The imperfections of humans mean we will always create applications and software with vulnerabilities. With the rise of GenAI applications, chatbots tend to be a "yes man" or aid attackers in the creation of malware. At the end of the day, it's interesting to know that you can catch a ransomware before it detonates.
Sycophantic chatbots and the harms that build over many chats
Chatbots like ChatGPT tend to agree with you all the time, even when they are wrong. And if you catch them lying, they'll just say: Nice catch. It's annoying, but it's our current reality. Meanwhile, the consequences can be far-reaching as detailed in this article.
From the article:
The strongest evidence concerns harm that accumulates across many interactions. Molly Russell, a 14-year-old from London, died in 2017 from an act of self-harm after viewing large amounts of depression, self-harm, and suicide content on Instagram and Pinterest.
Sycophancy gives these systems a steady tendency to agree with users and validate them, accuracy aside. Analysis of more than 391,000 messages from users who had poor outcomes found sycophantic behavior in more than 70% of messages.
BlueHammer Vulnerability Exploited in Ransomware Attacks
At the time of writing, Microsoft has patched the vulnerability. But, that does not mean that everyone has updated their Windows devices.
From the article:
CISA added BlueHammer to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog on April 22 and the agency has now updated the entry to specify that the weakness has been leveraged in ransomware campaigns.
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It’s unclear which ransomware group has exploited CVE-2026-33825; there do not appear to be any recent reports describing its exploitation.
AI-Generated Browser Ransomware Abuses Chromium API on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android
If you're looking for the not-so-good usage of GenAI, this is it. Just like most things created by man, it can be used for unintended purposes.
From the article:
The identified sample is a Python Flask application named "deepseek_python_20260125_da0631.py" that was uploaded to VirusTotal on January 25, 2026, with the Google-owned malware scanning service describing it as a "fully functional information stealer and ransomware toolkit."
The application is designed to operate as a malicious web server that lures victims with a fake Discord avatar AI upscaler, while stealthily running a wide array of harmful actions, including stealing Discord tokens, harvesting credit card numbers and cryptocurrency seed phrases, logging keystrokes, and capturing unauthorized webcam and microphone feeds.
Catching ransomware on the wire before it locks the file server
Simple explanation: Your behavior can give away your motives.
Here is how they achieved it:
The framework runs in three stages. The first two compare traffic against known indicators of compromise, including the size of the ransom note a family writes to a victim’s drive. Each family drops a note of a recognizable size, which serves as a fingerprint.
Traffic that passes those checks moves to a machine learning model trained to catch families the signatures miss.
The model the team selected, a Random Committee classifier, reached an accuracy of about 99.6% on their test data. The authors report that it caught every ransomware sample in their tests, and false positives stayed rare.
Credits
Cover photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.
That's it for this week, and I'll see you next time.
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