AI Turns Amateurs into Super‑Hackers

AI chatbots and small agentic models are lowering the technical barrier for conducting complex cyberattacks: novices can chain models together to find software bugs, craft exploits, move laterally inside networks, and monetize stolen data. Incidents investigated by CrowdStrike and media reporting on South Korean bank breaches show this happening in the wild, with attackers using both commercial and freely available models. — If true, this shifts cyber risk from a specialist problem to a mass‑market security externality that requires national planning for rapid remediation, testing of critical infrastructure, and new public–private incident‑response funding.