AI-Enabled Cyber Attacks: What They Are and How to Defend Against Them
Brief
AI-enabled cyber attacks are malicious operations in which adversaries use AI, most often large language models (LLMs), to plan, carry out, or scale any part of an attack. That includes writing phishing lures and deepfake pretexts, developing and debugging malware, discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities, and running intrusions end to end.
In most cases observed so far, attackers add AI to existing playbooks to move faster and at greater scale. What sets the most advanced cases apart is autonomy : the model, often running as an agent connected to offensive tooling, reasons about each result and chooses the next action itself instead of following a fixed script.
AI-Enabled Cyber Attacks: What They Are and How to Defend Against Them