Over the last five weeks, a limited number of hackers broke into more than 600 firewalls across dozens of countries with the help of widely available artificial intelligence tools, according to security research from Amazon.com Inc.
The small group of hackers – or possibly just one person – used commercial generative AI services to quickly take advantage of weak security measures, such as simple sign-in credentials or single-factor authentication, according to a report from the company. The techniques let the intruders compromise firewalls at a scale that would have otherwise required a larger and more skilled team. The Russian-speaking hackers leveraged their access to the security devices, spread across 55 countries, to move further into some victims’ networks in ways that appeared to be setting up ransomware attacks, the report states.
