Cybersecurity researchers at Cisco Talos have uncovered a new piece of malware known as Volta-Autodoxer (VOLTA) which uses commercial AI models to analyse the data it steals from Windows systems, identifying the most valuable targets. This shows that AI technology is now increasingly being used inside malware to automate processes.
While traditional infostealers will steal sensitive data from infected systems such as saved passwords, browser cookies, payment card details, crypto wallet recovery phrases, authentication tokens and cloud credentials, the attacker often has to manually search through large amounts of data to identify valuable targets. Volta aims to cut this out using automated analysis of the victims data on the infected system.
During the data collection phase, the malware will collect credentials, session data, Wi-Fi profiles, SSH keys, Microsoft OAuth tokens and screenshots of the desktop. It will also target Discord, Telegram, Steam and Roblox accounts to collect active session and account data.
It will then use the stolen session tokens to access the victims main email accounts. This includes Gmail and Outlook. It will look at purchase confirmations and order history on services like Amazon, UberEats, DoorDash and Grubhub. This can give an insight into the victims home address, shopping habits, daily routines, work details and other personal information. It can also look up third-party services such as Rolimons to determine the resale value of their Roblox items.
The malware will then organise the data it has collected and send it to OpenRouter, an API gateway that allows access to multiple AI models. The prompt inside the malware will tell the language model to act as a forensic intelligence analyst. It will create a detailed report on the victims and will identify if they could be valuable financially and how good their operational security is.
The malware will use Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model by default. However, the developers have considered that there may be AI safety measures in place preventing the creation of malicious reports.
The malware will look for rejection phrases such as 'I can’t’ in the models responses and switch to another provider if the request is denied. It will switch to Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash.
Once the report has been created, the malware will package the stolen data and AI report into ZIP files. These will be sent directly to the attackers via a Telegram channel. Files will be named things like volta_dox.zip.
The malware was discovered by Cisco Talos during their research using the CAIRN research framework.
The builder also has configurable fields suggesting that this malware may have been designed to be distributed or sold to other cybercriminals. While it has not been seen widely in the wild, it shows how AI can be used to help attackers target victims more effectively by automatically creating profiles. This makes the personal information stolen more useful for targeted cybercrime.