New AI “agents” could hold people for ransom in 2025

Lerner · Feb 11, 2025

New AI “agents” could hold people for ransom in 2025
“Agentic” AI could arrive in 2025, according to Malwarebytes’ State of Malware report. This technology could allow hackers to use AI-powered agents for tasks like personalized ransom schemes, using stolen data combined with public information.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/02/new-ai-agents-could-hold-people-for-ransom-in-2025?

“Agentic” AI and a new landscape of attacks
Agentic AI is the next big thing in artificial intelligence, even if you’ve never heard about it before.

Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and more have all begun experimenting with the technology, which promises to take AI out of its current chatbot silo and into a new landscape where individualized AI “agents” can help with specific tasks. These agents could, for example, more effectively respond to simple customer support questions, help patients find in-network providers with their health insurance, and even suggest strategy based on a company’s most recent performance. Microsoft, for its part, has already teased its AI agent that answers employee questions around HR policies, holiday schedules, and more. Salesforce, too, is investing heavily in agentic AI, positioning the technology as a personal assistant for everyone.

As we wrote in the 2025 State of Malware report:

“If agentic AIs arrive in 2025, they won’t just answer questions, they will be able to think and act, transforming AI from an assistant that responds to prompts, into a peer, or even an expert that can plan out tasks, interact with the world, and solve the problems it encounters.”

The implications for cyberattacks are enormous. If put into the wrong hands, malicious attackers could ask AI agents to:

Search vast troves of stolen data to match leaked Social Security numbers with leaked email addresses, composing and sending phishing emails that threaten more data exposure unless a ransom is paid.

Scrape public social media feeds for baby photos that are delivered to other AI agents that create fake profiles that weaponize those baby photos as empty threats against a child’s safety.

Scour LinkedIn to create a database of potentially viable email addresses from countless companies by deducing the email address format—first name, last name; first initial, last name; etc.—from publicly listed email addresses, and then mirroring that format to write and send bogus requests from executives to their direct reports.

Comb through public divorce records across multiple states and countries to identify targets for romance scams, who receive messages and who can carry on with whole conversations composed and controlled by another AI agent.

These attacks threaten not only individuals but small businesses, too, as a vulnerability in a person’s device can become a malware attack on a network. The same is true in reverse—if attacks on companies become more accessible, then the data that people give these companies becomes more vulnerable to exposure.

Thankfully, where agentic AI poses a risk, it also poses a boon, as individual AI agents could be tasked with finding a company’s vulnerabilities, responding to suspicious activity on its network, and even guiding everyday people into safely posting online, searching the web, and buying from unknown retailers.

The truth is that AI is here to stay. There is already too much investment from the largest developers and companies for that to reverse course any time soon. So, if the threat is that attackers might harness this AI, then the foreseeable future will involve a lot of defenders and everyday people harnessing it, too.
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New AI “agents” could hold people for ransom in 2025

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New AI “agents” could hold people for ransom in 2025

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