Unit 42 warns AI has shifted balance of power from defenders to attackers

Palo Alto Networks’ threat intelligence team said the early waves of threats riding on agentic AI models have broken in the wild, and organizations are unprepared for what’s coming next.

Unit 42’s top brass has seen enough from internal frontier AI model testing and malicious in-the-wild use of commercially available AI tools to be genuinely concerned.

“I can tell you without exaggeration that we believe that this is a generational shift in cybersecurity,” Sam Rubin, senior vice president of Palo Alto Networks’ threat intelligence arm, said in a media briefing Wednesday. 

A period of relative balance between security and exposure has been broken by frontier AI model capabilities that could allow attackers to find and exploit network weaknesses with speed, Rubin said.

Unit 42 warned that capabilities demonstrated by readily available agentic AI models, and those unlocked by frontier AI models that remain gated for defense, have shifted the balance of power from defenders to attackers.

“The defenses that we’ve had built up over years weren’t necessarily built for or prepared for these machine-speed attacks,” Rubin said. “Organizations are ill-equipped to detect and to respond quickly in the face of these attacks.

Back in April, when Anthropic brought Palo Alto Networks and other major technology companies together to form Project Glasswing, an initiative to find and address security defects with its Mythos model, Unit 42 estimated the same capabilities would be in the hands of attackers within a year. 

“Well, here we are five months later, and we’re starting to see the early waves of this threat in the wild,” Rubin said. 

Unit 42 is actively investigating an attack on one of its customers where an attacker used an agentic framework to exploit 50 applications and other weaknesses across the enterprise in less than 10 hours. Rubin estimates AI allowed the attacker to accomplish in 10 hours what would have taken at least 10 days in a pre-AI era. 

Attackers are already using AI across the entire attack chain, said Sherrod DeGrippo, vice president of threat intelligence at Unit 42. “We are not far from fully agentic attacks across all at once, but right now it’s piece by piece by piece,” she said. 

“AI has seeped into every part of what threat actors do,” including malware development at scale, delegation, social engineering and ransomware negotiations, DeGrippo added.

As such, she sees the threat landscape shifting in four areas. AI is a force multiplier, identity is the primary compromise vector, attackers are burrowing into foundational libraries and software supply chains “baked into the fabric of our digital world,” and nation-sponsored threat groups are learning more about points of weakness in enterprise systems, DeGrippo said.

Nobody is fully prepared for what’s coming and it would be naive or a bad defender mindset to think otherwise, she said. “This is a transformative period, and how organizations navigate that transformation is going to be make-or-break for a lot of them.”

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