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Cyber AI Chronicle
By Simon Ganiere · 8th September 2025
Welcome back!
📓 AI-Powered Malware: Hype vs. Reality
The cybersecurity industry loves a good scary story, and AI-powered malware is exactly one of those those story! Cutting-edge technology turned malicious, scalability of the threat, autonomous adversaries, mis/dis-information created in a blink of an eye.
The perfect mix for a good headline story! and of course the headlines are here and the stories are here so let’s see what we are looking at.
Anthropic's August 2025 threat intelligence report documents genuine operational capability: cybercriminals using Claude to develop ransomware variants selling for $400-$1,200 on dark web forums, and sophisticated actors using Claude Code for large-scale extortion targeting 17 organizations across healthcare, emergency services, and government.
The Hype Trap: Why Technical Possibility ≠ Immediate Threat
Much of the AI malware narrative suffers from assuming technical possibility equals immediate operational reality. CrowdStrike's 2025 data reveals 81% of interactive intrusions remain malware-free—attackers still prefer human-operated approaches over AI-powered automation. This tend to indicate we are not there just yet. However the trend and the potential is clearly there.
Faster, Not Smarter: AI Accelerates Old Attack Patterns
The HexStrike-AI exploitation of Citrix vulnerabilities demonstrates AI accelerating existing attack patterns rather than creating new threat categories. What we are seeing is more speed in the execution and therefore a need to detect/response faster rather than brand new type of attack.
Looking Forward: The Next 18 Months of AI-Driven Threats
Social Engineering at Scale:
Timeframe: Within 18 months (end 2026)
What: Single threat actor can perform large scale phishing attacks on his own. Attack will move away from "spray and pray" to targeted attack at scale
Technical Skills Compression:
Timeframe: Within 18 months (end 2026)
What: Throughout this time period the technical knowledge and requirement to build functional malware will continuously go down. I don't foresee it will be zero but it will give access to a whole set of new actors that previously were relying on other more skilled actor. This will flip some of the economic of the cyber crime.
Attribution Erosion:
Timeframe: 12-18 months
What: The line between the usual actors will get blurry and the attribution to cyber criminals or nation state will be even more difficult to confirm. This will lead to confusion in geopolitics but also impact big international companies.
Organizations that win will focus on visibility and rapid response rather than chasing the latest AI defense vendor promises. As always in cybersecurity, the fundamentals matter more than the hype.
The stories that follow will help you separate signal from noise in this evolving threat landscape. Read them with the skepticism they deserve—because good forecasting beats good marketing every time.