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Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware
Technology
Nathaniel Mott

The first AI-powered ransomware has been discovered — "PromptLock" uses local AI to foil heuristic detection and evade API tracking

AI hacking.

ESET today announced the discovery of "the first known AI-powered ransomware." The ransomware in question has been dubbed PromptLock, presumably because seemingly everything related to generative AI has to be prefixed with "prompt."

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.

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