Ravie Lakshmanan, The Hacker News
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Microsoft has warned of an active cryptojacking campaign that makes use of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot interactions as a mechanism for surfacing malicious download sites.
“This emerging delivery technique extends social engineering beyond conventional search results and increases the visibility of malicious software recommendations,” Microsoft Defender Experts and the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said in a report published Tuesday.
The activity, per the tech giant, impersonates legitimate system utilities like CrystalDiskInfo, HWMonitor, Display Driver Uninstaller, FurMark, K-Lite Codec Pack, and PDFgear, likely in an attempt to target users who own high-performance GPUs. The idea is to focus on compromising systems with higher mining value than indiscriminately infecting a large number of machines, it added.
The goals of the campaign are not merely financially motivated. The threat actors have also been found to establish persistent remote access to compromised hosts through ScreenConnect deployments, which could then be leveraged for follow-on activity, such as data theft, lateral movement, or ransomware.
The attack chain is more deliberate than other typical cryptocurrency mining efforts, strategically opting for endpoints that help maximize GPU mining yield per compromised device. The Windows maker said it detected and blocked activity associated with the campaign.
It all begins when users search for trusted system utilities and hardware-monitoring software on search engines, which surface malicious sites that have been gamed via techniques like search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning. Subsequent iterations observed in April 2026 indicate that users are being directed to these sites not through search engine results, but rather via interactions with large language model (LLM)-based tools.
“In these cases, users querying AI chatbots for software download recommendations were presented with links to attacker-controlled domains within generated responses,” Microsoft said. “While this behavior is based on observed patterns and correlated data sources, it’s consistent with emerging techniques in AI search result poisoning, representing an extension of traditional SEO poisoning beyond conventional search engines.”
Each of these sites contains a prominent download button that retrieves a ZIP archive from a campaign-specific subdomain of gleeze[.]com, which is hosted by infrastructure associated with Dynu, a dynamic DNS provider frequently used by threat actors. More than 150 malicious domains have been identified serving the malicious tools.