Former NSA Officer's Synack AI Startup Flags Defender Shortage

A 26-year-old hacker used an open-source AI agent called ARTEX to steal data from seven South Korean banks. The breach exposed 68,000 people in just weeks. CrowdStrike linked the attack to Anthropic's Claude Code. The AI performed most of the legwork, while one hacker picked the banks. The warning comes from a former NSA operator who co-founded Synack in 2013. He merged Synack with NetSPI in October, saying AI only amplifies the need for skilled analysts. Defenders still lack enough people to sift through thousands of AI-generated alerts, a gap executives keep overlooking. A June study showed autonomous AI succeeded on just 16.1 percent of web-attack tasks, rising to 33 percent with human guidance. President Lee Jae Myung warned that AI now makes hacking easy for anyone without special skills.