The era of AI hacking has arrived

Hackers and cybersecurity companies have entered an AI arms race.

This summer, Russia’s hackers put a new twist on the barrage of phishing emails sent to Ukrainians.

The hackers included an attachment containing an artificial intelligence program. If installed, it would automatically search the victims’ computers for sensitive files to send back to Moscow.

That campaign, detailed in July in technical reports from the Ukrainian government and several cybersecurity companies, is the first known instance of Russian intelligence being caught building malicious code with large language models (LLMs), the type of AI chatbots that have become ubiquitous in corporate culture.

Those Russian spies are not alone. In recent months, hackers of seemingly every stripe — cybercriminals, spies, researchers and corporate defenders alike — have started including AI tools into their work.

LLMs, like ChatGPT, are still error-prone. But they have become remarkably adept at processing language instructions and at translating plain language into computer code, or identifying and summarizing documents.