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Title: AI Is Reshaping Hacking. No One Agrees How Fast

Link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/08/16/193622...

"Several cybersecurity companies debuted advancements in AI agents at the
Black Hat conference last week," reports Axios, "signaling that cyber
defenders could soon have the tools to catch up to adversarial hackers." -
Microsoft shared details about a prototype for a new agent that can
automatically detect malware - although it's able to detect only 24% of
malicious files as of now. - Trend Micro released new AI-driven "digital
twin" capabilities that let companies simulate real-world cyber threats in a
safe environment walled off from their actual systems. - Several companies
and research teams also publicly released open-source tools that can
automatically identify and patch vulnerabilities as part of the government-
backed AI Cyber Challenge. Yes, but: Threat actors are now using those AI-
enabled tools to speed up reconnaissance and dream up brand-new attack
vectors for targeting each company, John Watters, CEO of iCounter and a
former Mandiant executive, told Axios. The article notes "two competing
narratives about how AI is transforming the threat landscape." One says
defenders still have the upper hand. Cybercriminals lack the money and
computing resources to build out AI-powered tools, and large language models
have clear limitations in their ability to carry out offensive strikes. This
leaves defenders with time to tap AI's potential for themselves. [In a DEF
CON presentation a member of Anthropic's red team said its Claude AI model
will "soon" be able to perform at the level of a senior security researcher,
the article notes later] Then there's the darker view. Cybercriminals are
already leaning on open-source LLMs to build tools that can scan internet-
connected devices to see if they have vulnerabilities, discover zero-day
bugs, and write malware. They're only going to get better, and quickly...
Right now, models aren't the best at making human-like judgments, such as
recognizing when legitimate tools are being abused for malicious purposes.
And running a series of AI agents will require cybercriminals and nation-
states to have enough resources to pay the cloud bills they rack up, Michael
Sikorski, CTO of Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat research team, told
Axios. But LLMs are improving rapidly. Sikorski predicts that malicious
hackers will use a victim organization's own AI agents to launch an attack
after breaking into their infrastructure.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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