AI is industrialising cyberattacks and shrinking the time for exploitation, says EU cybersecurity agency

Europe has been hit with numerous cyber incidents in recent months, raising widespread concern, not just from governments but from the public too, about how vulnerable society is to cyber-attack and how prepared the continent is to deal with future cyber threats.“When we look at the threats landscape, the picture is not so rosy,” said ENISA Executive Director Juhan Lepassaar at a press conference today.Recent incidents range from the PHP vulnerability, which prompted numerous EU governments to take down their websites to prevent exploitation by hackers, to the wave of cyber-attacks on fridges at supermarkets and blood banks in France and eight other countries resulting from vulnerabilities in out-of-date software.Cyber threats are evolving and becoming more visible, thanks in part to AI, and now require organisations to keep pace with the latest artificial intelligence model advancements in a kind of cyber arms race.“Recent developments not only in frontier AI models but also cyber incidents in refrigeration systems across the EU underline the operational gaps and the need for timely information sharing and coordination,” said Lepassaar.ENISA also calls AI a “force multiplier”, expanding and accelerating the ability of both hackers and the companies defending themselves to spot vulnerabilities more quickly.“Data synthesised by researchers shows that the time between discovery and weaponisation is approaching zero,”