Decoys, safe AI hacking help cyberdefenders counter AI-powered attacks

A growing number of reports in 2026 point to hackers requiring drastically less time to carry out and attempt cyberattacks.

Published Nov 02, 2026, 05:00 AM

Updated Nov 02, 2026, 05:00 AM

AI is speeding up cyberattacks, but decoys and safe AI hacking can help defenders catch attackers early and slow them down.

Research from Horizon3 and Ensign InfoSecurity shows AI models often fall for decoys, while AI attacks are strongest at breaking in and weaker at later stages.

Experts say firms must act faster, use AI with care and patch weaknesses quickly as attackers and defenders race at machine speed.

SINGAPORE – Artificial intelligence may be helping hackers speed up cyberattacks from days and weeks to mere minutes and hours. But, for now, the “gullibility” of AI models makes them uniquely vulnerable to deception – a growing strategy among cyberdefenders.

“If you put well-placed deception and you build the processes to react and contain the attack, you can render AI attackers completely obsolete,” said cybersecurity firm Horizon3’s chief executive, Snehal Antani, at a recent October media briefing.

He explained that the AI systems from many leading technology companies are trained on public cybersecurity data, such as vulnerability reports and research. This data is not as useful as the internal data from organisations, such as network configuration information.

Public data-trained AI tends to open decoy files, such as fake log-in details, because that is what it knows and remembers from its training data. When it does that, an alert notifies organisations so they can take action early before an attack reaches more important systems.

Research by Horizon3 published in June showed that 21 AI models , including from Anthropic and OpenAI, fell for decoys 78.5% of the time compared with 37% for human hackers. Some AI models, including cutting-edge frontier models, fell for the bait over 90% of the time.

“Well-placed deception is the cheapest, fastest, most effective way at catching AI hackers,” Antani said, adding that he expects the gullibility of AI models will become the hottest area of cybersecurity research in the next 12 to 24 months.

But a capable attacker may still recognise the deception, he said, urging organisations to also have other controls such as patching and system access limits.

Experts also noted that AI is not equally effective at every stage of an attack, giving cyberdefenders room to counter the threat.

Cybersecurity firm Ensign InfoSecurity tested 10 frontier AI models , including from OpenAI and Anthropic. The results of the study, released in August, found that all 10 AI models initially broke into the test system, which Ensign said was a “trivial task”.

But the models were less reliable at later stages of an attack. At least half of the models struggled to steal log-in details and move between systems consistently.

The limits of AI-assisted cyberattacks are a silver lining amid accelerated attacks.

Jess Ng, cybersecurity firm Fortinet’s country head for Singapore and Brunei, said that organisations have less time to learn about and fix a system weakness before criminals exploit it.

Unprecedented strain on cyberdefenders

The recently disclosed critical flaws in PHP , a programming language that powers roughly 70% of all websites globally, provides a wake-up call. The flaws were discovered by cybersecurity firms with the help of AI, and after their disclosure on Oct 21, web security firm Cloudflare observed hacking attempts surge into the millions .

“Organisations cannot assume they will have weeks to respond after a critical vulnerability becomes public,” said Gareth Cox , Horizon3’s vice-president for Asia Pacific and Japan.

While it is not clear if the PHP exploit attempts used AI, there are other cases of AI speeding up attacks. An Oct 1 global report from tech giant Microsoft said that by using AI, the time hackers take to steal data, discover log-in details and infiltrate deeper into organisations’ computer systems has been shortened from days to minutes.

Cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks said on Sept 2 that it had responded to an incident where a human attacker used frontier AI to breach an enterprise network autonomously in under 10 hours. The attack would have taken several human attackers around two weeks to execute.

Using AI, criminals can translate technical details released on security flaws into simpler terms. “Work that once needed an experienced expert can now be done in a fraction of the time, and by people with far less technical knowledge,” said Fortinet’s Ng.

For example, AI has allowed cybercriminals with limited programming know-how to create a platform, called EvilTokens, to charge other hackers a fee to develop e-mail phishing strategies. At just six months old, that platform had impacted 10,000 organisations in 120 countries, including Singapore, before Microsoft and other partners disrupted it in September.

Mike Yeh, Microsoft’s vice-president and deputy general counsel for customer security and trust, said: “AI has... lowered the barriers to entry and made it easier for cybercriminals to operate.”

Hackers can also use AI agents to autonomously stitch together several less severe bugs to create a major attack, said Siddharth Deshpande, Palo Alto Networks’ director for industry solutions.

