Promptware Kill Chain – Five-Step Kill Chain Model for Analyzing Cyberthreats

This report describes “promptware,” a class of multi-stage attacks against large language model (LLM) applications that mirror traditional malware kill chains—covering initial access via prompt injection, jailbreak-based privilege escalation, persistence in agent memory or data stores, lateral movement, and objective execution (exfiltration, phishing, financial fraud). It highlights persistence mechanisms (retrieval-dependent and retrieval-independent), command-and-control via embedded fetches, and an illustrative Morris II worm example to show how LLM agents can enable self-replication and systemic organizational risk.