IN THE NEAR future one hacker may be able to unleash 20 zero-day attacks on different systems across the world all at once. Polymorphic malware could rampage across a codebase, using a bespoke generative AI system to rewrite itself as it learns and adapts. Armies of script kiddies could use purpose-built LLMs to unleash a torrent of malicious code at the push of a button.
Case in point: as of this writing, an AI system is sitting at the top of several leaderboards on HackerOne—an enterprise bug bounty system. The AI is XBOW, a system aimed at whitehat pentesters that “autonomously finds and exploits vulnerabilities in 75 percent of web benchmarks,” according to the company’s website.
AI-assisted hackers are a major fear in the cybersecurity industry, even if their potential hasn’t quite been realized yet. “I compare it to being on an emergency landing on an aircraft where it’s like ‘brace, brace, brace’ but we still have yet to impact anything,” Hayden Smith, the cofounder of security company Hunted Labs, tells WIRED. “We’re still waiting to have that mass event.”
Generative AI has made it easier for anyone to code. The LLMs improve every day, new models spit out more efficient code, and companies like Microsoft say they’re using AI agents to help write their codebase. Anyone can spit out a Python script using ChatGPT now, and vibe coding—asking an AI to write code for you, even if you don’t have much of an idea how to do it yourself—is popular; but there’s also vibe hacking.
