Focusing on Proactive Controls in the Face of LLM-Assisted Malware – Rob Allen – ASW #368

Everyone is turning to LLMs to generate code, including attackers. Thus, it's no great surprise that there are now examples of malware generated by LLMs. We the implications of more malware with Rob Allen and what it means for orgs that want to protect themselves from ransomware.

Rob Allen is a highly regarded IT expert with over 20 years of experience in the field. Throughout his career, he has shaped the narrative on how businesses can embrace technology to drive innovation while mitigating cyber risks. With a career rooted in technical field as a system administrator, technician, and engineer, Allen’s hands-on background uniquely positions him to bridge the gap between technical execution and business strategy.

Throughout his career, Allen has been a trusted advisor to small and medium-sized businesses while also supporting large enterprises, gaining invaluable insights into their distinct security and operational challenges. This extensive experience has cemented his reputation as a leading expert in cybersecurity and endpoint resilience.

Since joining ThreatLocker in 2021 as VP of Operations for EMEA, Allen played a pivotal role in driving the company’s regional growth through his deep technical acumen and focus on customer success. Now serving as ThreatLocker Chief Product Officer, Allen is at the forefront of developing groundbreaking Zero Trust security solutions that empower businesses to operate confidently in an increasingly hostile cyber environment.

Recognized as a trailblazer in Zero Trust endpoint protection, Allen has been instrumental in championing a “deny-by-default, allow-by-exception” philosophy to harden endpoints and networks. Allen’s thought leadership and practical insights have made him one of the most sought-after voices in the field of Zero Trust endpoint protection.

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Last week we talked criticism of OpenSSL's APIs and emphasized how APIs that appeal to developers and encourage clear, readable code are good for security. This week we're not picking on OpenSSL for having vulns (it's nowhere near alone in that regard).

This week we're looking at a theme of how security researchers are leveraging LLMs to find vulns. These dozen vulns come from a new company, AISLE, applying its flavor of LLM-based security analysis to OpenSSL. For a code base as scrutinized as OpenSSL, it's interesting to see new flaws and code quality issues identified in this way.

This particular CVE is neither particularly interesting from a technical perspective nor likely impactful in terms of the overall population of potentially impacted apps.

What is interesting it is another example of this week's news theme of LLM-based security analysis. In this case, a CodeQL plus LLM combination called Vulnhalla . The article makes some brief references to time spent by humans and potentially saved by automation, which is both a motivating factor to craft better tools and a more reliable sign of a successful tool.

If Vulnhalla has some appeal, check out the repo .

This will likely get attention purely because of the Solarwinds connection. Two of the flaws reported look like common, trivial problems in an overly naive allowlist implementation and a deserialization attack.

I grabbed this more as a chance to ponder whether LLMs can generate code well enough to help orgs migrate their code to more modern frameworks or to harden their existing architectures.

The best way to deliver malware to an org is to create something trendy in the LLM space and benefit from hype to harvest downloads. To be clear, there's nothing even implicitly malicious OpenClaw (aka Molt, Clawd) and the maintainer has been positively responsive to critique and security reports. But this kind of project shows the dangers of combining uncontrolled access to arbitrary services (from command lines to messaging apps to web sites) from unconstrained actions. It's one thing to experiment with a project like this in a sandboxed environment. It's another for orgs to have to figure out if users are installing software that can be so trivially abused to access systems and data.

The security shortcomings have also been covered by 404 Media .

This week's new theme is humans using LLMs to find flaws, so why not include another look at how humans and LLMs fare against certain types of vuln classes.

We already covered this last week , but here's the official announcement the end of the curl project's bug bounty program.

Curl still has a fine vulnerability disclosure process. The critical point here is that they're removing the monetary incentive in order to avoid the influx of low-quality security reports.

The bounty program had a pretty good run for six years, with "...87 confirmed vulnerabilities and over 100,000 USD paid as rewards to researchers."