EXCLUSIVE A jailbroken Google Gemini did 90 percent of the work in a credential- and cryptocurrency-stealing spree, including spinning up a new command-and-control (C2) server in just six minutes, according to a TrendAI report shared exclusively with The Register.The human behind the heist – a solo Russian-speaking miscreant known as “bandcampro” – acted as the manager of the cyber-fraud operation, which targeted hardcore Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists.Meanwhile, the AI agent did most of the hacking: migrating a botnet from an old architecture to a new one, writing and deploying a new C2 server, and even proactively carrying out 59 unprompted behaviors during the C2 migration.
“Persistence is evolving because of AI,” Tom Kellermann, TrendAI’s VP of AI security and threat research, told The Register.
“That's what you see in this report, with the capacity to dynamically shift C2 in less than six minutes, and make it portable and disposable, which is crazy-cool and terrifying," he added. "But also, you see the rebirth of steganography through invisible prompt injection.” In other words, it's hiding secret data – in this case, the C2 server malicious payloads – in plain sight.Scanning for known malicious artifacts doesn't provide sufficient protection against AI-enabled C2, according to Kellermann.“If AI does not have multi-layered guardrails, and if you can't detect behavioral anomalies when the guardrails are being tampered with, then you might as well see the AI as a command-and-control in today's world,” he said. “AI has to be viewed from a defensive perspective as a C2 unless you can govern it, actually apply various mechanisms of least privilege, and all the rules that OWASP and NIST espouse for the AI that you've deployed in your environment.”The new report follows up on TrendAI’s earlier research about bandcampro, a “low-skilled” scumbag who partnered with Gemini to impersonate an American veteran, run a Telegram channel, hack admin credentials, and steal cryptocurrency.Since then, the threat hunters obtained and analyzed more than 200 Gemini CLI session logs from said scumbag, and these logs provided additional insights into the daily AI-assisted operations between March 19 and April 21.
