{"id":212699,"date":"2026-02-12T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/12\/ai-is-already-making-online-crimes-easier-it-could-get-much-worse\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T12:20:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T17:20:09","slug":"ai-is-already-making-online-crimes-easier-it-could-get-much-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/12\/ai-is-already-making-online-crimes-easier-it-could-get-much-worse\/","title":{"rendered":"AI is already making online crimes easier. It could get much worse."},"content":{"rendered":"

AI is already making online crimes easier. It could get much worse.<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2026\/02\/12\/1132386\/ai-already-making-online-swindles-easier\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-02-12 06:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.technologyreview.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Cherepanov and Str\u00fd\u010dek were confident that their discovery, which they dubbed PromptLock, marked a turning point in generative AI, showing how the technology could be exploited to create highly flexible malware attacks. They published a blog post declaring that they\u2019d uncovered the first example of AI-powered ransomware, which quickly became the object of widespread global media attention.<\/p>\n

But the threat wasn\u2019t quite as dramatic as it first appeared. The day after the blog post went live, a team of researchers from New York University claimed responsibility, explaining that the malware was not, in fact, a full attack let loose in the wild but a research project, merely designed to prove it was possible to automate each step of a ransomware campaign\u2014which, they said, they had.\u00a0<\/p>\n

PromptLock may have turned out to be an academic project, but the real bad guys are using the latest AI tools. Just as software engineers are using artificial intelligence to help write code and check for bugs, hackers are using these tools to reduce the time and effort required to orchestrate an attack, lowering the barriers for less experienced attackers to try something out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The likelihood that cyberattacks will now become more common and more effective over time is not a remote possibility but \u201ca sheer reality,\u201d says Lorenzo Cavallaro, a professor of computer science at University College London.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some in Silicon Valley warn that AI is on the brink of being able to carry out fully automated attacks. But most security researchers say this claim is overblown. \u201cFor some reason, everyone is just focused on this malware idea of, like, AI superhackers, which is just absurd,\u201d says Marcus Hutchins, who is principal threat researcher at the security company Expel and famous in the security world for ending a giant global ransomware attack called WannaCry in 2017.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Instead, experts argue, we should be paying closer attention to the much more immediate risks posed by…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AI is already making online crimes easier. It could get much worse. https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2026\/02\/12\/1132386\/ai-already-making-online-swindles-easier\/ Publish Date:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":212700,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/wp.technologyreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/opener-final1_social.jpg?resize=1200,600","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20,19],"class_list":["post-212699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-generative-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212699"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212699"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212701,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212699\/revisions\/212701"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}