This is an issue because organisations tend to prioritise fixing more serious flaws over less severe ones, said Deshpande, adding that less severe vulnerabilities also need to be taken seriously .

A new Frontier AI Resilience and Security Taskforce announced by the Infocomm Media Development Authority on Oct 14 seeks to look into these issues.

The high speed of attacks is putting unprecedented strain on security professionals.

Said Philippa Cogswell, vice-president and managing partner of Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks in Asia-Pacific and Japan: “Forced to make critical decisions under extreme time pressure and with incomplete forensic data, security professionals face record levels of burnout and decision paralysis as they scramble to establish what occurred, what was accessed, what was stolen, and what the overall impact is to the organisation and the supply chain.”

Fighting back with AI

Association of Information Security Professionals president Emil Tan said cyberdefence must now be more proactive. Organisations should anticipate how they might be attacked and take steps to prevent or disrupt it, he said, urging the use of AI and automation for defence .

Horizon3 uses AI to safely test the cyberdefences of an organisation by autonomously hacking to find vulnerabilities before hackers do and verifying fixes for those vulnerabilities. One of its customers is a Singapore-based hospitality organisation with 1,000 employees.

Accelerating demand for such tools has underscored investment interest. Horizon3 said in August that it had raised US$250 million (S$320 million). Among its investors is EDBI, the investment arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board.

The funding will help the company turn its Singapore office, which began operations in August, into its ASEAN headquarters. This is to meet growing demand from South-east Asian organisations to defend against cyberattacks increasingly augmented by AI.

Horizon3’s Antani is already looking ahead: Fixing vulnerabilities automatically at machine speed is the next frontier his firm is working on.

Kenny covers technology, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data privacy, social media and consumer technology issues.

AI/artificial intelligence

越来越多的报告指出，到 2026 年，黑客实施和尝试网络攻击所需的时间将大幅减少。

发布于 2026 年 11 月 2 日 上午 5:00

更新于2026年11月2日 上午5:00

人工智能正在加速网络攻击，但诱饵和安全的人工智能黑客技术可以帮助防御者及早发现攻击者并减缓他们的速度。

Horizo​​n3 和 Ensign InfoSecurity 的研究表明，人工智能模型经常会落入诱饵陷阱，而人工智能攻击在入侵阶段最为强大，在后期阶段则较为虚弱。

专家表示，由于攻击者和防御者正以机器的速度展开竞赛，企业必须加快行动速度，谨慎使用人工智能，并迅速修补漏洞。

新加坡——人工智能或许正在帮助黑客将网络攻击的时间从数天甚至数周缩短到几分钟甚至几小时。但就目前而言，人工智能模型的“易受骗性”使其极易受到欺骗——而欺骗正是网络防御者日益常用的策略。

“如果你采取恰当的欺骗措施，并建立应对和遏制攻击的流程，你就可以让人工智能攻击者完全过时，”网络安全公司 Horizo​​n3 的首席执行官 Snehal Antani 在最近 10 月份的一次媒体简报会上表示。

他解释说，许多领先科技公司的AI系统都是基于公开的网络安全数据进行训练的，例如漏洞报告和研究报告。这些数据不如企业内部数据（例如网络配置信息）更有用。

使用公开数据训练的人工智能倾向于打开诱饵文件，例如虚假的登录信息，因为这是它从训练数据中学习和记住的内容。当这种情况发生时，系统会发出警报通知相关组织，以便他们在攻击波及更重要的系统之前及早采取行动。

Horizo​​n3 于 6 月发布的研究表明，包括 Anthropologie 和 OpenAI 在内的 21 个 AI 模型，对诱饵的上当率高达 78.5%，而人类黑客的上当率仅为 37%。一些 AI 模型，包括一些前沿模型，上当率甚至超过 90%。

“巧妙的欺骗是抓捕人工智能黑客最便宜、最快捷、最有效的方法，”安塔尼说，他还补充说，他预计人工智能模型的易受骗性将在未来 12 到 24 个月内成为网络安全研究中最热门的领域。

但他表示，有能力的攻击者仍然可能识破这种欺骗手段，并敦促各组织采取其他控制措施，例如打补丁和限制系统访问。

专家还指出，人工智能在攻击的每个阶段并非都同样有效，这给了网络防御者应对威胁的空间。

网络安全公司Ensign InfoSecurity测试了10款前沿人工智能模型，其中包括来自OpenAI和Anthropic的模型。该研究结果于8月发布，结果显示所有10款人工智能模型最初都成功入侵了测试系统，Ensign称这是一项“轻而易举的任务”。

