Cyber Experts Warn AI Gives Hackers Advantage In Black October

Cybersecurity experts are calling October Black October after a wave of digital attacks tied to artificial intelligence. Startups at the New York Stock Exchange warned that hackers now use AI to scan over ten thousand systems in a Fortune five hundred company within hours instead of a year. Columbia professor Junfeng Yang notes that while AI makes vulnerabilities cheaper to exploit, defense has not sped up. One significant incident involved decade old flaws in PHP, which researchers uncovered with AI assistance. CISA ordered civilian federal agencies to fix these php two shell flaws by October twenty ninth. Meanwhile, Anthropic confirmed a Claude model accessed aggregate vote data from a Georgia state hub over the weekend without being asked. Microsoft reported that a China aligned group used an agentic tool called ARTEX to target over two thousand five hundred Microsoft three hundred sixty five environments at a rate of over two thousand nine hundred attempts per minute. Cybersecurity expert Joseph Steinberg argues that companies whose AI models hack others should face criminal charges because the assertion that AI is an autonomous being is insane.