North Korean cybercriminals have stepped up their use of Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Gemini to supercharge their cryptocurrency theft operations and malware attacks, the U.S. search giant reported Thursday.

In its new “AI Threat Tracker” report, the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said North Korean state-sponsored threat actors have continued their “misuse” of generative AI tools to enhance all stages of their operations.

One such group, classified by Google as UNC1069 (also known as MASAN and CryptoCore), used Gemini to research cryptocurrency concepts and locate data related to targets’ virtual currency wallet applications. 

This financially motivated cybercrime group