USENIX Security

AI Investigators in SOCs: Limits of Autonomy, Prompt Injection Risks, and the Cost of Over-Reliance

A February 2026 Vectra AI survey of 1,450 security professionals revealed that organizations receive nearly 3,000 daily attack alerts on average, with 63% left unprocessed and 71% of respondents delaying critical tasks at least two days a week. The article examines the push to deploy autonomous AI agents for investigations in Security Operations Centers, highlighting how such systems often fail when confronted with real-world disorder such as inconsistent server timestamps, unapproved software installations, and incomplete logging. It stresses strict limits on AI decision-making authority, especially for blocking systems or revoking access, and warns against treating model confidence scores as reliable error probabilities. Prompt injection attacks via malicious emails, logs, or documents are identified as a novel threat that can manipulate language models into ignoring attacks or leaking data. Research from Microsoft involving 167 analysts showed that false “safe” verdicts from AI increased missed threats by 29 percentage points. The piece concludes that independent human verification of AI-closed cases remains essential to avoid hidden risks behind empty alert queues.

Zombie Card Attack Revives Expired Visa Cards for Contactless NFC Payments

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have demonstrated the Zombie Card attack, which enables contactless payments with certain expired Visa cards over NFC without breaking cryptography or cloning the card. The technique exploits inconsistencies in how payment terminals and issuing banks validate card expiration dates within the EMV protocol. By deploying two Android smartphones as a relay between the expired card and the terminal, the researchers intercepted the EMV field containing the expiration date and substituted a future date during the transaction. The terminal accepted the locally validated payment while the cryptographic data remained valid because Visa EMV Kernel 3 does not always bind the expiration field to the protected cryptogram. Testing showed varying bank responses: one issuer approved transactions of different amounts at multiple merchants, while another consistently declined them. The attack failed against Mastercard, American Express, and Discover due to stricter cross-checks or cryptographic protection of the expiration data. The method requires an active account and valid keys on the expired card, making it more complex than traditional skimming.

Optimizing Cybersecurity Content for LLMs: How Sites Can Enter Generative AI Answers

Search engines and AI services like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews increasingly deliver synthesized answers instead of link lists. For cybersecurity publishers this changes competition because high traditional rankings no longer guarantee visibility or accurate citation. The article explains GEO, AEO and LLMO practices, shows how material moves through indexing, fragment selection and summarization stages, and stresses the need for self-contained facts that survive extraction and paraphrasing. It provides concrete writing frameworks for vulnerability reports, including required fields such as CVE identifiers, affected versions, attack conditions and real-world exploitation evidence. Technical requirements cover correct robots.txt handling for Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot and Bingbot plus the use of IndexNow for rapid updates. The piece also warns about poisoning risks, prompt injection and slopsquatting attacks that can feed false data into generative systems.