In 2024, a finance employee at a multinational firm in Hong Kong was tricked into authorizing more than 25 million dollars in transfers after joining what appeared to be a legitimate video conference with colleagues, including the company’s chief financial officer. In reality, every person on the call except the victim was a deepfake generated with artificial intelligence. The simulation was convincing enough to fool the employee into multiple transfers before the scheme was uncovered by police.
This was not a bad Zoom connection or a garden-variety phishing attempt. It was a sophisticated AI-enabled attack that turned a trusted communication channel into a weapon. It also highlights a sobering reality: with the right tools, attackers can now impersonate real people in real time and use that trust to bypass many of the defenses organizations have relied on for years.
AI has not just changed cybersecurity. It has accelerated the threat landscape at a pace that traditional defenses cannot match. Bitdefender’s 2025 Cybersecurity Assessment found that 63 percent of IT and cybersecurity professionals experienced an attack involving AI in the past year. Microsoft’s 2025 Digital Defense Report found that threat actors now use AI to automate phishing, scale social engineering, generate malware and rapidly discover vulnerabilities.
The uncomfortable truth is this: Cybercriminals are already using AI. Defenders that fail to do the same will quickly fall behind.
AI Has Become the Attacker’s Force Multiplier
Ten years ago, high quality phishing emails, social engineering and malware required time and specialized skill. Today, threat actors can generate all three with consumer grade AI models. What used to take hours now takes seconds and can be deployed at a scale that humans simply cannot match.
Some of the most common AI driven attack methods include:
- Deepfakes and Synthetic Identity Fraud: AI can now replicate voices, images and videos with alarming precision. This enables attackers to impersonate executives, employees, vendors and customers in ways that are increasingly difficult to detect.
- AI Generated Phishing and Social Engineering: AI models can craft personalized, natural sounding messages that closely mimic an organization’s writing style. This makes many phishing attempts nearly indistinguishable from genuine communication.
- Living off the Land (LOTL) Attacks: Once inside a network, attackers often use legitimate tools such as credentials, cloud services and system scripts to hide in plain sight. AI allows them to identify and exploit these tools far more quickly.
Each of these attack vectors contribute to rising financial and reputational risk. Phishing attacks alone average nearly 5 million dollars per breach, and ransomware groups increasingly leak sensitive data publicly to maximize pressure.
To Fight AI Driven Threats, Organizations Must Use AI Themselves
Human analysts cannot keep up with machine speed intrusions. Rules based systems cannot detect threats that mutate in real time. Manual investigation does not scale to the volume of signals modern environments produce.
AI changes this dynamic.
When incorporated into security programs, AI enables:
- Real Time Intrusion Detection: AI systems can analyze network traffic and user behavior instantly and flag subtle anomalies long before a human would notice them.
- Cross Domain Threat Correlation: AI can ingest logs, alerts and telemetry from across the entire enterprise, including cloud infrastructure, endpoints, applications and identity systems. It can then determine which signals represent genuine threats.
- Automated Incident Response: AI can isolate compromised devices, block malicious traffic, revoke access tokens and notify security teams within seconds. This often stops an attack before it has time to spread.
- Predictive Defense: By analyzing historic attack patterns, AI can anticipate vulnerabilities and recommend mitigation steps proactively.
The purpose is not to replace security teams. It’s to augment them with the speed, precision and scalability required to counter AI enabled adversaries.
What Modern, AI Driven Defense Looks Like
For most organizations, the foundation of AI enhanced cybersecurity includes:
Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
XDR unifies threat detection across endpoints, identities, cloud resources and applications. It uses AI to identify correlations and suspicious activity that would be difficult to detect manually.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
SIEM aggregates and analyzes data from across the environment. With AI support, SIEM tools can prioritize alerts, detect anomalies and recommend appropriate response actions.
Many cloud providers now offer integrated XDR and SIEM ecosystems that use AI natively. In one recent engagement, AI analytics in a major cloud platform identified a cluster of high-risk user accounts and automatically generated a mitigation plan that prevented what would have been a targeted credential-based attack.
Complementary Protections Still Matter
Strong firewalls, network segmentation and especially phishing resistant multi factor authentication (MFA) remain critical. MFA alone blocks more than 90 percent of unauthorized access attempts and should be considered essential.
However, these protections are most effective when AI is at the core of the security strategy.
Prepare Before You Have To
Security teams often repeat a simple truth: “The first time you use your incident response plan should not be the first time.”
With AI enabled attacks moving at machine speed, organizations need to rehearse, test and continuously refine their defenses. AI tools can simulate attacks, identify weaknesses and strengthen response playbooks long before a real adversary attempts to exploit them.
Preparation is no longer optional. It’s a requirement.
The Future of Cybersecurity Is Automated
The contest between attackers and defenders is no longer a human versus human struggle. It’s AI versus AI.
Cybercriminals have already embraced this shift. Organizations must do the same if they want to stay ahead. AI will not eliminate cyber risk, but it will determine which organizations can respond quickly, adapt intelligently and defend effectively in an increasingly automated threat landscape.
If we want to protect our data, customers and reputations, one thing is clear: The only way to fight AI powered cybercrime is with AI powered defense.
