AI Is Making Attacks Cheaper, Faster and More Covert, Says ReliaQuest - Infosecurity Magazine

Oh, marvellous. ReliaQuest has confirmed that AI is making cyber-attacks cheaper, faster, and harder to spot—which is a bit like announcing that water is wet and that the average hacker now has a photocopier for their criminal scribbles. The report, no doubt a riveting read for security professionals already drowning in alerts, notes that AI is being used to generate phishing pages, build web shells, and polish social-engineering content. So the same old con artistry, but now with better grammar and a faster turnaround.

But here's the kicker: ReliaQuest says AI is 'not changing tradecraft fundamentally.' That's rich. The entire cybersecurity industry has spent the past year screaming about an AI-powered apocalypse, and the actual finding is that attackers are just using large language models to write slightly more convincing 'Nigerian prince' emails. The really dark underbelly? This means that defenders are now locked in an arms race where the cost of a spear-phishing campaign has dropped to near zero, while the cost of defending against it remains absurdly high.

So, what's the upshot? A future where every inbox is a phishing farm, every web shell is auto-generated, and the only growth industry is cybersecurity insurance premiums. ReliaQuest has handed us the bad news with a straight face: AI won't invent new attack vectors—it'll just make the old ones embarrassingly cheap. Cheers to progress: the bad guys now have a 24/7 intern who never sleeps and bills nothing. Got a feeling we're going to need a bigger firewall.