Researchers flag code that uses AI systems to carry out ransomware attacks

Researchers at cybersecurity firm ESET claim to have identified the first piece of AI-powered ransomware in the wild.

The malware, called PromptLock, essentially functions as a hard-coded prompt injection attack on a large language model, causing the model to assist in carrying out a ransomware attack.

Written in Golang programming code, the malware sends its requests through Ollama, an open-source API for interfacing with large language models, and a local version of an open-weights model (gpt-oss:20b) from OpenAI to execute tasks.

Read more at CyberScoop