"Before an attacker ever sends a payload, they've already done the work of understanding how your environment is built. They look at your login flows, your JavaScript files, your error messages, your API documentation, your GitHub repos. These are all clues that help them understand how your systems behave. AI is significantly accelerating reconnaissance and enabling attackers to map your environment with greater speed and precision."
"While the narrative often paints AI as running the show, we're not seeing AI take over offensive operations end to end. AI is not autonomously writing exploits, chaining attacks, and breaching systems without the human in the loop. What it is doing is speeding up the early and middle stages of the attacker workflow: gathering information, enriching it, and generating plausible paths to execution."
"Think of it like AI-generated writing; AI can produce a draft quickly given the right parameters, but someone still needs to review, refine, and tune it for the result to be useful. The same applies to offensive security. AI can build payloads and perform a lot of functions at a higher level than traditional algorithms could, but as of yet they still require direction and context to be effective."
Attackers gather extensive environmental clues—login flows, JavaScript, error messages, API documentation, and public repositories—well before sending payloads. AI is markedly accelerating reconnaissance by mapping environments with greater speed and precision. AI enhances early and middle attacker workflows by gathering, enriching, and generating plausible execution paths. AI is not yet autonomously executing end-to-end offensive operations; human direction, review, and contextual tuning remain necessary. AI increases exposure by converting harmless-seeming details, such as outdated libraries revealing frameworks, into actionable insights that help attackers prioritize targets and paths.
Read at The Hacker News
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