Powerful new AI models are powering a growing wave of cyber attacks, experts say
Source: Fortune ·
Three incidents this month involved hundreds of website breaches, an unprecedented refund from OpenAI, and banking data stolen from 68,000 people.
From the source
Starting on Sept. 25, a hacker set loose an army of AI agents that attempted to break into over 1,200 websites over the next few weeks—autonomously, with no additional work required of the human hacker after sending them off on their task. The agents successfully breached about 100 companies, including farm equipment maker Deere, home appliance company SharkNinja, and engine manufacturer Cummins, according to Reuters, which first reported the incident, discovered by cybersecurity researchers.While the hacker didn’t need to execute the attack themselves, they had to foot the bill for the AI tools. It cost about $5,000 worth of tokens from a combination of DeepSeek and Anthropic’s Claude Code models, researchers told Reuters. That’s roughly $50 per successful breach. Autonomous attacks powered by AI agents are becoming more common, Jessica Ji, a senior research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) told Fortune. This is primarily happening because…