Hackers around the world are all-in on using agentic AI to wage attacks--and manipulating tools like Anthropic's Claude to help them carry out their crimes. As AI adoption spreads among both malicious hackers and defenders, even relatively unsophisticated cybercriminals are incorporating agentic AI into their campaigns and getting around model safeguards, according to new details published on Wednesday about recent successful attacks by four different threat groups. Researchers from the threat intelligence firm CrowdStrike looked at the AI infrastructure powering attacks perpetrated between May and August by four previously unreported groups--one that operates in Chinese, one in Spanish and English, one in Indonesian, and one in Russian. The former two exhibited sophisticated AI "harnesses," the software that supports and guides a model to carry out tasks. The latter two showed less technical prowess, researchers found, but were still able to compromise multiple targets.

South Korea bank hack suspect may be 26-year-old in China, U.S. firm says Authorities in Seoul are investigating cyberattacks that affected multiple financial institutions after banks, including Shinhan Bank and KB Kookmin Bank, reported data breaches. SEOUL - The suspect behind recent cyberattacks targeting South Korea's financial sector may be a 26-year-old based in China's Guangdong province, U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has said. In a report published on its website on Wednesday, CrowdStrike said it uncovered personal details linked to the suspected attacker while analyzing AI coding-tool sessions and infrastructure associated with a campaign targeting South Korean financial institutions from late September to early October. CrowdStrike said the attacker used ARTEX, a recently released Chinese-developed open-source penetration testing tool, alongside large language models and assessed with "moderate confidence" that the actor was a Chinese speaker and likely financially motivated. The firm said one Claude Code session contained a request to create a security researcher resume describing results from the hacking activity.

Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Although AI is fundamentally changing cybersecurity, Bartley Richardson thinks the hackneyed IT refrain still rings true: "The best security is the security you don't have to think about." Richardson, a former Nvidia engineer who joined cybersecurity company CrowdStrike in June as its chief AI and autonomous systems officer, says his title perfectly reflects his belief that once consumers trust AI, they'll stop regarding it as "AI."

The cybersecurity company that became a household name after causing a massive global IT outage last year has announced it will cut 5% of its workforce in part due to "AI efficiency". In a note to staff earlier this week, released in stock market filings in the US, CrowdStrike's chief executive, George Kurtz, announced that 500 positions, or 5% of its workforce, would be cut globally, citing AI efficiencies created in the business. "We're operating in a market and technology inflection point, with AI reshaping every industry, accelerating threats, and evolving customer needs," he said. Kurtz said AI "flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster", adding it "drives efficiencies across both the front and back office". "AI is a force multiplier throughout the business," he said.

Microsoft has confirmed that its latest global outage was caused by a malicious cyberattack. The outage saw Outlook email services, Xbox Live, and even Minecraft go down for almost 10 hours yesterday afternoon - just two weeks after millions were affected by global outages. Microsoft now admits that its services were taken out by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack which was'amplified' by an error in the company's cyber defences. Experts say the true culprits may never be identified but that they were likely encouraged to strike by Microsoft's recent service troubles. Sylvain Cortes, vice president of strategy at cybersecurity firm Hackuity, told MailOnline: 'Rogue actors, cybergangs, and nation-states alike leverage these tactics, so further investigation is required to determine the origin of the threat.'

When Reddit said last month it would block unauthorized data scraping from its site, most of us assumed it was to tackle chatbot training. It turns out the site/service/fandom battleground also appears to be blocking search engines other than Brave and Google, the latter of which reportedly inked a deal earlier this year with Reddit worth 60 million annually. A Reddit spokesperson told Engadget the empty search results are because these engines won't agree to the company's requirements for AI training. The company says it's in discussions with several of them. Bing and DuckDuckGo both appear to be affected.

The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT has increased the potential for a wide range of attackers to target elections around the world in 2024, according to a new report by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike. Both state-linked hackers and allied so-called "hacktivists" are increasingly experimenting with ChatGPT and other AI tools, enabling a wider range of actors to carry out cyberattacks and scams, according to the company's annual global threats report. This includes hackers linked to Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, who have been testing new ways to use these technologies against the U.S., Israel, and European countries. With half the world's population set to vote in 2024, the use of generative AI to target elections could be a "huge factor," says Adam Meyers, head of counter-adversary operations at CrowdStrike. So far, CrowdStrike analysts have been able to detect the use of these models through comments in the scripts that would have been placed there by a tool like ChatGPT.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here. Weaponizing artificial intelligence (AI) to attack understaffed enterprises that lack AI and machine learning (ML) expertise is giving bad actors the edge in the ongoing AI cyberwar. Innovating at faster speeds than the most efficient enterprise, capable of recruiting talent to create new malware and test attack techniques, and using AI to alter attack strategies in real time, threat actors have a significant advantage over most enterprises. "AI is already being used by criminals to overcome some of the world's cybersecurity measures," warns Johan Gerber, executive vice president of security and cyber innovation at MasterCard. "But AI has to be part of our future, of how we attack and address cybersecurity."

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World-renowned semiconductor producer Nvidia is widely regarded as a pioneering force behind artificial intelligence (AI), and it remains a leader in the field today. But AI is a rapidly growing industry with plenty of room for other contributors, and in fact, some experts predict the majority of companies will be using AI by 2030, adding $13 trillion in value to the global economy. Therefore, while Nvidia is a $413 billion giant today, three Motley Fool contributors think C3ai (AI -0.70%), Riskified (RSKD 0.69%), and CrowdStrike (CRWD 0.83%) are artificial intelligence powerhouses of the future. Anthony Di Pizio (C3ai): One thing the artificial intelligence industry is missing is accessibility. Typically, only large technology companies with the financial resources and the ability to attract talented developers have been able to use AI in a meaningful capacity.