The future is here: AI-borne ransomware has arrived

PromptLock is an early proof-of-concept ransomware identified by ESET that embeds prompts to a locally hosted open-weights LLM (gpt-oss:20b) to dynamically generate Lua scripts for file discovery, exfiltration, and SPECK-128 encryption; while not observed in active attacks, researchers warn it demonstrates how AI can enable adaptive, harder-to-detect ransomware and could be copied or evolved into operational threats.