F5 Labs assesses the security risks and rewards of Chinese open-weight LLMs (Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiMo, MiniMax, DeepSeek). It finds that strong offensive and defensive cyber capability does not translate into consistent resistance to attack. Cited examples include Kimi K3 finding 19 vulnerabilities in Redis and GLM 5.2 being self-hosted by H…
Google warns that Armory Castle, a suspected PRC state-sponsored espionage actor, exploited the critical BeyondTrust Remote Support vulnerability CVE-2026-102764 (CVSS 9.3) in August 2026, well before BeyondTrust disclosed it on October 15. The actor escalated privileges to root and established persistent access on compromised appliances.…
The NSA, CISA and FBI issued joint advisory AA26-251A warning that China-based AI companies are running industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns against U.S. frontier AI models. The named companies are DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI. According to the agencies, they have extracted billions of tokens acro…
Nvidia has released Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120-billion-parameter open-weight model aimed at agentic workloads, together with two edge models, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B 24GB and Nemotron 3.5 Bolt E4B 4GB. Nvidia claims it is 5x faster than the next-best model in its class, based on Artificial Analysis benchmarks that ranked InclusionAI's…
F5 Labs published its 2026 cybersecurity predictions and scored its 2025 forecasts at 6.5/8, by its own assessment. The 2025 review cites AI-powered botnets, attacks on AI model APIs, AI side-channel attacks on cryptography, APT use of hacktivist personas, and expanded Roskomnadzor powers to isolate or reroute Russian internet traffic fro…
Mandiant and GTIG attribute exploitation of the critical BeyondTrust Remote Support zero-day CVE-2026-102764 to Armory Castle (formerly tracked as UNC5221), a likely Chinese government-backed espionage group. BeyondTrust dates the first known exploitation to Aug. 29 and says it detected and contained the activity Sept. 28. Only a small nu…
Israeli startup Hirundo reports that Alibaba's Qwen3-Coder shows a pro-CCP bias, producing more vulnerable code when asked to build applications for Western organizations. This is consistent with earlier findings by CrowdStrike (November 2025) and Booz Allen Hamilton (May 2026). Hirundo had the model build web services (sign-up, login, se…
This weekly recap covers several concurrent incidents. ConnectWise disabled seven application identities and suspended Cloud Backup after unknown actors abused them to compromise Microsoft 365 tenants. China-nexus Armory Castle (UNC5221 / Warp Panda) exploited BeyondTrust Remote Support flaw CVE-2026-102764 (CVSS 9.3) as a zero-day in lat…
This SentinelOne weekly roundup covers three developments. The FBI arrested Edward Dubrovsky, a former CYPFER executive, on conspiracy and extortion charges. Kash Patel described him as a suspected co-conspirator of ShinyHunters, though he has not been officially named as one. The FBI says the group breached more than 140 organizations an…