Cybersecurity company ESET has disclosed that it discovered an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered ransomware variant codenamed PromptLock. Written in Golang, the newly identified strain uses the gpt-oss:20b model from OpenAI locally via the Ollama API to generate malicious Lua scripts in real-time. The open-weight language model was released by OpenAI earlier this month. "PromptLock leverages Lua scripts generated from hard-coded prompts to enumerate the local filesystem, inspect target files, exfiltrate selected data, and perform encryption," ESET said. "These Lua scripts are cross-platform compatible, functioning on Windows, Linux, and macOS." The ransomware code also embeds instructions to craft a custom note based on the "files affected," and the infected machine is a personal…