Papers for

online security teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

GROB multi-agent system investigates public internet traces for agent activity

GROB: A Multi-Agent Architecture for Public-Trace Investigation of Candidate Agentic Activity

Abstract: We present GROB, a multi-agent architecture for investigating candidate autonomous-agent activity through public Internet traces when privileged telemetry is unavailable. The system performs controlled, read-only collection of public traces and preserves selected observations for later resolution. In a frozen September 2026 corpus, several collected traces became more informative as additional public evidence emerged. The strongest result concerns Census-labelled identifiers captured on 9 September. Public revision records later resolved these identifiers to specific Census requests from 16 - 17 June. Other results show weaker links between traces collected by GROB and evidence reconstructed or reported later. These links vary in strength, and only some can be tied to specific public records. The results show that sparse public traces can remain useful even before their significance is fully understood. Such evidence can support later reconstruction, but public traces alone do not establish organizational attribution. Execution identity presents a separate problem, as continuity of agent identity remains an active research question for autonomous language-model agents.

Thu 8 OctCryptography and SecurityArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Sometimes it's hard to figure out what automated online agents are doing if you don't have direct access to their internal data. The authors created GROB, a system that collects and carefully preserves public internet information to help investigate these agents' actions. They showed this public information can become clearer and more useful over time as new related data appears. However, just using public traces can't definitively say who is behind the activity or fully track continuous identities of these agents, which remains a difficult problem.
Open → 2610.11467v1

Similarity based recommendation systems can be stealthily poisoned by multi stage attacker chains

The Like Trap: Multi-Stage Poisoning against Agents in Similarity-based Recommendation Systems

Abstract: With recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents, these agents are becoming increasingly autonomous and gaining broader access to act on users' behalf on the internet. However, the vulnerability of automated agents deployed on social media platforms (e.g., for managing a user's personal account) remains underexplored. Existing studies on agent poisoning typically assume that the adversary can expose poisoned content to the agent. Although such an attack is direct and effective, it is more easily detected and mitigated. In the context of social media platforms, this leaves open whether the recommendation system itself would surface such content to the agent in a more subtle manner. Through theoretical analysis, we show that the like-score mechanism used in OASIS can be exploited, and we characterize the conditions under which a multi-stage chain of poisoned posts can steer the agent's feed. Based on these insights, we further develop an algorithm that crafts realistic poisoned posts. Experiments support our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Notably, by exploiting the like-score feedback loop, the attack causes the recommendation system to select poisoned posts even when their user-post similarity falls below the retrieval threshold.

Tue 22 SeptCryptography and SecurityArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Online agents use recommendation systems to show users content they might like. The authors find a way to trick these systems by creating chains of fake posts that appear real and gather likes over time. This fake popularity causes the system to keep showing bad or harmful posts to the agents, even when those posts don't closely match user interests. The attack hides from easy detection by using the system's own liking rules against it.
Open → 2609.27155v1