Nation-state hackers ramping up use of Gemini for target reconnaissance, malware coding, Google says
China-Based Artificial Intelligence Companies Conducting Industrial-Scale Distillation Campaigns Against U.S. AI Companies
NSA, CISA, and FBI warn DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other Chinese AI firms ran industrial-scale distillation of U.S. frontier models, threatening U.S. AI leadership.
A joint NSA, CISA, and FBI Cybersecurity Advisory (AA26-251A) says China-based firms DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens from U.S. frontier models including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, likely with Chinese government knowledge. Campaigns running since at least late 2024 used native APIs, cloud providers, third-party aggregators, gray-market proxy "transfer stations", and shared premium subscriptions to bypass geographic restrictions, evade safeguards, and violate providers' terms of use. The agencies recommend detecting anomalous prompts, accounts, and usage patterns; subtly altering responses to suspected distillers; and cross-organization intelligence sharing. They also call DeepSeek's publicly cited $5.6M training cost misleading because it excludes data acquired through distillation.
Fake Gemini installer delivers Vidar infostealer via Google Colab lure
Attackers used a fake Google Gemini installer hosted on Google Colab to deliver a Go-compiled Vidar infostealer that stole browser credentials from an EMEA company.
Darktrace investigated an EMEA company infection where the top search result for a Gemini-related filename pointed to a Google Colab page that redirected to a fake 'Windows Software Hub' hosting a malicious executable. The ZIP contained a README instructing victims to run the file as administrator and add it to antivirus exceptions, delivering a newer Go-compiled Vidar variant that used dtm[.]kijangturbo88[.]top over Telegram-based infrastructure. The malware stole browser credentials and other sensitive data; Darktrace's Autonomous Response blocked the C2 and quarantined the device.