Opening PromptLock — first known AI-powered ransomware (academic proof-of-concept) on Rogue Agent Watch.

Test / evaluation · Primary sourcing · AI load-bearing · Medium severity.

ESET Research disclosed "PromptLock" on 2025-08-26 as the first known AI-powered ransomware after discovering samples uploaded to VirusTotal. The Go-based code used a locally hosted large language model (OpenAI's gpt-oss:20b via the Ollama API) to generate malicious Lua scripts at runtime for file enumeration, exfiltration and encryption. ESET assessed it as a proof-of- concept; researchers at NYU Tandon subsequently confirmed it originated from their academic project "Ransomware 3.0" and was never deployed in a real attack.

Data: Agentic Attack Index (MLSecOpsHub), dataset v0.3.0, CC BY-SA 4.0.