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:
- WebMonitor RAT Bundled with Zoom Installer
April 29, 2020
The coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the usefulness of communication apps for work-from-home (WFH) setups. However, like they always do, cybercriminals are expected to exploit popular trends and user behavior. We have witnessed threats against several messaging apps including Zoom. In early April, we spotted an attack leveraging Zoom installers to spread a cryptocurrency miner. We recently encountered a similar attack ...
- Anatomy of Formjacking Attacks
April 27, 2020
The rise of the Internet has contributed positively in many ways to people’s lives and you can find almost any service on the internet now. However, the convenience of the internet also opens a gate to use malware to steal people’s confidential information, and unfortunately, more and more malware authors are taking advantage of this. Formjacking, ...
- A look at the ATM/PoS malware landscape from 2017-2019
April 23, 2020
From remote administration and jackpotting, to malware sold on the Darknet, attacks against ATMs have a long and storied history. And, much like other areas of cybercrime, attackers only refine and grow their skillset for infecting ATM systems from year-to-year. So what does the ATM landscape look like as of 2020? Let’s take a look. ATM attacks aren’t ...
- Studying How Cybercriminals Prey on the COVID-19 Pandemic
April 22, 2020
With the spread of the coronavirus worldwide, interest is high in related topics. Accordingly, Unit 42 researchers found an immense increase in coronavirus-related Google searches and URLs viewed since the beginning of February. Cybercriminals are looking to profit from such trending topics, disregarding ethical concerns, and in this particular case preying on the misfortunes of ...
- Fast-Moving DDoS Botnet Exploits Unpatched ZyXel RCE Bug
April 22, 2020
A new variant of the Hoaxcalls botnet, which can be marshalled for large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) campaigns, is spreading via an unpatched vulnerability impacting the ZyXEL Cloud CNM SecuManager that was disclosed last month. That’s according to researchers at Radware, who also said that it’s notable how quickly Hoaxcalls operators have moved to weaponize the ZyXel ...
- Loki Delivered as CAB File Attachment
April 22, 2020
We found in our honeypot a spam sample that delivers the info stealer Loki through an attached Windows Cabinet (CAB) file. The email that bears the malicious file poses as a quotation request to trick the user into executing the binary file inside the CAB file. CAB is a compressed archive file format usually associated with various drivers, system ...

