We need to talk about Mythos, the recently announced AI model from Anthropic that has the industry panicking about the powerful technology’s ability to supercharge cyberattacks. The Cloud Security Alliance has started a conversation.
The convergence of AI and vulnerability detection has been moving toward a singularity – that point where traditional rules evaporate and prediction becomes impossible – for years. That point arrives with Anthropic’s Claude Mythos.
Mythos’ power eliminates time between vulnerability detection and vulnerability exploitation. Two previously distinct events are now effectively simultaneous – they have collapsed into one single event.
Project Glasswing: A Temporary Window
For now, Anthropic is keeping Mythos away from general usage, constrained within its Project Glasswing. The intent is to give major software providers time to find their own vulnerabilities, using Mythos, and fix them for their customers. It also gives defenders time to reorganize defenses to cope with an inevitable Mythos-born maelstrom of attacks.
This ‘phoney war’ will not hold forever, nor will all vulnerabilities be fixed by Project Glasswing. Sooner or later, Mythos will be in the hands of multiple adversaries: nation state actors, criminal gangs, hacktivists, and delinquent youths causing trouble for fun. This is the coming storm: more overlapping attacks from more bad actors with different motivations at a pace never before witnessed.
The only thing we know for certain is that current cybersecurity defenses will not cope and will be overwhelmed. CISOs must use the brief respite provided by Project Glasswing to prepare as best they can.
To help security teams prepare for this future, the Cloud Security Alliance has developed and published The ‘AI Vulnerability Storm’: Building a ‘Mythos-ready’ Security Program. The report does not provide a solution, but it will help readers understand what is coming, and what they must do in preparation.
Mythos will not fundamentally change the nature of cybersecurity. It primarily provides a step change in the pace of attacks, and the biggest single change will be the asymmetric advantage to the attacker increasing dramatically. Cybersecurity itself doesn’t change – it just needs to cope with a new ferocious pace. Best practice fundamentally remains the same, but its importance becomes more critical.
“Focus on the basics and harden your environment further,” say the CSA report authors. “Segmentation, egress filtering, multifactor authentication, and defense-in-depth/breadth all increase the difficulty for attackers.” Nothing there is new, but many firms have not done it adequately – and must rapidly start doing it effectively.
The Patching Problem
This will probably require a reorientation of resources. Although the basics of security will not change, the details will. Patching will become critical. There will be more patches and defenders can no longer assume a period of grace before patches are implemented. But traditional limitations in patching cadence will remain, so this will become a major problem.
Cybersecurity staff will become collateral damage to Mythos. Existing staffing levels will struggle against the growing workload. “Leaders must be clear-eyed about the human cost of this transition,” warns the report. “Security teams are caught in a vice: AI is simultaneously accelerating the volume of vulnerabilities they must respond to, the volume of code their organizations are shipping, and expanding the attack surface.”
Fighting AI With AI
The result will be increased burnout and attrition in the security team. The primary solution is to increase the headcount to reduce the pressure; but economics and board resistance may be a problem. Less of a problem, but necessary regardless, will be the enhanced use of AI and automation within defense. We must fight fire with fire. It will lessen the pressure on the security team, but will simultaneously further increase the attack surface with new vulnerabilities that may be discoverable to Mythos.
“Consistently enforce automated security assessments in your development processes, including using LLM-powered agents to find vulnerabilities before the attackers,” suggests the report. “Introduce AI agents to the cyber workforce across the board enabling defenders to match attackers’ speed and begin closing the gap.”
Perhaps surprisingly with the new potential for so many attacks from aggressors with many different motivations, there is no mention of ‘backup’ capabilities or requirements. The nearest the report comes to this is the suggestion to “Re-evaluate your risk tolerance to operational downtime caused by vulnerability remediation to account for shorter adversary timelines.”
But if we expect an increase in financially-motivated attacks, we should also expect an increase in the use of directly damaging attacks, including wipers – and defenders should evaluate how their organization might handle massive data destruction in the future.
Preparing for Simultaneous AI-powered Attacks
What the report does advise is, “Run tabletop exercises for multiple, simultaneous, high-severity incidents occurring within the same week; have playbooks in place for high level, critical incidents. Examine how to automate remediation capabilities to the degree possible. Verify and enable mitigating controls such as segmentation, egress filtering, Zero Trust architectures, phishing-resistant MFA, and secrets rotation, to limit impact when post-exploitation. The supply chain will be affected.”
It is the new cadence around the peripherals of cybersecurity that must adapt. This is complex and confusing, because nobody yet fully understands to what extent or in what manner this will be necessary. The CSA report is a good place to start, providing a wide-ranging overview of what to expect and how to react. It is not a change to cybersecurity, but a realignment and reemphasis of resources that is necessary.
The Window Is Closing
The sooner this is done, the safer we will be. This is not simply a response to Mythos, but the start of a new variation on cybersecurity. There will be more, and even more powerful, Mythos-like models from other AI developers in the months to come.
“By the end of the year, Mythos level capabilities will be in the hands of any attacker,” commented Mike Johnson, CISO at electric vehicle maker Rivian. “To all the CISOs out there, it’s time to lean in. There’s a window of opportunity that will close unexpectedly, so don’t wait to start.”
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