Warning: AI-powered ransomware is real and in the wild

Image credit: Freepik via Freepik. Article by Tim Marcin. Mashable – August 28, 2025.

As if there weren’t enough privacy concerns in the world, AI ransomware is now reportedly a thing. Cybersecurity firm ESET said that it discovered the first-ever AI-powered ransomware, which it has dubbed PromptLock. “The PromptLock malware uses the gpt-oss:20b model from OpenAI locally via the Ollama API to generate malicious Lua scripts on the fly, which it then executes,” the company wrote. […]

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