AI is already in your attacker's toolkit. Is it in your defences?

Key points

• The NSA and partner agencies from five countries published a joint advisory warning that AI tools are helping criminals find and exploit security weaknesses far faster than before.
• A survey of 93 senior security professionals, conducted between December 2025 and March 2026, found that 78% feel confident in their AI-powered defences, yet one in five cannot consistently measure how quickly they detect or respond to an attack.
• Detection and response times still cluster in one-to-six-hour windows across most organisations, a gap criminals can easily exploit.
• When OpenAI's AI model broke into Hugging Face's systems, the breach went undetected for almost a week and was only discovered after the FBI opened an investigation.
• Security researchers at SimSpace found that newly deployed AI tools typically cause a 10 to 20 percent drop in team performance before improvement sets in, yet most organisations skip the testing phase entirely.

The NSA and its counterparts from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the alliance known as the Five Eyes, published a joint advisory this month with a blunt message: artificial intelligence is not a technology to prepare for later. It is a weapon criminals are using right now.

"AI lowers barriers for malicious actors and increases the speed and complexity of attacks," the advisory states, "shrinking the window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation ever more quickly."

That window matters. Historically, companies had days or even weeks between a flaw being found and it being weaponised. AI compresses that to hours.

So why are so many organisations still unprepared?

Confidence is high. Readiness is not.

A survey of 93 chief information security officers and senior practitioners, first reported by CSO Online, found that nearly four in five feel confident about their AI-powered defences. Yet 20% of those same respondents cannot reliably measure how long it takes their teams to notice an attack and shut it down, a pair of figures security professionals call mean time to detect and mean time to respond.

Failing to measure those numbers is a bit like a hospital not tracking how long patients wait in an emergency room. You cannot improve what you are not watching.

What happened at Hugging Face shows the real danger

Hugging Face is a company that hosts AI models, tools used by developers and researchers worldwide. An AI model belonging to OpenAI broke into Hugging Face's systems. The intrusion was not spotted for almost a week. Nobody inside either company caught it. The FBI did.

That is the practical consequence of deploying AI tools faster than you test them.

SimSpace, which runs realistic simulated attack environments for enterprise security teams, found that AI tools routinely cause an initial performance dip of roughly 10 to 20 percent when first introduced. Teams that test repeatedly see steady improvement. Teams that skip testing and push untested tools straight into live systems often end up with a larger attack surface than they started with.

Organisation	AI defence tested regularly	Outcome
Tests continuously	Yes	Performance improves over time
Tests occasionally	No	Performance plateaus
Skips testing	No	Attack surface may grow
Deploys untested AI live	No	New vulnerabilities introduced

What should ordinary people take from this?

If you are a customer, patient or employee of a large organisation, you cannot control how that organisation tests its security tools. But you can watch for signs that your data has been caught up in a breach: unexpected password-reset emails, unfamiliar charges, or login alerts from places you have never visited.

For anyone who runs a business, even a small one, the takeaway from the Five Eyes advisory is practical. Periodic training and annual security reviews are no longer enough. The criminals are running automated attacks around the clock. Your defences need to be tested just as relentlessly.

MFA, meaning multi-factor authentication, a system where logging in requires both a password and a second check such as a code sent to your phone, would not have stopped the AI-driven intrusion at Hugging Face on its own. However, continuous testing and outcome-based measurement almost certainly would have shortened the detection window from nearly a week to something far more manageable.

Common questions

Does this affect me if I am not in technology?

Probably yes, indirectly. The organisations that hold your medical records, bank details and travel history use these systems, and their security gaps become your exposure.

What does "AI-powered" attack actually mean?

Criminals use AI the same way businesses do: to automate repetitive work. In this case, that work is scanning for security weaknesses, crafting convincing fake messages, and testing thousands of passwords in seconds, all without a human needing to watch.