Wouldn't be surprised if elaborate worms like this are AI-designed
I would. AI designed software in general does not include novel ideas. And this is the kind of novel software AI is not great at, because there's not much training data.
Of course it's very possible someone wrote it with AI help. But almost no chance it was designed by AI.
Turns out it's a pretty rudimentary XSS worm from 2023. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; if all you have is a LLM, everything looks like slop?
I mean....elaborate is a stretch.
I wouldn't be surprised either. But the original formatting of the worm makes me think it was human written, or maybe AI assisted, but not 100% AI. It has a lot of unusual stylistic choices that I don't believe an AI would intentionally output.