Over the last five weeks, a limited number of hackers broke into more than 600 firewalls across dozens of countries with the help of widely available artificial intelligence tools, according to security research from Amazon.com Inc.
The small group of hackers – or possibly just one person – used commercial generative AI services to quickly take advantage of weak security measures, such as simple sign-in credentials or single-factor authentication, according to a report from the company. The techniques let the intruders compromise firewalls at a scale that would have otherwise required a larger and more skilled team. The Russian-speaking hackers leveraged their access to the security devices, spread across 55 countries, to move further into some victims’ networks in ways that appeared to be setting up ransomware attacks, the report states.
The widespread breaches, which Amazon said were financially motivated, are the latest example of hackers using AI to ease and speed cyberattacks.
“It’s like an AI-powered assembly line for cybercrime, helping less skilled workers produce at scale,” CJ Moses, who leads security engineering and operations at Amazon, said in the report. It doesn’t identify the AI tools the hackers used nor does it name the victims.
Researchers believe the hackers opportunistically broke into firewalls with weak protections, rather than targeting certain industries, according to the report. The compromised devices were spread across South Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, West Africa, Northern Europe and Southeast Asia.
When the hackers encountered more hardened security, they simply moved on to other targets, Moses said. And once inside a network, they “largely failed when attempting to exploit anything beyond the most straightforward, automated attack paths,” the report states.
Last year, a hacker leveraged technology from Anthropic PBC as part of a vast cybercrime scheme that’s impacted at least 17 organizations, Anthropic said, marking what was then an “unprecedented” instance of attackers weaponizing a commercial artificial intelligence tool on a widespread basis.
Amazon expects more of this to come.
“Organizations should anticipate that AI-augmented threat activity will continue to grow in volume from both skilled and unskilled adversaries,” Moses said.
Topics
InsurTech
Cyber
Artificial Intelligence
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