Evaluating LLM-Generated Obfuscated XSS Payloads for Machine Learning-Based Detection

Cross-site scripting XSS remains a persistent web security vulnerability, especially because obfuscation can change the surface form of a malicious payload while preserving its behavior. These transformations make it difficult for traditional and machine learning-based detection systems to reliab...

ARES: Adaptive Red-Teaming and End-To-End Repair of Policy-Reward System

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback RLHF is central to aligning Large Language Models LLMs, yet it introduces a critical vulnerability: an imperfect Reward Model RM can become a single point of failure when it fails to penalize unsafe behaviors. While existing red-teaming approaches...

LLM4CodeRE: Generative AI for Code Decompilation Analysis and Reverse Engineering

Code decompilation analysis is a fundamental yet challenging task in malware reverse engineering, particularly due to the pervasive use of sophisticated obfuscation techniques. Although recent large language models LLMs have shown promise in translating low-level representations into high-level...

Russian Hacker Sentenced to 2 Years for TA551 Botnet-Driven Ransomware Attacks

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ said a Russian national has been sentenced to two years in prison for managing a botnet that was used to launch ransomware attacks against U.S. companies. Ilya Angelov, 40, of Tolyatti, Russia, was also fined $100,000. Angelov, who went by the online aliases...

An Agentic Multi-Agent Architecture for Cybersecurity Risk Management

Getting a real cybersecurity risk assessment for a small organization is expensive -- a NIST CSF-aligned engagement runs $15,000 on the low end, takes weeks, and depends on practitioners who are genuinely scarce. Most small companies skip it entirely. We built a six-agent AI system where each age...

TraceGuard: Process-Guided Firewall against Reasoning Backdoors in Large Language Models

The deployment of Large Reasoning Models LRMs in high-stakes decision-making pipelines has introduced a novel and opaque attack surface: reasoning backdoors. In these attacks, the model's intermediate Chain-of-Thought CoT is manipulated to provide a linguistically plausible but logically fallacio...

Reddit, porn sites fined by UK regulators over children’s safety and privacy

The UK’s online safety and privacy regulators are targeting companies that violate new age verification laws at both ends : Porn sites that did not keep children out, and mainstream platforms that profited from children coming in. On February 23, media regulator Ofcom fined porn operators that...

Detecting PowerShell-Based Fileless Cryptojacking Attacks Using Machine Learning

With the emergence of remote code execution RCE vulnerabilities in ubiquitous libraries and advanced social engineering techniques, threat actors have started conducting widespread fileless cryptojacking attacks. These attacks have become effective with stealthy techniques based on PowerShell-bas...

MultiVer: Zero-Shot Multi-Agent Vulnerability Detection

We present MultiVer, a zero-shot multi-agent system for vulnerability detection that achieves state-of-the-art recall without fine-tuning. A four-agent ensemble security, correctness, performance, style with union voting achieves 82.7% recall on PyVul, exceeding fine-tuned GPT-3.5 81.3% by 1.4...

From SFT to RL: Demystifying the Post-Training Pipeline for LLM-Based Vulnerability Detection

The integration of LLMs into vulnerability detection VD has shifted the field toward interpretable and context-aware analysis. While post-training methods have shown promise in general coding tasks, their systematic application to VD remains underexplored. In this paper, we present the first...

GoodVibe: Security-By-Vibe for LLM-Based Code Generation

Large language models LLMs are increasingly used for code generation in fast, informal development workflows, often referred to as vibe coding, where speed and convenience are prioritized, and security requirements are rarely made explicit. In this setting, models frequently produce functionally...

A one-prompt attack that breaks LLM safety alignment

Large language models LLMs and diffusion models now power a wide range of applications, from document assistance to text-to-image generation, and users increasingly expect these systems to be safety-aligned by default. Yet safety alignment is only as robust as its weakest failure mode. Despite...

The Trigger in the Haystack: Extracting and Reconstructing LLM Backdoor Triggers

Detecting whether a model has been poisoned is a longstanding problem in AI security. In this work, we present a practical scanner for identifying sleeper agent-style backdoors in causal language models. Our approach relies on two key findings: first, sleeper agents tend to memorize poisoning dat...

Evaluating Large Language Models for Security Bug Report Prediction

Early detection of security bug reports SBRs is critical for timely vulnerability mitigation. We present an evaluation of prompt-based engineering and fine-tuning approaches for predicting SBRs using Large Language Models LLMs. Our findings reveal a distinct trade-off between the two approaches...

Llama-3.1-FoundationAI-SecurityLLM-Reasoning-8B Technical Report

We present Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning, the first open-source native reasoning model for cybersecurity. Built upon our previously released Foundation-Sec-8B base model derived from Llama-3.1-8B-Base, the model is trained through a two-stage process combining supervised fine-tuning SFT and...

A week in security (January 12 – January 18)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: WhisperPair exposes Bluetooth earbuds and headphones to tracking and eavesdropping Dutch police sell fake tickets to show how easily scams work "Reprompt" attack lets attackers steal data from Microsoft Copilot Phishing scammers are posting fake "account restricted...

TrojanPraise: Jailbreak LLMs Via Benign Fine-Tuning

The demand of customized large language models LLMs has led to commercial LLMs offering black-box fine-tuning APIs, yet this convenience introduces a critical security loophole: attackers could jailbreak the LLMs by fine-tuning them with malicious data. Though this security issue has recently bee...

LLMs in Code Vulnerability Analysis: A Proof of Concept

Context: Traditional software security analysis methods struggle to keep pace with the scale and complexity of modern codebases, requiring intelligent automation to detect, assess, and remediate vulnerabilities more efficiently and accurately. Objective: This paper explores the incorporation of...

A Decompilation-Driven Framework for Malware Detection with Large Language Models

The parallel evolution of Large Language Models LLMs with advanced code-understanding capabilities and the increasing sophistication of malware presents a new frontier for cybersecurity research. This paper evaluates the efficacy of state-of-the-art LLMs in classifying executable code as either...

A week in security (January 5 – January 11)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: pcTattletale founder pleads guilty as US cracks down on stalkerware Are we ready for ChatGPT Health? CISA warns of active attacks on HPE OneView and legacy PowerPoint Lego’s Smart Bricks explained: what they do, and what they don’t Fake WinRAR downloads hide malwar...