Russian-Speaking Hacker Uses Google Gemini CLI to Control Botnet of Eight Dental Clinic PCs
Jul 20, 2026
Artificial Intelligence / Cybercrime
A solo Russian-speaking threat actor known as " bandcampro " outsourced a chunk of their operations to Google's open-source Gemini CLI artificial intelligence (AI) and commandeered a live botnet. The findings come from an analysis of 200 Gemini CLI session logs between March 19 and April 21, 2026, which found the threat actor using AI, among other things, to crack passwords, set up a residential proxy, compromise WordPress merchants, and plan a phone-based cryptocurrency fraud scheme aimed at elderly people in the U.S. and Canada. "The logs documented how the threat actor used an AI agent to migrate a command-and-control (C&C) server, and to control a small-scale botnet, among other hacking activities," Trend Micro researchers Joseph C Chen, Philippe Lin, Lucas Silva, Vladimir Kropotov, and Fyodor Yarochkin said . "The entire C&C operation fits in three plaintext files totaling roughly 5 KB, making it highly replicable and effectively disposa...
