The underground market for criminally oriented generative AI has moved beyond the early hype surrounding ‘malicious chatbots.’ The gradual integration of AI as a productivity layer within cybercrime operations has become the dominant story, indicating that while the potential for fully autonomous AI hacking systems is possible, attackers are not embracing them as expected. Instead, threat actors are increasingly using AI to accelerate routine, but operationally significant, tasks to scale their operations. Drafting phishing lures, profiling targets, debugging code, generating forged documents, modifying malware, translating victim communications, and processing stolen data at scale were once time-consuming activities that AI has made significantly easier. AI does not replace cybercriminals; it lowers friction, increases speed, and expands the range of actors able to perform tasks that previously required more time, skill, or external support.
Read more…
Source: Rapid7 News
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- Cybercriminals breach Aflac as part of hacking spree against US insurance industry
June 20, 2025
Cybercriminals have breached insurance giant Aflac, potentially stealing Social Security numbers, insurance claims and health information, the company said Friday, the latest in a spree of hacks against the insurance industry. With billions of dollars in annual revenue and tens of millions of customers, Aflac is the biggest victim yet in the ongoing digital assault on ...
- UBS bank reports data leak after attack on its external supplier
June 18, 2025
Zurich-based banking giant UBS Group has confirmed that company information was stolen during a cyberattack on one of its external suppliers, though it assured that no client data was compromised. The bank said the breach was part of a larger cyber incident affecting multiple companies, including former UBS affiliate Chain IQ and Swiss private bank Pictet. ...
- Scammers hijack websites of popular brands to insert fake phone number
June 18, 2025
Cybercriminals frequently use fake search engine listings to take advantage of our trust in popular brands, and then scam us. It often starts, as with so many attacks, with a sponsored search result on Google. In the latest example of this type of scam, we found tech support scammers hijacking the results of people looking for ...
- Scania hit by cyberattack – thousands of customers potentially affected
June 18, 2025
Swedish automotive manufacturer Scania has confirmed suffering a cyberattack which saw it lose sensitive customer data. Security researchers Hackmanac found a new thread on a dark web forum, in which a database allegedly stolen from ‘insurance.scania.com’ was being offered for sale to an exclusive buyer for an unknown sum of money. “hi guys. we hacked new ...
- Hackers steal and destroy millions from Iran’s largest crypto exchange
June 18, 2025
Iran’s largest crypto exchange, Nobitex, said Wednesday that it was hacked and funds have been drained from its hot wallet. In a statement on its website translated by TechCrunch, Nobitex said it detected unauthorized access to its infrastructure and hot wallet, in which the company stores a portion of its customers’ cryptocurrency. The company said it ...
- Innovative Tunnelling and Forensic Tool Abuse: IR Tales from the Field
June 17, 2025
Rapid7’s Incident Response (IR) team was engaged to investigate an incident involving an attempted Cobalt Strike execution. The investigation uncovered twists and turns with pre-ransomware activities, tunneling tools, and attackers taking a page out of the defender’s playbook. The attacker took careful steps to maintain access to the environment through persistence that mimicked normal user behavior. ...