---
title: AI-Made Phishing Decoys Are Hiding Malware in Windows Shortcuts
description: North Korea's Kimsuky used the AI agent opencode for Operation GitPower decoys, then shipped them with placeholder text still in place.
canonical_url: https://codekeeper.co/ticker/north-korea-kimsuky-ai-phishing-malware
---

[Cyberattacks](https://codekeeper.co/ticker/tag/cyberattacks)

# AI-Made Phishing Decoys Are Hiding Malware in Windows Shortcuts

North Korea's Kimsuky used the AI agent opencode for Operation GitPower decoys, then shipped them with placeholder text still in place.

![Content Team](https://codekeeper.co/hubfs/_sized/Codekeeper_21_beeldmerkL-800.png)

By Content Team Sep 8, 2026

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North Korea's Kimsuky group turned to opencode, an open-source AI coding agent, to mass-produce the decoy documents behind its latest phishing run. Speed came at the cost of care. Genians counted placeholder text for payment dates, grace periods, and interest rates surviving into the files that shipped, nine times over, which is what gave the tool away. What reaches the inbox is handled far more carefully. Genians examined 13 shortcut files sent in ZIP archives between August 11 and 19, 2026, aimed at Korean financial and corporate staff, each wearing a Chrome icon over a forged "Hangul Document" property. Open one and PowerShell runs behind 5,800 to 9,500 characters of arguments, held out of sight by roughly 300 leading spaces. From there the loader reaches GitHub Raw with a hardcoded access token, then registers a hidden scheduled task misspelled to pass for BitLocker, MATLAB, or .NET before deleting itself. Three samples never fetch a decoy and open a 16-byte error file instead, which looks like a failed attack. Persistence and payload retrieval run anyway. That is why document quality settles nothing. Genians points defenders at the shortcut itself: a chrome.exe icon over a PowerShell target, randomly named scripts written into AppData and executed on the spot, and scheduled tasks carrying slight misspellings or long strings of digits. Source: [Cyber Security News](https://cybersecuritynews.com/kimsuky-hackers/)

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