AI Tools Drive Mass Attacks at Minimal Cost

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Over a five-day period in September, a Chinese-speaking threat actor utilized three different AI toolkits, as well as both open-weight and publicly available AI models, to attack 105 different e-commerce websites.

 

Often within a single day, and in some cases in a matter of hours, this autonomous hacking system breached the systems of at least 27 different companies. According to Gambit Security, the company that discovered the campaign, the attackers stole at least 600,000 payment card records from two sites, installed credit card skimmers on five companies' sites, and gained varying degrees of unauthorized access to the rest, including at least one Fortune 500 company.

 

What was the total cost of the attacks for the threat actor? An average of $25.46 per breached target.

"The scale and success of this single-week campaign is simply staggering, especially given the size of some of the impacted companies," says Saar Elias, co-founder and head of research at Gambit Security. "Work that previously required the coordinated efforts of a team of experienced hackers can now be carried out by a single individual without much prior knowledge."

 

This autonomous campaign targeting data and credit card information is not an isolated incident. Agentic AI has accelerated vulnerability research, leading to a sharp increase in assigned CVE numbers. Attackers are increasingly leveraging AI to automate attacks, compromise systems faster, and even operate as fully autonomous hackers.

In another instance, researchers at Silverfort, a cybersecurity firm specializing in AI-driven defense, conducted lab tests using an orchestrating agent alongside publicly available versions of Claude Opus to study how quickly autonomous AI can escalate initial access into a full system compromise. The "attacker" gained complete domain control in just eight minutes, says Colin Ferris, lead of threat hunting and incident response at Silverfort.

 

The total cost: around $12.

 

"The barrier to entry is dropping," Ferris says. "All you need is a basic foothold—not exotic skills—and that is why this won't remain the domain of advanced players alone."

 

Security Professionals Seek Low-Cost Defense Solutions

 

Dark web market prices reflect the plummeting costs for attackers. According to Flashpoint, a threat intelligence analytics firm, the average price of initial access offered on underground forums dropped from just over $1,400 to $429 due to surging supply. Although the percentage of companies paying ransoms declined—accounting for 28% in the first half of 2026—ransomware activity continued to rise by 45%, the company notes.

 

"We recorded a drop in prices specifically at the initial access phase," says Ian Gray, VP of analysis at Flashpoint. "Across other stages of the attack chain, we are seeing how artificial intelligence accelerates operations and makes them easier to scale"

 

In many ways, the situation mirrors modern battlefields: cheap autonomous or piloted drone attacks render expensive defense systems cost-ineffective, forcing defenders to seek cheaper ways to protect and harden their systems. According to Gambit Security, the cybercriminals behind the recent campaign used the Hermes AI agent system along with two AI-based penetration testing platforms—Strix and Cairn

 

"Attackers can now execute increasingly sophisticated attacks at very low marginal costs, while defenders must maintain high reliability across complex environments," says Elias of Gambit Security. "Defending against every single attempt can quickly become an economically unsustainable endeavor"

According to him, integrating AI into existing security workflows will be a necessary but insufficient step. Instead, organizations must analyze their business processes, determine which are most critical, and find ways to protect them and prevent operational disruptions

 

No Place to Hide from AI

 

For the past two decades, cybersecurity experts have warned that companies cannot expect to avoid attacks simply because they operate in a niche industry or maintain a relatively small attack surface. Any part of an organization connected to the Internet—or linked to an Internet-connected partner—will become a target, argues Albert Ziegler, Chief Information Security Officer at XBOW, a company specializing in offensive cybersecurity

"These attacks don't require huge investments, yet they succeed precisely because the sites weren't sufficiently hardened," he says. "The point is, simply protecting a couple of key sites you're particularly worried about is no longer enough"

One way to strengthen defense is to focus on the primary pathways commonly exploited by AI agents—over-privileged accounts, reused credentials, and unmanaged service accounts—and automate access control decisions so human delay doesn't slow down the response, Ferris of Silverfort explains. When Silverfort researchers tightened these controls, particularly authentication and access management, the same agent that previously compromised the domain in minutes ran into 21 dead ends and gave up

"AI didn't create these vulnerabilities; it just finds them faster," Ferris says. "Controls that stop an attack at the access stage are far cheaper than remediating the consequences after a breach."

Companies should focus on the economics of post-attack recovery and how to safeguard their minimum essential business processes, believes Elias of Gambit Security. Executive leadership must focus on which security investments will deliver the greatest impact on business continuity

Regrettably, this may mean budgets need to grow to adjust to the economic realities of artificial intelligence, he notes. However, "spending should increasingly be evaluated by how effectively it protects business operations," he concludes, "rather than simply by the volume of threats or tools a security program can handle

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