Criminals Now Ask AI One Question About You: How Much Are You Worth?

A new piece of malware steals your passwords, cards and accounts, and then sends all of it to an AI with one job. The AI writes a report on you, and that report has a section titled "WHAT THEY'RE WORTH." Cisco Talos, one of the world's best known security research teams, published the details on October 31. They named the malware VOLTA.

For years, the hardest part of cybercrime wasn't stealing data. It was sorting through mountains of stolen data to find the victims actually worth chasing. VOLTA hands that job to AI. In Talos's words, the plan is to "cast a wide net, steal everything, and let AI sort out the specifics."

What VOLTA Takes From a Computer

VOLTA is what security people call an infostealer. It's a program that quietly gets onto a Windows computer, grabs as much personal information as it can, and then often deletes itself so there's little trace left behind.

The list of what it takes is long. It collects passwords, cookies and saved payment cards from Chrome style browsers. It takes email and Outlook profiles, Slack workspaces, and logins for Discord, Telegram, Steam and Roblox. It grabs Microsoft login tokens, technical keys used by developers, and cloud settings. It pulls every saved Wi-Fi password on the machine, takes screenshots, and even tries to crack cryptocurrency wallets.

A token is worth explaining here. When you tick "keep me signed in" on a website, your browser stores a small digital pass so you don't have to log in again. Criminals who steal that pass can often walk straight into your account without your password at all.

Then It Starts Building a File on You

VOLTA doesn't stop at stealing. It uses your own logged in accounts to learn more about you.

It searches your Gmail for receipts from Amazon, Walmart, PayPal, DoorDash and Uber Eats to confirm your home address. It pulls your food delivery history. It even checks the market value of your Roblox items. Bit by bit, it builds a profile with your location, home address, employer, likely birth year, the last four digits of your cards and the work tools you use.

That's when the AI gets involved.

The AI Becomes the Criminal's Analyst

VOLTA packs everything into a file called "Identity_Report.txt" and sends it to an AI model through a service called OpenRouter, which gives access to many different AI models in one place. The malware is set to try Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 first, then Moonshot's Kimi K2, then Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash.

The instructions it sends are chilling. The AI is told to act as "a forensic intelligence analyst drafting a target assessment." It has to fill in two sections. "WHAT THEY'RE WORTH" ranks the victim's valuables by how easily they can be turned into money, each marked low, medium or high. "THEIR OPSEC" judges how careful the victim is with security and passwords. The AI is also asked to link small details, like a name or a university, to likely password patterns. The instruction ends with "Go deep, not wide… Be blunt, specific, accurate."

There's one more detail worth noticing. The malware checks the AI's reply for phrases like "I can't" or "I'm not able." If it finds one, it simply moves on to the next model on the list. Talos says this shows the criminals fully expected some AI models to refuse, and they built a way around it. Talos didn't report which models, if any, actually refused.

Why This Is a Turning Point

Most news about AI and crime focuses on things like fake emails or deepfake voices. VOLTA shows something quieter and more practical. AI is taking over the boring office work of crime, the analysis, sorting and prioritizing.

Talos calls this "effort displacement." The most time consuming part of the job is passed to AI, so the criminal can handle far more victims with far less work. Think of a thief who used to break into one house and spend hours searching for the safe. Now the thief takes everything from a hundred houses at once and lets an assistant point out which three are worth going back to.

Talos also thinks VOLTA may be sold as a kit, where buyers fill in their own settings and get a custom copy. They're careful to say this is their inference, not a confirmed fact. If they're right, this kind of AI ranking could spread fast.

What Business Owners Should Take From This

Your team's laptops hold more than work files. A single infected computer can expose saved company card details, Slack access, Microsoft logins and cloud accounts, and the AI will tell the criminal exactly which of those are worth using.

The good news is that this kind of malware still has to get onto a computer first, and simple habits make that much harder. They also limit the damage if it does get in.

Simple Steps to Protect Yourself and Your Team

Stop saving passwords and cards in your browser. VOLTA goes straight for the browser's saved data. Use a proper password manager instead, and keep payment cards out of browser autofill on work machines.

Use two step login everywhere you can, and prefer app or hardware keys over text messages. Talos also recommends storing credentials in hardware backed stores like security keys, because they're much harder to steal from a computer.

Be strict about what gets installed. Infostealers usually arrive through files people download themselves, such as pirated software, game cheats, fake updates and "free" tools. Agree on a rule that work computers only get software from trusted sources.

Keep work and personal life apart. If the same browser holds your company Slack, your Roblox account and your food delivery history, one infection exposes all of them. A separate work browser profile, or better still a separate device, makes a big difference.

Never keep crypto recovery phrases in plain text. If a wallet's seed phrase was ever saved in a file on an infected computer, Talos advises treating that wallet as fully compromised and moving funds to a new wallet.

Have a plan for "what if." If a computer might be infected, sign out of all sessions, revoke access tokens, change passwords from a clean device, and let your team know. Speed matters, because stolen tokens can be used within minutes.

The Real Lesson

AI didn't invent cybercrime, but it's making criminals faster, more organized and more selective. Once your data is stolen, you're no longer just one name in a pile. You're a ranked target with a score next to your name.

The best defense is still the basics, done consistently. Keep less data in easy places, lock important accounts behind strong logins, and be careful about what gets onto your computers. If there's less to steal, the AI has less to rank.

Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence, Privacy, Small Business, Technology