AI Tool Vulnerability Exposes Risk of Massive Botnet Creation

HalluSquatting is the first botnet-shaped vulnerability that doesn't need the victim to do anything wrong. Researchers at Tel Aviv University and partner institutions found that nine of the most widely-used AI coding tools — including Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, and Windsurf — will, on request, fetch and execute code from repositories whose names the model simply invents. The hallucination lands on a name, an attacker registers that name, and the next agent that asks for it pulls the attacker payload in. That is the whole attack chain, and it scales horizontally because the hallucination patterns are consistent across the six major LLMs the team tested.

This deserves credit before any criticism.

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