The hunt is on to find protections against the coming generation of adaptive AI worm malware, to head off a global incident on the scale of other famous worm events, such as NotPetya, Stuxnet, MSBlast, or the SQL Slammer worm. AI adaptive worms will be autonomous agents that rapidly self-propagate by searching for zero-day bugs, known but unpatched software flaws, and unprotected secrets — and they will be able to do this across multiple environments, morphing dynamically as they go. To get ahead of this evolution, AI/machine learning (ML) security researchers at the University of Toronto, the Canadian AI incubator Vector Institute, enterprise-software firm ServiceNow, and the University of Cambridge created a proof-of-concept (PoC) agentic AI worm that spreads by adapting to each new environment, searching for vulnerabilities, and creating programs to exploit the systems.

Full report : AI worms, or “viruses with wings and brains,” adapt to new environments, seek out vulnerabilities, and will likely strike within a year, researchers say.