Catching Smarter Mice With Even Smarter Cats
Fortinet, July 10,2025
From the beginning, the antivirus world has been a cat-and-mouse game, where malware authors and antivirus engineers constantly adapt their code to bypass or catch each other.
Artificial Intelligence is bringing the game to the next level, with malware authors using AI to improve their malware and anti-virus engineers using AI to assist them with reverse engineering.
(Un)Packing and (De)Obfuscating with AI assistance
Nowadays, nearly all malware is packed and/or obfuscated. AI doesn't help (yet) for packers: we tried this on a Linux/Prometei botnet sample from February 2025, and the AI would have wasted time reversing the inner logics of the packer if we hadn't helped it out. -