AI-driven cyberattacks erupt intensively; industry insiders call October a "Black October" for cybersecurity

Cailian Press Financial News Agency

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Cailian Press, October 24 (Editor: Xiaoxiang) — Late at night on an ordinary Friday, startup founder Colin Parsons was still asleep, while a group of hackers using AI to carry out cyberattacks had already begun reaching for his accounts...

The next morning, Parsons was jolted awake by a full 50 charge notification emails in his inbox — his account was being fraudulently charged one transaction after another, used to purchase computing services from Anthropic and OpenAI. When he tried to log in to the Discord customer service channel of the AI coding platform OpenCode to ask for help, the scene before him left him even more helpless: every two seconds, a meaningless piece of spam such as "Yo" or "uninstall Telegram" would pop up in the channel, and his help post was instantly drowned out by the flood of messages.

Subsequent investigation showed that Parsons' unauthorized purchases were made using credentials he had stored on an AI coding website called OpenCode. OpenCode co-founder Dax Raas said on X that since October 16, OpenCode had been caught in an "uninterrupted" AI-driven cyberattack. "Damn it, we basically need people on duty around the clock, 24 hours a day, because that's what the hackers are doing," Raas said.

And clearly, Parsons' experience is by no means an isolated case. In recent weeks, as hackers have massively deployed AI agents and automated attack tools, an unprecedented cyber storm has been sweeping across the global internet. Many industry insiders have already described this month as "Black October" in the cybersecurity world.

Alarm bells ring for 70% of websites worldwide; multiple governments forced to "pull the plug"

On Wednesday, PHP, the underlying programming language of the internet, was exposed as having a major security vulnerability — as infrastructure supporting half the internet, once this vulnerability is exploited by hackers, as many as 70% of websites worldwide could face the risk of being hacked. Tech giants including Amazon and Cloudflare both detected aggressive attempts by hackers to exploit the vulnerability.

Facing an imminent threat, the U.S. National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a rare and extreme warning to companies: if they cannot patch immediately, they should simply "pull the plug" — shut down their websites.

For a time, the global internet was on edge. Some government websites in Canada, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, in order to prevent being breached by hackers before patching was completed, simply chose to proactively go offline to "cut the connection and protect themselves"; the well-known image forum 4chan also urgently disabled its comment function before the patch was released.

Patrick Garrity, a researcher at intelligence firm VulnCheck, pointed out that the PHP emergency-repair chaos was only the tip of the iceberg in this frantic week — this week alone, Node.js and streaming software Plex successively disclosed vulnerabilities, the AI gateway LiteLLM and development platform Railway also suffered data breaches, and Indian certificate authority eMudhra was reported to have extremely weak keys.

According to a report soon to be released by VulnCheck, with AI adding fuel to the fire, the number of digital security flaws discovered has doubled year on year.

Matthew Prince, CEO of internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare, even warned that he had learned that a large number of severe vulnerabilities were still lurking in several other critical software programs. "I think for the next few years, every week will feel like the sky is falling; for any system exposed to the internet, this kind of fire-alarm emergency response will become the norm."

The attack-and-defense timeline has been completely upended: from "months" to "hours"

Why has this wave of cyber crisis come so fiercely?

Industry insiders say that in the past, finding bugs in massive codebases required an extremely high technical threshold, and writing attack code to exploit vulnerabilities often required experienced professional hackers to spend weeks or even months. This left cyber defenders a valuable "breathing window" in which they could patch and roll out updates at a leisurely pace.

Shane Fry, chief technology officer of security firm RunSafe Security, pointed out that AI models can conduct round-the-clock, uninterrupted reviews of codebases, repeatedly uncover vulnerabilities, and "weaponize" them into attack code in just a few hours.

Adam Meyers, senior vice president of cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike, also admitted: "We are seeing this kind of 'agentic adversary' exploding in growth. Not only are highly skilled hackers using it, but even very low-skilled attackers are using it."

The speed of this AI evolution is staggering. Sherri Davidoff, founder of security consulting firm LMG Security, said that in a peer survey a year ago, almost no one had seen AI used in real cyberattacks; but over the past quarter, it has become commonplace.

Steven Adair, president of cybersecurity firm Volexity, went further, predicting that in the coming weeks and even months, the world may see a dense wave of corporate "breach disclosures."

Is it "the good guys gaining a foot" or "the bad guys gaining a yard"?

Daniel Stenberg, chief developer of the file transfer tool curl, believes that the vulnerabilities uncovered by AI models tend to be obscure and rare, and are difficult for hackers to actually exploit.

Esteban Borges, head of research at intelligence firm Hunt.io, also noted that although hackers launched fierce probing against this week's PHP vulnerability, as of Thursday afternoon, the criminals he tracks did not appear to have yet pieced together a genuinely effective attack tool.

In the view of Cloudflare's Prince, although this wave of vulnerability discovery set off by AI has caused the entire industry short-term pain, in the long run it is a good thing.

He vividly compared it to "slaying demons in a haunted house"—facing monsters head-on is certainly terrifying, but letting monsters lurk silently behind closed doors is far worse.

"The reality is that we may be able to use this opportunity to thoroughly clean up the security risks that have accumulated at the foundations of the internet for years," Prince said.

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