Why CyberSecurity threats are more likely in the AI era.

Data breaches and cyber attacks have become frequent lately, which leads to the question: What’s the cause? Have hackers gotten smarter? Or perhaps Applications and digital systems are poorly built? Let’s dive into the details.

Security is a crucial aspect when building an application or a digital system, Cybersecurity professionals work with software engineers to ensure security standards are met, but with the rise of AI and agentic coding, building applications becomes much easier and faster as code generation is automated but if not properly reviewed it could lead to lots of software bugs and security flaws which could be exploited by threat actors, but this isn’t the only side of the story.

Cybersecurity is a highly technical field; exploits and analysis require experience and domain expertise. While we have tools to automate exploits and analysis, they can be limited and require expertise to use fully. This entry barrier helps limit the ability of threat actors, especially individual and small-scale malicious groups, but something changed: with AI, threat actors can perform exploits beyond their skill and domain expertise, and malware and cyberattacks can be carried out easily. Now you’ll probably think “But AI isn’t accurate, it can introduce bugs”, but remember, threat actors aren’t building industry-standard software; they don’t care if it works inefficiently or if clean up isn’t done properly, as long as the exploit is performed properly, this makes AI perfect for them.

This trend has proposed a challenge towards Software engineers and cybersecurity professionals, a challenge to build “secure and foolproof systems”, and to meet this challenge, we have to incorporate AI into our workflow, enabling the detection and mitigation of cyber attacks as soon as threat actors launch them.