{"id":205404,"date":"2026-04-24T04:04:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T08:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/24\/how-ai-is-revolutionizing-and-endangering-global-cybersecurity\/"},"modified":"2026-04-24T05:45:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T09:45:12","slug":"how-ai-is-revolutionizing-and-endangering-global-cybersecurity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testing.news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/24\/how-ai-is-revolutionizing-and-endangering-global-cybersecurity\/","title":{"rendered":"How AI is revolutionizing\u2014and endangering\u2014global cybersecurity"},"content":{"rendered":"

How AI is revolutionizing\u2014and endangering\u2014global cybersecurity<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/news.az\/news\/how-ai-is-revolutionizingand-endangeringglobal-cybersecurity<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-04-24 04:04:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: news.az<\/a><\/p>\n

Author: <\/a><\/p>\n

Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t In 2016, the Pentagon\u2019s research and development agency hosted the first-ever hacking competition fought entirely by machines. Dubbed the \u201cCyber Grand Challenge,\u201d the contest lasted more than eight hours and ultimately saw a computer system called Mayhem, developed by a team of Pittsburgh-based researchers, crowned victor. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMayhem would go on to compete against\u2014and lose to\u2014human hackers at DEF CON, one of the world\u2019s largest hacking conferences, in Las Vegas that same year. In the decade since, however, the bots may have gained the (metaphorical) upper hand,\u00a0News.Az reports, citing The Dispatch.
\nThis month, the American AI company Anthropic announced that its team had built a model, Mythos, capable of discovering and attacking vulnerabilities in software code at a higher level than \u201call but the most skilled humans.\u201d The pace of AI\u2019s advance raises concerns that it could be used to exploit vulnerabilities in software underpinning the world\u2019s most sensitive infrastructure\u2014from government systems to banks to hospitals. But proponents also argue that, in the right hands, the technology creates new cyberdefense opportunities.<\/p>\n

Anthropic, for its part, has argued that Mythos\u2019 development constitutes a turning point in cybersecurity. Deeming the model too dangerous to release to the public, the company shared it with more than 40 technology companies to help them defend against attackers and partnered with 11 of them in an initiative to secure critical software. Anthropic says that this will give defenders a key advantage over attackers, who don\u2019t have access to the model.
\nBut some analysts have argued that Anthropic\u2019s efforts to close cybersecurity gaps may be too late, noting that existing open-source AI models can find and exploit vulnerabilities. \u201cI think a lot of people took the Mythos announcement to be like this capability to discover zero-day vulnerabilities hadn\u2019t existed before, and now suddenly it\u2019s here,\u201d Stanislav Fort, the founder and chief scientist of the cybersecurity startup Aisle. Zero-day vulnerabilities are previously unknown software flaws that attackers can exploit before defenders have a fix ready. One high-profile example is the weakness that allowed Stuxnet, a US-Israeli cyberweapon, to silently disable Iran\u2019s nuclear centrifuges for years before its discovery in 2010.
\nThe rapid advancement of AI amplifies the risk of such attacks, but it can also be used to preempt them. Companies like Aisle, for example, have used the technology to develop methods for autonomously detecting potential vulnerabilities. By building a specialized system using open-weight models, the team has used its tool to identify security weaknesses in vital digital infrastructure, including 12 vulnerabilities in OpenSSL, a software library used to secure most online communications. It also uncovered a 3-year-old security bug in the software that protects transmissions between NASA spacecraft and Earth.
\nAnthropic\u2019s new cyberdefense initiative has also helped identify key security risks, including in OpenBSD, an operating system used in critical infrastructure like firewalls. For 27 years, the company claimed, the system contained a bug that could remotely crash any computer connected to its network. Yet preexisting tools, too, may be capable of identifying weaknesses like this one. By pointing their tool at the area of vulnerability in OpenBSD and offering \u201ccontextual hints,\u201d Aisle researchers claim they were able to identify it at a fraction of the cost. Other AI security companies, including Vidoc Security Labs, also say they have successfully reproduced Anthropic\u2019s findings using public models.
\nWhile Mythos is \u201calmost certainly amazing in many things,\u201d Fort said, the AI landscape is best understood as a \u201cjagged frontier\u201d in which different systems have particular strengths and weaknesses, with small models often boasting surprisingly strong capabilities.
\nTurning these vulnerabilities into exploits is perhaps a tougher skill, yet one that also may not be unique to Claude Mythos. \u201cMythos the model is like this amazing engine, right? But an engine by itself sitting on a stand inside of a lab like that doesn\u2019t win a race,\u201d said Jamieson O\u2019Reilly, a hacker and co-founder of Aether AI, an AI tool that works to autonomously exploit vulnerabilities. \u201cIt needs carbon fiber. It needs ceramic brakes, like world-class suspension, air-force-grade titanium exhaust, all of this stuff, and then a driver,\u201d he told The Dispatch. \u201cWithout that, it\u2019s like this impressive piece of hardware with nowhere to go.\u201d
\nAnd while Anthropic keeps Mythos under lock and key, other actors\u2014both friends and foes\u2014are working to develop hacking technology to rival the model, and cheaply. \u201cNo attacker\u2019s waiting around for Anthropic to release Mythos to the public,\u201d O\u2019Reilly said. \u201cThey\u2019re already building their own instrumentation around public models.\u201d O\u2019Reilly claims Aether AI was able to run a simulated attack against a government agency portal, bypassing the defenses on the external website before finding a way to escalate its privileges to an \u201cadmin user,\u201d from which it may be able to delete sensitive government data. He also showed The Dispatch a spear-phishing Zoom attack that he had created using existing AI models for under $5.
\nFortunately, cyberdefenders seem to have an edge over would-be hackers\u2014at least for now. \u201cAI excels at detection, and that\u2019s most useful for defenders. For offenders, detecting vulnerabilities is only the first step,\u201d Lennart Maschmeyer, an assistant professor of cybersecurity at Georgia Tech, told The Dispatch. \u201cOffenders need to find vulnerabilities and develop working exploits that achieve their specific objectives against a target system, and despite defenders\u2019 efforts to find and neutralize them.\u201d
\nWhile Claude Mythos is an important and powerful new development, O\u2019Reilly emphasized that the cybersecurity industry \u201cshould not have a full sense of security,\u201d given what is possible using existing models. Marcus Hutchins, a British cybersecurity expert who famously stopped the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack on hospitals worldwide from his bedroom, likewise highlighted the danger of cruder AI technology. Most attacks, he explained, don\u2019t require sophisticated exploits and can instead be carried out far more cheaply. AI-driven phishing attacks and deepfakes are already earning attackers billions of dollars.
\nNevertheless, the U.S. government appears to be taking the potential impacts of Anthropic\u2019s new model seriously. Despite the tech company\u2019s ongoing legal dispute with the Pentagon\u2014and the Trump administration\u2019s designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk, a first for an American company\u2014the government is reportedly seeking to provide U.S. agencies with access to a version of the model. And time may be of the essence for Washington, as other countries seek to build out their own AI hacking capabilities. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that Chinese open-source models would be capable of replicating Mythos in six to 12 months.
\nDigital infrastructure underpins much of modern society, as a recent attack against the Mexican government demonstrated. The breach, which used an earlier Claude model and OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, accessed more than 150 gigabytes of government data, including voter information and tax records.
\nUltimately, these AI-enabled hacks put everyday citizens and their personal information at risk, as Ryan Fedusiak, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, knows better than most. Falling victim to a cyberattack by a state actor \u201cforced me to reset my entire digital life, bottom to top,\u201d he told The Dispatch.
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNews.Az\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBy Leyla \u015eirinova\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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