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New research shared exclusively with Kernel Panic shows that hackers have started adding AI functionality into a new strain of infostealer malware, making it possible for the system to automatically profile victims and quickly surface the highest value targets and their information. Dubbed “Volta-Autodoxer” because of how the malware refers to itself internally, the finding by Cisco Talos researchers sheds light on the ways that commercial LLMs are being used to augment and enhance the capabilities of established types of malware.

Often hidden in counterfeit software, infostealers are designed to live up to their name, grabbing usernames, passwords, authentication tokens, cookies, credit card data, and more from infected machines. Many of the biggest data breaches in recent years—from the widespread Snowflake-linked breaches that included AT&T and Ticketmaster to the theft of a terabyte of Disney data—have resulted from hackers accessing targets using login details gathered by infostealers. Overall, the malware has been used to steal hundreds of millions of credentials in recent years.

“Volta is pretty mature as a stealer. It casts a pretty wide net for what it collects,” says Ryan Fetterman, a security researcher at Cisco Talos. “It compiles all of those things together, ultimately producing a serialized dossier that it can send to a couple LLM models.

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