Research
Here Comes The AI Worm: Unleashing Zero-click Worms that Target GenAI-Powered Applications
Publication date not yet evaluated · Added arxiv.org
Page published
Coverage timeline
Single-source research — one report is available.
Why it matters
Morris-II shows that interconnected RAG-powered AI agents can be turned into a worm-propagation medium, a systemic risk defenders of GenAI ecosystems must anticipate and mitigate.
The paper 'Here Comes The AI Worm' by Cohen, Bitton, and Nassi demonstrates Morris-II, a zero-click self-replicating adversarial prompt that triggers cascading indirect prompt injections across RAG-based GenAI applications such as email assistants, forcing each to exfiltrate confidential data and poison the RAG of additional applications. The authors evaluate propagation across context sizes, embedding algorithms, and hop counts, and introduce a guardrail called Virtual Donkey achieving a 1.0 true-positive rate at a 0.015 false-positive rate.