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Cybersecurity Today would like to thank Meter for their support in bringing you this podcast. Meter delivers a complete networking stack, wired, wireless and cellular in one integrated solution that's built for performance and scale. You can find them@meter.com CST We've got an interview for you this week, following up on an interesting story about a malware that was authored by an AI. It certainly wasn't the first malware that's been written using AI, but it was a little different. Now, just to refresh your memory, here's the story I did. It's only a couple of minutes long. Voidlink appears to be one of the first clearly documented cases of advanced malware authored almost entirely by artificial intelligence. Check Point says voidlink represents a break from earlier example of AI assisted malware, which were usually tied to inexperienced threat actors or simple rewrites of existing open source tools. In contrast, they say Void Lake shows evidence of structured engineering, including documented development, sprints and coding guidelines, suggesting deliberate, disciplined design rather than simple experimentation. What makes this discovery unusual is how early it happened. Researchers believe they caught voidlink largely by chance after a compiled test version was uploaded to VirusTotal very early in development. One recovered artifact, timestamped December 4, roughly a week after the project appears to have begun, shows the framework already functional, with more than 88,000 lines of code. That early submission gave the defenders a rare look inside the project that likely would have been far harder to analyze once it was fully operational. Check Point notes that while the project was presented as a 30 week engineering effort, the available evidence suggests it was built much faster, highlighting how AI can dramatically compress development timelines for even complex malware. And despite the listings of various teams in the documents, it's quite likely, according to Checkpoint, that this was actually done with AI and perhaps a single individual. So the concern isn't just speed, it's also originality and technical innovation. This wasn't a remix of known tools, it was a custom framework produced at scale. This doesn't mean that AI written malware is suddenly everywhere, but voidlink shows what happens when capable developers use AI as a force multiplier, shrinking the time between concept and deployment and leaving defenders with far less warning than they might be used to. We put a link to the Checkpoint paper in our show notes. Check technewsday.com or CA under Podcasts and we've reached out to Checkpoint to see if we can get an interview for our weekend show. And thanks to a very responsive PR person at Check Point, I was able to get an Interview with the researcher who found the malware and the head of the team, because as you'll find out, this is pretty much a team effort. It not only gives you some deeper insight into the story, but I think it might give you an idea of how some of this type of research is done. My guests are Pedro Dremmel, who heads the cybercrime research team at Checkpoint, and Sven Raat, who is a security researcher based in Vienna. Sven is on Pedro's team and did the initial research. I reached them on Friday morning, my time, which is late afternoon for them on Friday. Thanks for sticking around, guys. And we'll jump into the discussion.
