AI Worms Were Only a Precursor with Ben Nassi

AI Worms Were Only a Precursor with Ben Nassi

The first AI worm was just a precursor. Today, In the Wild goes live - conversations about AI worth having right now. Non-deterministic. Just like AI.  In episode 1 we hosted Ben Nassi - Ben is on the bleeding edge of practical academic work on AI security. He is a BlackHat Review Board member. Leads the Adversarial Minds research group as a faculty member at TAU. Was very early to identify that AI security is about real world impact not harmful outputs. The first to show an AI worm. A Pwnie award winner on his cryptoanalysis work. And is a co-organizer of a new conference the Real World AI Security conference 2026. We'd also like to give a shout out to Stav Cohen, Zenity's Blue Team leader, who was part of Ben Nassi's research team and led the mentioned research projects. In the Wild - Hosted by Zenity Co-Founder & CTO Michael Bargury. Research Agentic Botnets - https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07433   AI Worm - https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3719027.3765196  Relevant Profiles: Ben Nassi  https://x.com/ben_nassi  https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-nassi-phd-68a743115/  Stav Cohen https://x.com/StAJect0r   https://www.linkedin.com/in/staject0r/  Michael Bargury https://x.com/mbrg0  https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelbargury/   Zenity Labs https://x.com/zenitysec  https://www.linkedin.com/company/zenitysec/ https://labs.zenity.io/  A Zenity Labs podcast, produced by POLDHU CHAPTERS 00:00  Cold open and introductions 01:27   Why “promptware”: prompt injection was too small a word 07:33   The kill chain paper and the missing catastrophe 15:28   The end of the beginning 20:10   Refusals are not a security barrier 22:07   Safety vs. security: the blame game 25:16   Slopsquatting: weaponizing a hallucination 28:33   From one prompt to a botnet 33:02   Disclosure is broken 41:55   From the AI worm to remote code execution 46:40   The scan comes back clean