Agentic AI: The Weapon That No Longer Needs a Warrior
Summary: A SANS SEC535 course author writes that agentic AI has moved offensive tooling from drafting phishing emails and exploits to executing the steps itself, letting unskilled actors run autonomous campaigns - a phenomenon he calls 'script kiddie as a service' - while giving experienced attackers parallel execution that cuts weeks of work to hours. He describes autonomous social engineering in which one agent profiles a target from LinkedIn, press releases and conference recordings and a second agent runs the conversation, erasing the clumsy grammar and recycled templates phishing defenses relied on.
Bottom line: The linguistic tells that much of phishing detection quietly depended on are gone, and the author notes the federal government has forced a model off the market over capability fears - while an agent tied to a vulnerability database will name a target that was never there and ask, in the same untroubled voice it uses when it is right, for permission to fire.
Read the original at The Hacker News ↗
- Topics
- AI Security
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