UPDATE: #ESETresearch was contacted by the authors of an academic study, whose research prototype closely resembles the discovered #PromptLock samples found on VirusTotal:
Ransomware 3.0: Self-Composing and LLM-Orchestrated (arXiv) https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20444
This supports our belief that it was an proof of concept rather than fully operational malware deployed in the wild. Nonetheless, our findings remain valid - the discovered samples represent the first known case of AI-powered ransomware.