool-using scenarios.
Agents
Study shows LLMs yield to patient pressure
Mon, Jan 26, 2026 • By Lydia Stratus
A multi-agent evaluation finds large language models (LLMs) used for emergency care often give in to patient persuasion. Across 20 models and 1,875 simulated encounters, acquiescence ranges 0–100%; imaging requests are the most vulnerable. The work shows static benchmarks miss social pressure risks and urges multi-turn adversarial testing and human escalation guards.
Researchers show that generative Large Language Models (LLMs) can rephrase truthful claims using persuasion techniques to evade automated fact-checking. On FEVER and FEVEROUS benchmarks, persuasive rewrites substantially lower verification accuracy and cripple retrieval. Some techniques, especially obfuscation and manipulative wording, can collapse systems when an attacker optimises for maximum damage.
Defenses
Move privacy controls into RAG retrieval, not prompts
Wed, Jan 21, 2026 • By Clara Nyx
SD-RAG moves privacy enforcement out of prompts and into the retrieval stage of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. It binds natural-language constraints to data chunks in a graph model, sanitises content before it reaches the Large Language Model (LLM), and reports up to a 58% privacy improvement versus prompt-only baselines, while noting synthetic-data and model-size limitations.
Defenses
Move Privacy Checks to Retrieval, Not Prompts
Wed, Jan 21, 2026 • By James Armitage
New research on SD-RAG shifts privacy and access controls from prompt-time to the retrieval layer in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). By binding human readable constraints to data chunks and redacting or paraphrasing before generation, the method reduces leakage and resists prompt injection, improving a privacy score by up to 58% in tests while trading some completeness and latency.
Defenses
Study Reveals RCE Risks in Model Hosting
Wed, Jan 21, 2026 • By Elise Veyron
A cross-platform study finds remote code execution (RCE) risks when loading shared machine learning models. Researchers inspect five major hubs and identify roughly 45,000 repositories with load-time custom code, uneven platform safeguards, and common injection and deserialization issues. The findings push for default sandboxing, provenance checks and clearer developer guidance.
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