AI-generated malware is already here. So why are we still guessing?

Cybersecurity used to be a race. Now it’s a chase and defenders are falling behind.

In his latest feature on Security Boulevard, Stairwell founder Mike Wiacek lays out a stark truth: every sample is now a zero-day.

“What once required infrastructure and skill can now be automated. With a few prompts and a language model, attackers can generate polymorphic code that adapts to each target.”

In other words, there are no reused payloads. No shared infrastructure. Nothing that looks familiar.

Traditional detection — pattern matching, behavioral analysis, even EDR is built to react. But when malware can remain dormant or change with every deployment, waiting for it to “act bad” is no longer good enough.

What defenders need instead:

• Visibility into what enters your environment, not just what behaves badly
• A searchable record of history, not just alerts and guesses
• Tools that ask: What was this file built to do?