NSA official turned founder: AI multiplies attackers’ expertise while defenders are still short on talent
Source: Fortune ·
A lone attacker, possibly 26, used AI agents to break into seven Korean lenders. The fix for defenders is not fewer people.
From the source
Between late September and early October, an attacker broke into seven South Korean financial institutions and exfiltrated the personal data of about 68,000 people. CrowdStrike traced the campaign to ARTEX, an open-source AI hacking agent built in China and run alongside Anthropic’s Claude Code, and said the actor could be a 26-year-old. President Lee Jae Myung warned that AI can now make hacking “easy for even those without special skills.” An official at the Korea Financial Security Institute added, “It is correct that AI was used in the attack, but the AI did not act autonomously without human involvement — a hacker used the AI as a tool.” Look closely at that hacker. CrowdStrike found no sign of an elite team or a state program, only an actor who paired agentic tools with established techniques. The human contribution looks thin: choosing Korean lenders as targets, aiming the agents at them, and asking Claude where the stolen data might be sold. The software supplied most of the…