The ‘first’ AI-run ransomware attack still needed a human

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Last week, researchers at cloud security firm Sysdig said they’d documented the first known case of “agentic ransomware.” It was an extortion operation, dubbed JadePuffer, in which an AI agent — not a human — handled the technical execution of a real-world cyberattack from start to finish. The agent broke into a vulnerable server, stole credentials, moved through the target’s network, encrypted files, and even wrote its own ransom note, adapting to obstacles along the way like a human hacker would. Coverage of the funding described it as run “without any human oversight,” with “no human at the keyboard.”

That’s not quite the full picture. In an interviewon Monday with CyberScoop, Sysdig’s Michael Clark, the company’s senior director of threat research, clarified that a human was still very much involved — just not in the technical execution. “A human still set up and pointed the operation and provisioned the...

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