The age of malware-generated AI art has arrived. The first image I found rivals that of the great HR Geiger in both scale and complexity. Twitter user Greg Linares, who brought us this wicked combination of AI malware art (opens in new tab), has not only imaged an impressive snapshot of a suspicious lurking space, but also designed a malware-generated cyberpunk-themed music album with his skills, and actually slapped them together.

But just as the war crowds of the past have inspired great artists to create masterpieces, so too have contemporary malware artists found dark inspiration.

Linares, who goes by the name Laughing_Mantis on Twitter, has compiled her malware-based AI art designs into a profile dedicated to malware art (opens in new tab). Each piece curated here is generated from a local version of Stable Diffusion v1.4 and a separate installation of 2.0 with significant changes. Essentially, he uses "strings, text, filenames, and other available metadata inside the malware to drive the AI art prompts."

What caught my eye earlier this morning was a glorious collection of images of Linares generated using the "Sandworm Group" malware. According to Linares' description, its debugging information and test folders were littered with quotes from "Dune," from which the "Sandworm" was derived. This crooked, cable-covered creature towers over humanity in a misty, near-destruction scene, mouth agape and hungry for flesh.

If this description wasn't enough to send chills down your spine, something a little more realistic might stimulate your fight-or-flight instinct.

The Sandworm is a Russian Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group, which Microsoft calls Iridium (open in new tab) and claims to be associated with the Russian intelligence agency GRU. That means the art was inadvertently designed by Russian hackers with a penchant for mystical science fiction, who are also believed to have been behind the 2015 breach of Ukraine's power grid that resulted in a massive blackout and disruption of energy supplies for some 225,000 residents. It was this group (opens in new tab). Microsoft also claims to have supported the recent missile attack on Ukraine's infrastructure with a cyberattack on the same sector.

The group is supposed to have used a tool known as Black Energy 3, which according to Malpedia (opens in new tab) is "associated with electricity and power generation for purposes of espionage, denial of service, and data destruction." The Sandworm group was able to compromise the Ivano-Frankivsk power grid by siphoning off operator credentials (opens in new tab).

The malware-based music (opens in new tab) created by Linares is also based on Twitter user vx-underground's vast collection of malware (opens in new tab), so the same messy origin story is No doubt about it.

Speaking with Linares, they told me: "Art generated from malware is kind of an ongoing process. We haven't figured out how best to render it yet, so each malware sample is a little different, but the idea is generally the same.

He used text inversion to help the AI generator better understand the prompts. Malware is not always filled with the best content for generating art, so by using text inversion, you can train the AI to interpret certain things into more aesthetically pleasing content."

"An example is "threading," which is found in many malware and is associated with multiple commands that are executed simultaneously." Reversing the threading text, we found something like "biomechanical threads, wires, cables, ropes, and strings."

They further explained that the AI-trained image collection includes "actual photographs of urban decay and debris taken in Baltimore, Centralia, Seattle, San Francisco, and Tucson. In addition, much of the biomechanical data is based on photos from my father's tool collection, machine parts, and science fiction magazine collection."

In other words, not everything is based on pessimism. And despite the potential connection to such a devastating cyber attack, there is no denying the beauty brought about by the utter devastation. Everything is metal, and I may have a new obsession.