Your Attacker's AI Knows You Better Than Yours Does

Founder and CEO at CYFIRMA, overseeing the business strategy, product roadmap, growth & expansion plan, and investor relationship.

On October 9, 2026, Japan declared its first-ever cybersecurity state of emergency. A day earlier, ransomware had spread through IDC Frontier, a SoftBank-owned cloud provider, reaching almost 500 client companies and local governments within hours. Across the water, an open-source AI agent was working through seven South Korean banks and lenders, and President Lee Jae Myung told his cabinet there were signs AI had been used.

Since then, nearly every conversation I have opens with the same question: “Can’t AI just stop this?” In more than two decades in this field, I’ve rarely seen a technology arrive with so much promise.​

The Barriers That Quietly Fell

For years, Japan and South Korea benefited from two defenses that never appeared on an architecture diagram.

The first was language. Badly translated phishing was easy to spot, and attackers who couldn’t follow Japanese or Korean business conventions looked elsewhere. That advantage is gone, as open-weight models now produce fluent Japanese and Korean.

The second was skill. In Japan, police arrested three students between the ages of 14 and 16 in 2025 who were accused of using ChatGPT to hijack more than 1,000 mobile lines. Police also arrested a 17-year-old accused of using a ChatGPT-built program to pull 7.25 million membership records from an internet cafe chain.

AI hasn’t produced a generation of elite hackers. Rather, it’s created millions of good-enough attackers and given each the reach of a team.​

What The Attacker Actually Did

​The Korean bank campaign used credential stuffing, one of the oldest techniques in the book, run by ARTEX, an autonomous penetration-testing agent published openly on GitHub. It moved through hundreds of IP addresses and altered its timing as it went.

The AI was the accelerant. The fuel was ours.