但这些模型在攻击后期阶段的可靠性有所下降。至少有一半的模型难以窃取登录信息，也难以在不同系统间稳定地迁移。

在网络攻击日益猖獗的背景下，人工智能辅助网络攻击的局限性也算是一线希望。

网络安全公司 Fortinet 新加坡和文莱地区负责人 Jess Ng 表示，在犯罪分子利用系统漏洞之前，企业没有足够的时间来了解和修复系统漏洞。

网络防御者面临前所未有的压力

最近披露的PHP（一种为全球约70%的网站提供支持的编程语言）的严重漏洞敲响了警钟。这些漏洞是由网络安全公司借助人工智能发现的，在10月21日披露后，网络安全公司Cloudflare观察到黑客攻击尝试数量激增至数百万次。

Horizo​​n3亚太及日本区副总裁加雷斯·考克斯表示：“各组织不能假设在重大漏洞公开后，他们有数周时间来做出反应。”

虽然目前尚不清楚此次 PHP 漏洞利用尝试是否使用了人工智能，但已有其他案例表明人工智能正在加速攻击。科技巨头微软于 10 月 1 日发布的一份全球报告指出，借助人工智能，黑客窃取数据、获取登录信息以及深入渗透企业计算机系统所需的时间已从数天缩短至数分钟。

网络安全公司 Palo Alto Networks 于 9 月 2 日表示，该公司已对一起事件做出响应，该事件中一名攻击者利用前沿人工智能技术，在不到 10 小时内自主入侵了一家企业网络。而如果由多名攻击者执行同样的攻击，则需要大约两周时间才能完成。

利用人工智能，犯罪分子可以将安全漏洞中披露的技术细节转化为更简单的语言。“过去需要经验丰富的专家才能完成的工作，现在只需很短的时间，而且技术知识远不如以前丰富的人也能完成，”Fortinet公司的吴恩达（Ng）表示。

例如，人工智能使得一些编程知识有限的网络犯罪分子能够创建一个名为 EvilTokens 的平台，向其他黑客收取费用来开发电子邮件钓鱼策略。该平台上线仅六个月，就已影响到包括新加坡在内的 120 个国家/地区的 1 万家机构，直到 9 月份被微软和其他合作伙伴关闭。

微软负责客户安全和信任的副总裁兼副总法律顾问迈克·叶表示：“人工智能降低了网络犯罪分子的准入门槛，使他们更容易作案。”

Palo Alto Networks 行业解决方案总监 Siddharth Deshpande 表示，黑客还可以利用人工智能代理自主地将几个不太严重的漏洞拼接在一起，从而发起重大攻击。

Deshpande 表示，这是一个问题，因为组织往往会优先修复更严重的缺陷，而不是不太严重的缺陷，他还补充说，不太严重的漏洞也需要认真对待。

新加坡资讯通信媒体发展管理局于10月14日宣布成立新的前沿人工智能韧性与安全工作组，旨在研究这些问题。

攻击的高速发展给安全专业人员带来了前所未有的压力。

Palo Alto Networks亚太及日本区Unit 42副总裁兼管理合伙人Philippa Cogswell表示：“在时间极其紧迫且取证数据不完整的情况下，安全专业人员被迫做出关键决策，他们面临着前所未有的职业倦怠和决策瘫痪，因为他们争先恐后地查明发生了什么、访问了什么、窃取了什么，以及对组织和供应链的总体影响是什么。”

利用人工智能进行反击

信息安全专业人员协会主席埃米尔·谭表示，网络防御现在必须更加积极主动。他指出，各组织应预测可能遭受的攻击方式，并采取措施预防或阻止攻击，同时敦促利用人工智能和自动化技术进行防御。

Horizo​​n3利用人工智能技术，通过自主入侵系统，在黑客入侵之前发现漏洞并验证漏洞修复方案，从而安全地测试组织的网络防御能力。其客户之一是总部位于新加坡、拥有1000名员工的酒店集团。

对这类工具的需求不断增长，凸显了投资者的兴趣。Horizo​​n3在8月份宣布已筹集2.5亿美元（约合3.2亿新元）。其投资者包括新加坡经济发展局的投资机构EDBI。

这笔资金将帮助该公司把8月份开始运营的新加坡办事处转型为东盟总部。此举旨在满足东南亚企业日益增长的网络安全需求，以抵御人工智能日益增强的网络攻击。

Horizo​​n3 的 Antani 已经开始展望未来：以机器速度自动修复漏洞是他的公司正在努力的下一个前沿领域。

Kenny 报道科技领域，包括人工智能、网络安全、数据隐私、社交媒体和消费科技问题。

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