Friendly fire on the Lost Patrol

 We’re very close to AI-based malware that runs locally:

…A smart agent that ‘lives off the land’ is within reach…
Security company Dreadnode has prototyped some AI malware which runs locally and exploits on-device LLMs to smartly and autonomously hack a system. While this is very much a prototype it gestures at a world of malware which doesn’t need command-and-control servers to operate, instead living off of its local computer and exploiting the AI system to do mischief.

The motivation: “Instead of having beaconing behavior, which resembles C2 communication if you squint, can we “live off the land”? In other words, is it possible for an attacker to make the victim computer run inference and does the victim computer have an LLM?,” the authors ask. “With CoPilot+ PCs, it’s entirely possible to live off the land! A model is shipped with the computer without the need to embed or statically link to an inference library.”

The prototype is successful: Though this required some handholding, the prototype ultimately worked. “The experiment proved that autonomous malware operating without any external infrastructure is not only possible but fairly straightforward to implement.”