COMMENTARY: I recently described the vibe hacker : the low-skill operator who uses AI to run attacks that would have been out of reach 12 months ago.
The Mexico breach , the FortiGate campaign , the extortion actor who literally asked an LLM what to do with stolen data. AI raised the floor of offensive capability, and the evidence kept piling up.
Since then, the ceiling moved, too. Anthropic's Mythos model found zero-day vulnerabilities autonomously across every major OS and browser family, then built a working browser exploit by chaining four of them together without human guidance.
On a Firefox exploit-generation benchmark, the best model managed two successes out of hundreds of runs. Mythos hit 181. It also surfaced a bug in OpenBSD that had sat undetected for 27 years, missed by every researcher and automated tool that had looked at the codebase in that time.
And just yesterday, Google reported the first AI-assisted zero-day exploited in the wild.
Finding unknown vulnerabilities and building working exploit chains has historically required dedicated research teams with intelligence-agency funding. That barrier has eroded. What leading labs can do today, open-source models have tended to replicate within one to two years. When that window closes, organized crime groups gain access to a capability tier that used to separate them from state- operations.
So the floor has been raised and so has the ceiling. Practitioners and security leaders are asking what to do it. Here’s some insight:
The skill floor in offensive cyber rose sharply over the past year, and the ceiling has risen. It requires a broad response spanning operational practices, organizational risk models, and the compliance and insurance structures around them.
Every recommendation we’ve made here comes back to the same issue: the speed at which threats materialize has outpaced the speed at which most organizations can respond. Closing that gap has become the defining challenge for security teams over the several years, and it will require defenders to adopt the same AI capabilities that created the gap in the first place.
Vineet Edupuganti, co-founder and CEO, Cogent Security
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