{"id":208499,"date":"2025-10-08T07:06:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T07:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/208499\/"},"modified":"2025-10-08T07:06:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T07:06:07","slug":"autonomous-ai-hacking-and-the-future-of-cybersecurity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/208499\/","title":{"rendered":"Autonomous AI hacking and the future of cybersecurity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>AI agents are now hacking computers. They\u2019re getting better at all phases of cyberattacks, faster than most of us expected. They can chain together different aspects of a cyber operation, and hack autonomously, at computer speeds and scale. This is going to change everything.<\/p>\n<p>Over the summer, hackers proved the concept, industry institutionalized it, and criminals operationalized it. In June, AI company XBOW took the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.techrepublic.com\/article\/news-ai-xbow-tops-hackerone-us-leaderboad\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">top spot<\/a> on HackerOne\u2019s US leaderboard after submitting over 1,000 new vulnerabilities in just a few months. In August, the seven teams competing in DARPA\u2019s AI Cyber Challenge <a href=\"https:\/\/www.darpa.mil\/news\/2025\/aixcc-results\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">collectively found<\/a> 54 new vulnerabilities in a target system, in four hours (of compute). Also in August, Google <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/08\/04\/google-says-its-ai-based-bug-hunter-found-20-security-vulnerabilities\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">announced<\/a> that its Big Sleep AI found dozens of new vulnerabilities in open-source projects.<\/p>\n<p>It gets worse. In July Ukraine\u2019s CERT <a href=\"https:\/\/www.csoonline.com\/article\/4025139\/novel-malware-from-russias-apt28-prompts-llms-to-create-malicious-windows-commands.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">discovered<\/a> a piece of Russian malware that used an LLM to automate the cyberattack process, generating both system reconnaissance and data theft commands in real-time. In August, Anthropic reported that they disrupted a threat actor that used Claude, Anthropic\u2019s AI model, to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.anthropic.com\/news\/detecting-countering-misuse-aug-2025\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">automate<\/a> the entire cyberattack process. It was an impressive use of the AI, which performed network reconnaissance, penetrated networks, and harvested victims\u2019 credentials. The AI was able to figure out which data to steal, how much money to extort out of the victims, and how to best write extortion emails.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI agents are now hacking computers. They\u2019re getting better at all phases of cyberattacks, faster than most of&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":208500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-208499","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}