AI Tools Are Making Large-Scale Cyberattacks Increasingly Cheap

Dark Reading describes a campaign in which a Chinese-speaking attacker used three AI harnesses plus open-weight and public AI models over five days to target 105 e-commerce sites. At least 27 companies were compromised; at least 600,000 payment-card records were stolen from two, credit-card skimmers were installed on five websites, and the attacker gained some degree of illicit access to the remaining targets. The average cost per completed target was $25.46. In a separate laboratory test, publicly available versions of Claude Opus achieved full domain control in eight minutes at a cost of about $12.