"A new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered penetration testing tool linked to a China-based company has attracted nearly 11,000 downloads on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository, raising concerns that it could be repurposed by cybercriminals for malicious purposes. Dubbed Villager, the framework is assessed to be the work of Cyberspike, which has positioned the tools as a red teaming solution to automate testing workflows."
"With the advent of generative AI (aka GenAI) models, threat actors have capitalized on the technology for social engineering, technical, and information operations in ways that have likely contributed to increased speed, access to expertise, and scalability. One key advantage to relying on such tools is that they lower the barrier to exploitation, and cut short the amount of time and effort required to pull off such attacks. What once required highly skilled operators and weeks of manual development can be automated using AI,"
The Villager package is an AI-powered penetration testing framework linked to Cyberspike and uploaded to PyPI in late July 2025 by a user named stupidfish001, a former HSCSEC CTF player. The package has nearly 11,000 downloads and is positioned as a red teaming solution to automate testing workflows, creating concerns about repurposing by cybercriminals akin to Cobalt Strike. The emergence follows reports of threat actors attempting to use HexStrike AI against disclosed vulnerabilities. Generative AI tools lower the barrier to exploitation by automating exploit creation, payload delivery, infrastructure setup, enabling parallelized scanning and adaptive decision-making at scale.
Read at The Hacker News
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]