- Villager is an AI-native pentest tool with ~10,000 downloads, likely including threat actors
- It automates attacks using Kali Linux and DeepSeek AI, raising dual-use concerns
- Cyberspike, its creator, has ties to malware and Chinese hacker circles
Is the world ready for AI-powered Persistent Threat Actors (AIPT)? We’re about to find out, as a Chinese company recently built and released an AI-native pentesting tool.
It’s been picked up approximately 10,000 times in the last two months, signaling rapid adoption.
Among the people downloading the tool are, most likely, threat actors as well.
Widely adopted
This is the conclusion of a new report published by the security outfit Straiker. Its researchers, Dan Regalado and Amanda Rousseau, observed a new tool called Villager. They’re describing it as an AI-powered successor to Cobalt Strike, integrating tools like Kali Linux and DeepSeek AI to automate offensive security operations.
“Originally positioned as a red-team offering, Cyberspike has released an AI-enabled, MCP-supported automation tool called “Villager” that combines Kali Linux toolsets with DeepSeek AI models to fully automate testing workflows,” the researchers warned.
“The rapid, public availability and automation capabilities create a realistic risk that Villager will follow the Cobalt Strike trajectory: commercially or legitimately developed tooling becoming widely adopted by threat actors for malicious campaigns.”
Widely adopted it is. The tool is freely available on PyPI, the world’s biggest Python Package Index, and it has been downloaded nearly 10,000 times since its release in July.
Straiker also claims that Cyberspike, the company behind Villager, is shady at best, and quite possibly – a threat actor engaged in distributing malware. At the moment, it doesn’t have an official website, but it used to have one two years ago, and back then, it was offering a product called Cyberspike.
Its entire toolset and arsenal were subsequently uploaded to VirusTotal and flagged as AsyncRAT, a dangerous and well-established remote access trojan. There were also traces of Mimikatz, an exploit for Windows that extracts passwords stored in memory.
The Register added more weight to the suspicions of an elaborate hack, reporting that the tool’s author is a former capture the flag player for the Chinese HSCSEC team. This “is significant because these competitions in China provide a recruiting and training pipeline for skilled hackers and Beijing’s cybersecurity and intelligence agencies looking to hire them,” the publication concluded.
Via The Register
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