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.
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.