AI-Generated Malware Attacks 230,000 Exposed Ray AI Clusters in Massive ShadowRay 2.0 Botnet Campaign

SecurityOnline[.]info reports that researchers at Oligo Security have uncovered a massive, fast-evolving cyberattack campaign hijacking exposed Ray AI clusters worldwide through the long-standing ShadowRay vulnerability (CVE-2023-48022), marking one of the first cases of AI-generated malware used against AI infrastructure.

The article states that the threat actor, operating under the alias IronErn440, has transformed Ray’s legitimate orchestration functions into a self-propagating, globally distributed botnet capable of cryptomining, lateral movement, data exfiltration, reverse shell access, DDoS attacks and automated worm-like propagation to new Ray servers. A striking statistic cited is that there are now more than 230,000 Ray servers exposed to the internet, a tenfold increase from the researchers’ initial ShadowRay discovery.

The piece notes that attackers are leveraging LLMs to accelerate exploitation, with payloads containing docstrings and verbose logic, refined via GitLab and GitHub commits to form a malware CI/CD pipeline. It also highlights continued exposure of Ray dashboards by thousands of organisations and references CVE-2023-48022 as a vulnerability that was never directly fixed.