‘The assertion that the AI is an autonomous being is insane’: Cyber expert says companies should face criminal charges when their AI hacks
Source: Fortune ·
From a decade-old PHP flaw to AI agents going off script, a wave of incidents this month shows how AI has handed attackers an edge.
From the source
Cybersecurity experts are calling this month “Black October,” and unfortunately, the name has nothing to do with Halloween. Over the past several weeks, AI developers, government agencies, and private companies have disclosed a wave of cybersecurity incidents. One of the most significant: a pair of decade-old flaws in PHP, the programming language behind an estimated 70% of websites, which researchers uncovered with the help of AI models. Some of this month’s incidents involved hackers using AI tools to hammer an organization’s digital defenses at machine speed; others resulted from plain human error. But many cybersecurity experts agree that this is the beginning of a new era, one in which AI can be used both to defend people’s cybersecurity and to attack it. “AI is making the old vulnerabilities cheaper to discover and exploit, but on the other side, the defense side… that’s not sped up,” Junfeng Yang, a computer science professor at Columbia University, told Fortune. “That is the…