{"id":1875,"date":"2026-07-20T11:18:59","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T11:18:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedigitalfortress.us\/?p=1875"},"modified":"2026-07-20T11:18:59","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T11:18:59","slug":"russian-speaking-hacker-uses-google-gemini-cli-to-control-botnet-of-eight-dental-clinic-pcs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedigitalfortress.us\/?p=1875","title":{"rendered":"Russian-Speaking Hacker Uses Google Gemini CLI to Control Botnet of Eight Dental Clinic PCs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A solo Russian-speaking threat actor known as \u00abbandcampro<\/strong>\u00bb outsourced a chunk of their operations to Google’s open-source Gemini CLI artificial intelligence (AI) and commandeered a live botnet.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u00abThe 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,\u00bb Trend Micro researchers Joseph C Chen, Philippe Lin, Lucas Silva, Vladimir Kropotov, and Fyodor Yarochkin said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00abThe entire C&C operation fits in three plaintext files totaling roughly 5 KB, making it highly replicable and effectively disposable. The AI was also observed to proactively (unprompted) propose improvements 59 times without being asked.\u00bb<\/p>\n

Specifically, the threat actor is said to have abused Google Gemini\u202fCLI to deploy\u202fand operate a\u202fC&C\u202finfrastructure\u202fto control\u202feight computers\u202fin\u202fa dental clinic\u202fand access\u202ftheir\u202fOpenDental database. Besides writing code snippets, the AI served as the \u00abprimary\u202fhacking agent,\u202fconsultant,\u202fand\u202finterface\u00bb to\u202fthe entire operation.<\/p>\n

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This included setting up the server, deploying it on a new virtual private server (VPS), configuring the infrastructure, setting up Cloudflare tunnels, managing the bots, and debugging connectivity issues.<\/p>\n

Details of \u00abbandcampro\u00bb first emerged in late May 2026 in connection with a campaign dubbed Patriot Bait<\/strong> that used AI-assisted information operation (IO) techniques to run a Telegram channel, targeting politically engaged American audiences for cryptocurrency fraud and AI-assisted credential theft.<\/p>\n

Trend Micro has described the threat actor as a Russian speaker who used Google Gemini to \u00abimpersonate an American veteran patriot and to avoid Russian phrasing,\u00bb while tricking the AI agent into bypassing its guardrails by assuming the role of an \u00abauthorized pentester.\u00bb<\/p>\n

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The threat actor is said to have run prompts to study the old C&C infrastructure where the victim machines connected using Cloudflare tunnels and migrate it to a new architecture within six minutes. The architecture involves victims issuing outbound requests to a C&C server over HTTPS to pull and run PowerShell commands staged by the threat actor on the server.<\/p>\n

\u00abThe migration hit errors immediately, but the AI agent resolved them: When the payload\u202fdistribution\u202fserver returned a\u202f’502 Bad Gateway’\u202ferror, the AI diagnosed the issue\u202fand automatically added\u202fthe\u202fnecessary header\u202fto resolve it,\u00bb Trend Micro said.<\/p>\n

\u00abAs Cloudflare still blocked\u202fthe\u202frequests, the AI identified that the User-Agent header was required to bypass the WAF and\u202fthus\u202fadded it to the\u202frequest header. The actor did none of the debugging, and the migration was done in merely six minutes.\u00bb<\/p>\n

Once the migration was complete, the AI agent carried out additional debugging to successfully remediate errors that left all the victim machines disconnected from the C&C infrastructure. In addition, the threat actor has been found to leverage the AI agent to perform botnet management tasks by sending natural language instructions in Russian, which then enabled the AI tool to perform the following tasks –<\/p>\n