Researchers bypass Cylance AI malware detector with universal string
Attack on AI1 Research / proof of conceptAdversarial evasion
Researchers created a universal bypass string that, when appended to malicious files, successfully evades detection by Cylance's AI malware detector. The research demonstrates a vulnerability in AI-based security classification systems.
Details
- type
- Attack on AIAn AI model, agent or AI-powered product was the thing exploited, abused or leaked.
- categories
- Adversarial evasionInputs crafted to make a model misclassify or miss detections (perturbations, evasion of AI-based defences).
- Adversarial evasion
- owasp llm top 10
- no entry for these categories
- mitre atlas
- Both rows are derived from the type and categories (OWASP 2025 edition, ATLAS release 2026.09), not classified per record. How
- severity
- 1 · Research / proof of conceptDemonstrated by researchers; no known real-world exploitation.
- targets
- Framework / tooling
- products
- CylancePROTECT, Cylance Smart Antivirus
- incident date
- 31 Mar 2023
- first reported
- 31 Mar 2023
- origin
- AVID
- classifier confidence
- 0.90 · published at or above 0.80; see the methodology
- tags
- adversarial-evasion · malware-detection · bypass
- record
- created 2026-10-18 06:56Z · updated 2026-10-18 06:56Z · json
Sources · 4
- 2023-03-31AVID-2023-V004: Researchers at Skylight were able to create a universal bypass string that evades detection by Cylance's AI Malware detector when appended to a malicious file.AVID · github.com/avidml/avid-db/blob/main/vulnerabilities/2023/AVID-2023-V004.json
- 2023-03-31Bypassing Cylance's AI Malware DetectionMITRE ATLAS · atlas.mitre.org/studies/AML.CS0003
- 2023-03-31Skylight Cyber Blog Post, "Cylance, I Kill You!"skylightcyber.com · skylightcyber.com/2019/07/18/cylance-i-kill-you
- 2023-03-31Statement's from Skylight Cyber CEOsecurity7.net · security7.net/news/the-new-cylance-vulnerability-what-you-need-to-know
Titles and links belong to their publishers. The summary above is written by GCD AI RADAR in its own words; data is CC BY-SA 4.0.
Related incidents
- 2023-03-31Azure Red Team demonstrates adversarial evasion on Microsoft edge AI product1 Researchon AIEvasion2 src
- 2023-03-31Microsoft AI Red Team conducts red teaming exercise on Azure service1 Researchon AIEvasion2 src
- 2023-03-31MITRE AI Red Team demonstrates physical evasion attack on face identification1 Researchon AIEvasion2 src
- 2023-03-31CNN-Based Botnet DGA Detector Bypassed via Domain Mutation1 Researchon AIEvasion4 src
- 2023-03-31Kaspersky Antimalware ML Model Evaded via Feature Knowledge1 Researchon AIEvasion3 src
- 2023-03-31Researchers replicate machine translation services and transfer adversarial attacks1 Researchon AIModel theftEvasion5 src