VOLTA infostealer uses AI to profile victims

Talos described VOLTA as a self-deleting Windows infostealer and a mature infostealer with an optional AI-integration layer.[1] The malware is self-named “VOLTA-AUTODOXER” and surfaced through Talos’s CAIRN research effort.[1] Its AI stage is part of the post-theft workflow: Talos says it profiles victims and ranks their assets by potential monetization value.[1] That distinction matters when assessing the threat: AI is used to organize stolen material, rather than being required for the malware to function.[2]

Talos says VOLTA can steal browser passwords and cookies, payment cards, cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases, messaging and gaming sessions, and Microsoft OAuth tokens.[1] It also collects SSH and cloud-provider keys, Wi-Fi profiles and screenshots.[1] The resulting evidence bundle can include geolocation, a home address, an employer, an inferred birth year and the last four digits of a payment card.[1] Talos says the malware searches Gmail for purchase receipts to help confirm a home address and pulls UberEats and DoorDash order histories.[1]

Talos says VOLTA sends its evidence bundle to OpenRouter with a system prompt, and uses Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 by default.[1] Its fallback models are Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash.[1] VOLTA can check responses for refusal phrases before trying another model, using a chain of up to three models.[1] The prompt asks the model to assess a target’s suitability, cite its analysis, rank valuables by monetization value, and assess security posture and password hygiene.[1]

Talos says the AI stage produces a prioritized, citation-backed dossier of the victim and monetizable assets.[1] It can also enrich Discord account profiles using stolen tokens.[1] However, Wired reports that Cisco Talos did not track whether VOLTA had been used in the wild.[2] Talos says the builder has six swappable slots filled at build time, a setup that suggests the author sells access and customers provide values for custom binaries.[1] Talos also says VOLTA uses no infrastructure owned by the threat actor.[1]