Aiding the sophistication upgrade of both nation-states and cybercriminals is the widespread availability of top-level, open-weight AI models out of China. David Wong, a director at Mandiant, Google Cloud, said on a panel at Google’s Cyber Defense summit last week, “Imagine a world where you have a nation-state that’s using an open-source or an open-weight model and it’s pointing it at critical infrastructure.”
AI compresses the response window
AI is compressing the interval between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation to minutes or seconds, potentially outrunning conventional patching processes.
“A friend of mine once told me, in talking about this North Korean actor, ‘This guy, every day he wakes up and sees if there’s a zero-day or whatever in these appliances, and he just starts running on it,” Google’s Hultquist says. “The future is, he won’t have to wake up because the agent will have already run all that. He can pull himself out of the cycle and speed it way up.”
