Some prominent, even state-sponsored threat actors are giving up on trying to build cyberattack campaigns with artificial intelligence (AI), despite that the notion AI is "enhancing" cyber threats makes for great cybersecurity product marketing, news headlines, and LinkedIn-grade thought leadership.
Just this week, mainstream media outlets picked up a story based on self-reported survey data that found around 84% of ransomware attacks utilize AI in some form or fashion. At a glance, it seemed frightening. But in a briefing shared with Dark Reading this week, Proofpoint highlighted TA4903, a once-sophisticated cybercrime actor that's been suffering from conspicuous AI rot.
It's a phenomenon that Proofpoint principal threat researcher Selena Larson outlines, noting that AI is actually making lots of cyber activity dumber, and the best threat actors are simply staying away from it altogether.
"There's all this pressure to find impressive stuff, [but] I push back a lot on the narrative that AI is making threat actors better. It's just not the case," she tells Dark Reading. "We're actually seeing, in real time, how AI-generated attack chains have made threat actors worse [at their jobs]."