Smouk

I'm relatively confident in predicting that currently, more major breaches are likely to be the result of AI use by the target, not the attacker. Ransomware actors have been consistently winning for over a decade. They've had so much time to perfect their tradecraft, and non-AI ransomware actors can now blast through entire networks in minutes. It is extremely unlikely that organizational security has, in 4 years, after decades of failure, matured enough that hackers now somehow need AI to win. What has likely happened, though, is that organizations have spent the last 4 years falling over themselves to shove AI into everything, negating longstanding security fundamentals. "only give a user/system the minimum possible access needed to do its job" has become "just give the AI access to everything and give everyone access to the AI". "use processes with well-defined and easily auditable input and output" has become "the AI correctly processes requests all the time, 60 percent of the time" "reduce attack surfaces" is now "every department should be vibe coding. It doesn't matter if you've never coded before and don't understand information security. Just make public-facing dashboards, it'll be fine." I'd say if anything, hackers aren't getting measurably more sophisticated, but the average organization's security posture has gotten exponentially worse.

The “suggests the attackers are using automation” part took me out. Imagine trying to split $3.3 billion dollars up into tiny amounts and laundering it by hand 😭

I'll be the first to admit I'm mediocre at exploit development, but I am in contact with enough extremely talented exploit developers to say this for certain: Anyone claiming they were "easily" able to generate a working php2shell exploit with AI is either: a) a world-class exploit developer with an extreme case of imposter syndrome. b) currently looking at some very confident-sounding but wrong LLM output. I'm rather certain it's the latter based on the number of AI-hallucinated exploits I've seen posted on GitHub. Threat actors are also blasting my honeypot network with "php2shell" exploits that not only don't work, but aren't even within 10,000 miles of anything to do with how the exploit actually works. I've seen the same technique from the attached image in multiple alleged "php2shell exploits", including one on GitHub with over 100 stars. Problem is, it's not php2shell, nor is it even a vulnerability at all. It's a technique known as "session poisoning", which can be leveraged to exploit local file inclusion (LFI) vulnerabilities in PHP apps (not PHP itself). The only thing it has in common with CVE-2026-109618/CVE-2026-109619 is they both use the "PHP_SESSION_UPLOAD_PROGRESS" feature. And mitigation advice for both issues reference setting "session.upload_progress.enabled" to "Off". People are shoving loose details of the vulnerability into LLMs, the LLMs are keying in on the "PHP_SESSION_UPLOAD_PROGRESS" string, then generating session poisoning code that has nothing to do with the actual CVE. And because the people doing this have absolutely no idea what they're doing, they're confident enough to post their "proof of concept exploit" to GitHub and share it on social media. So if you see people talking about "session poisoning + LFI" it's likely their LLM hallucinated an exploit based on a 2018 blog by Orange Tsai talking about a local file inclusion attack vector. What's even worse is that "security researchers" are then using LLMs to triage these exploitation attempts, falling victim to the same hallucinations, then confirming there is ongoing mass-exploitation (there currently isn't). The actual real exploit is very difficult to exploit, and so far I've not seen anyone successfully get it working on more than a handful of PHP version with highly-specific configurations. LLMs are useful tools in the hands of skilled professionals, but for others, they're often just a Dunning-Kruger accelerator.