AI malware just removed the human from the attack loop
Brief
Attackers using AI have greatly benefited when it comes to speed and scale, and now, says Cisco Talos, the technology has evolved to execute large portions of the attack chain entirely without human involvement.
Researchers at the threat intelligence group have identified what they call the first “LLM-as-C2” architecture that can fully automate the command-and-control (C2) chain. Dubbed CLOSEDQUORUM, the malware binary relies on a panel of large language model (LLM) judges to map and execute the optimal path to steal credentials.
“This is not merely augmenting what an operator can accomplish in a session, but transferring an entire phase of the attack from the operator to the system,” Cisco Talos security and threat researcher Ryan Fetterman explained in a blog post .
The benefits of speed and scale are compounded because the human-in-the-loop is no longer the bottleneck, he noted.