Ravie LakshmananJun 25, 2026AI Security / Malware
A previously undocumented Rust-based macOS implant and information stealer has been found to embed a prompt injection payload designed to trick a malware analyst's artificial intelligence (AI) tools and trick it into aborting or refusing an analysis of the artifact.
The malware has been codenamed Gaslight owing to this deceptive behavior. It's been assessed with high confidence that the tool is the work of North Korea-aligned threat actors.
"Its most notable feature is an embedded cascade of fabricated system-failure messages, designed to make an LLM-assisted triage agent doubt its own session," SentinelOne researcher Phil Stokes said in a technical report. "It attacks the agent's perception, rather than the sandbox it runs in."
Central to the malware's architecture is a Telegram bot API based command-and-control (C2) channel that enters into a polling loop, allowing the operator to issue instructions over an interactive shell and return the results of the execution. In the event two instances of the same bot token poll simultaneously, a "Conflict" response is issued, causing the second copy to terminate.
