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The first AI-powered ransomware has been discovered — "PromptLock" uses local AI to foil heuristic detection and evade API tracking
Hackers finally discover a practical use for local AI models
ESET said that this malware uses an open-weight large language model developed by OpenAI to generate scripts that can perform a variety of functions on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems while confounding defensive tools by exhibiting slightly different behavior each time. "PromptLock leverages Lua scripts generated from hard-coded prompts to enumerate the local filesystem, inspect target files, exfiltrate selected data, and perform encryption," ESET said in a Mastodon post about the malware. The fact that the model runs locally also makes it so OpenAI can't snitch on the ransomware operators—if they had to call an API on its servers every time they generate one of these scripts, the jig would be up.
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