AI is helping hackers make new malware faster and more complex than ever - and things may only get tougher

• Palo Alto warns GenAI accelerates malware creation and complexity
• AI reduces data exfiltration time from five hours to 72 minutes
• Identity weaknesses and SaaS supply chains drive most intrusions, with ransomware shifting to data theft

The rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is helping hackers make new malware faster and more complex than ever, experts have warned, arguing that things may only get tougher for the cybersecurity community.

In its annual Unit 42 Global Incident Response Report, researchers from Palo Alto laid out how AI has become a force multiplier for the attackers, who can now exfiltrate data in just over an hour (72 minutes), whereas in the pre-AI era, that time was around five hours, meaning exfiltration increased by four times.

While the browser remains the “primary battleground”, in which almost half (48%) of all incidents happen, attack complexity is increasing. In fact, almost nine in ten (87%) of intrusions span multiple attack surfaces. In some cases, the attack surfaces are in double digits, and threats are rarely confined to a single environment. Attackers often coordinate across different endpoints, networks, cloud services, SaaS platforms, and identity systems.

Identity woes and supply chain attacks

Palo Alto also said that identity drives initial access. In nine out of ten incidents, identity weakness was a major factor, and with agentic identity management, the challenge is even more complex. Roughly two-thirds (65%) of initial access stems from social engineering while, in comparison, vulnerabilities take up less than a quarter (22%).

Third-party SaaS applications have also become a prime target. Supply chain attacks spiked by almost four times since 2022 and now make up almost a quarter (23%) of all attacks. Most of the time, the crooks hunt for OAuth tokens and API keys which allow them to move laterally, steal data, lock down systems, and deploy malware.

The report also points out what the industry has been warning for some time now - ransomware operators are pivoting away from encryptors and focusing solely on data extraction.

“From the attacker’s perspective, it’s faster, quieter, and creates immediate pressure without the signals defenders once relied on to detect ransomware attacks,” Palo Alto concluded. .

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