Tag: epidemiology

All the articles with the tag "epidemiology".

• The Intelligent Worm: Adaptive Malware

  12 Jul, 2026

  A conceptual, defense-oriented threat analysis of the 'Intelligent Worm' — a hypothetical self-propagating program whose exploitation capability is regenerated by an AI reasoning loop rather than fixed at authoring time. I walk the history of static worms through an epidemiological lens (the reproductive number R0 and the epidemic threshold), show why patching has historically driven outbreaks below threshold, and argue that an adaptive exploit term changes the shape of that curve. I take the feasibility limits seriously — hallucination, verification cost, autonomous experimentation — survey what current LLM-agent security research (Morris II, the Fang et al. autonomous-exploitation results, Google's Big Sleep) actually demonstrates, and lay out the defensive re-architecture the threat model implies. No exploit code, no propagation implementation: this is a stress-test of our defensive assumptions.