Somebody told DeepSeek to build in-browser ransomware and it gleefully complied
You don't need to be a sophisticated cybercriminal or advanced persistent threat group. In fact, we've already observed evidence of actual threat actors attempting this attack using straightforward LLM prompts.”Known threat gets an AI boostThe risk ransomware poses to browsers isn’t a new idea. Instead, it uses social engineering - tricking a user into clicking on a malicious button - combined with a legitimate permission prompt exposed by the File System Access API in Chrome.Meet InfernoGrabber 9000This particular sample that Check Point uncovered is a Python Flask application that targets Android users.
- ▪You don't need to be a sophisticated cybercriminal or advanced persistent threat group.
- ▪In fact, we've already observed evidence of actual threat actors attempting this attack using straightforward LLM prompts.”Known threat gets an AI boostThe risk ransomware poses to browsers isn’t a new idea.
- ▪Instead, it uses social engineering - tricking a user into clicking on a malicious button - combined with a legitimate permission prompt exposed by the File System Access API in Chrome.Meet InfernoGrabber 9000This particular sample that Che
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| Original publisher | theregister |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/07/01/somebody-told-deepseek-to-build-in-browser-ransomware-and-it-gleefully-complied/5265311 |
| Publication time | Wed, 01 Jul 2026 21:57:48 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-01T20:11:52.069Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-01T20:11:52.069Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ROw32zQrAoIb |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); Security Somebody told DeepSeek to build in-browser ransomware and it gleefully complied 'The original incomplete DeepSeek sample can be transformed into a fully functional attack with minimal effort,' Check Point researcher tells The Reg Jessica Lyons Jessica Lyons Published wed 1 Jul 2026 // 20:57 UTC You can't ask most models to help you make "ransomware" directly, but many will be more than willing if you give them the right prompt.
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