APT28’s LameHug wasn’t just malware, it was a trial run for AI-driven cyber war, according to experts at MITRE. Marissa Dotter, lead AI Engineer at MITRE, and Gianpaolo Russo, principal AI/cyber operations Engineer at MITRE, shared their work with MITRE’s new Offensive Cyber Capability Unified LLM Testing (OCCULT) framework at the pre-Black Hat AI Summit, a one-day event held in Las Vegas on August 5. The OCCULT framework initiative started in the spring of 2024 and aimed to measure autonomous agent behaviors and evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) and AI agents in offensive cyber capabilities. Speaking to Infosecurity during Black Hat, Dotter and Russo explained that the emergence of LameHug, revealed by a July 2025 report by the National Computer Emergency Response…