Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition
Oct 26, 2026 · 1 hr · 10 segments
A reading of articles and features from the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal
Oct 26, 2026 · 1 hr · 10 segments
A reading of articles and features from the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal
Hacks Driven by AI Mushroom Overwhelming Internet Defenses The AI-powered hackers began stealing from Colin Parsons at 11 p.m. on a recent Friday night.
The bills ran to $449.
Parsons is just one of the latest victims in a wave of AI-powered attacks that has flooded the internet in recent weeks, as hackers increasingly turn to agents and AI hacking tools that make intrusions faster and harder to track.
We've been seeing an explosion of these agentic adversaries, said Adam Myers, a senior vice president with the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
We've found advanced adversaries using this.
We've found very unsophisticated adversaries using this.
The increase in hacks is part of the dizzying AI-driven acceleration of cybersecurity threats that is rippling around the world.
At the same time, as new tools speed up hackers, cyber defenders are racing to fix the fast-growing volume of security bugs discovered by AI before hackers can exploit the new flaws.
On Wednesday, organizations rushed to patch newly uncovered bugs that could allow takeover of as many as 70% of the world's websites.
Hackers are actively trying to break into websites by exploiting these flaws, Amazon says.
The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation told companies they couldn't immediately patch the web bugs.
To simply pull the plug on their websites.
Government-run websites in countries such as Canada, Belgium, France, the Netherlands did just that.
The image posting message board 4chan suspended comments on its site ahead of the patches.
The pace and volume... of the AI-powered attacks are starting to overwhelm the incident response firms that respond to cyber breaches.
Pundits are referring to the month as Black October, and many in the field are predicting more to come.
We expect that there's going to be a massive number of compromised disclosures in the coming weeks and months, said Stephen Adair, president of the cybersecurity firm Vilexity.
Incident responders such as Adair say that AI tools are now being used by nation-state hackers from China and Russia, as well as criminals looking to steal data and install ransomware.
One of the tools they are using is a Chinese open-source hacking tool called Artex, which uses artificial intelligence to automate the process of breaking into a computer network.
This week, Microsoft said that threat actors across multiple geographic regions were using Artex to speed up attacks on hundreds of companies.
This month, a cyber attack used Artex to steal data on about 68,000 people from South Korean banks.
Hackers are using AI for reconnaissance, to analyze swaths of data they steal and even to rapidly build exploit code that can be used to break into networks, said Sherry Davidoff, founder of the security consulting firm LMG Security.
Every three months, Davidoff works with data breach services company Net Diligence to poll a group of her peers about the techniques they are seeing in real-world cyberattacks.
A year ago, few saw any signs of AI use.
Hacks Driven by AI Mushroom Overwhelming Internet Defenses The AI-powered hackers began stealing from Colin Parsons at 11 p.m. on a recent Friday night.
The bills ran to $449.
Parsons is just one of the latest victims in a wave of AI-powered attacks that has flooded the internet in recent weeks, as hackers increasingly turn to agents and AI hacking tools that make intrusions faster and harder to track.
We've been seeing an explosion of these agentic adversaries, said Adam Myers, a senior vice president with the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
We've found advanced adversaries using this.
We've found very unsophisticated adversaries using this.
The increase in hacks is part of the dizzying AI-driven acceleration of cybersecurity threats that is rippling around the world.
At the same time, as new tools speed up hackers, cyber defenders are racing to fix the fast-growing volume of security bugs discovered by AI before hackers can exploit the new flaws.
On Wednesday, organizations rushed to patch newly uncovered bugs that could allow takeover of as many as 70% of the world's websites.
Hackers are actively trying to break into websites by exploiting these flaws, Amazon says.
The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation told companies they couldn't immediately patch the web bugs.
To simply pull the plug on their websites.
Government-run websites in countries such as Canada, Belgium, France, the Netherlands did just that.
The image posting message board 4chan suspended comments on its site ahead of the patches.
The pace and volume... of the AI-powered attacks are starting to overwhelm the incident response firms that respond to cyber breaches.
Pundits are referring to the month as Black October, and many in the field are predicting more to come.
We expect that there's going to be a massive number of compromised disclosures in the coming weeks and months, said Stephen Adair, president of the cybersecurity firm Vilexity.
Incident responders such as Adair say that AI tools are now being used by nation-state hackers from China and Russia, as well as criminals looking to steal data and install ransomware.
One of the tools they are using is a Chinese open-source hacking tool called Artex, which uses artificial intelligence to automate the process of breaking into a computer network.
This week, Microsoft said that threat actors across multiple geographic regions were using Artex to speed up attacks on hundreds of companies.
This month, a cyber attack used Artex to steal data on about 68,000 people from South Korean banks.
Hackers are using AI for reconnaissance, to analyze swaths of data they steal and even to rapidly build exploit code that can be used to break into networks, said Sherry Davidoff, founder of the security consulting firm LMG Security.
Every three months, Davidoff works with data breach services company Net Diligence to poll a group of her peers about the techniques they are seeing in real-world cyberattacks.
A year ago, few saw any signs of AI use.
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