Appraisal by AI: Model-driven victim prioritization in the VOLTA infostealer

Cisco Talos describes VOLTA, a self-deleting Windows infostealer that, after harvesting credentials, sessions and wallets, sends a victim profile to an LLM through OpenRouter. The model returns a ranked, tiered list of monetizable assets. It defaults to Claude Opus 4.6 and falls back to Kimi K2 and Gemini 2.5 Flash when refusal phrases appear. Talos infers a builder-style product from template slots, and its claims about the operator's intent are interpretation. For defenders, the signal is model-refusal handling becoming a design requirement in malware.