{"paper":{"title":"Tiny Enough to Break In: Agentic Remote Access Trojans Powered by Small Language Models","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CR","authors_text":"Cameron Berryman, Daniel Graham, Joel Sadler, Suhas Adavelly, Victoria Lovelace, Yuhan You","submitted_at":"2026-08-04T01:42:43Z","abstract_excerpt":"Agentic artificial intelligence raises a new security concern: cyber threats that reason, act, and adapt locally without continuous human direction. We examine this threat through an Agentic Remote Access Trojan (agentic RAT): a Remote Access Trojan augmented with a locally deployed Small Language Model (SLM). The SLM interprets host and network observations, selects actions, recovers from failed steps, and reduces reliance on an external operator. We implement the concept in a controlled, network-isolated lab built from Kali Linux, a Metasploitable2 target, LM Studio, and a local 8-billion-pa"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2608.03009","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2608.03009/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}