How AI Is Transforming Cybercrime and What Organizations Must Do Next
Artificial intelligence is not just changing technology, it is reshaping the very nature of cybercrime. According to the Fortinet blog post AI Is Reshaping Modern Cybercrime, global research and coordinated exercises with the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity and industry partners show that AI is amplifying the speed, scale, and sophistication of attacks without creating fundamentally new threats. This means that familiar risks are becoming far easier and faster for attackers to exploit.
The AI Impact on Cybercrime
Fortinet’s analysis highlights several key patterns emerging from tabletop exercises and threat intelligence.
AI does not invent new motives for attackers, but it dramatically increases efficiency. Attackers are using AI for faster reconnaissance, highly convincing phishing and social engineering, and rapid iteration on exploit development and deployment. This lowers the barrier to entry for less experienced adversaries and accelerates the impact of criminal operations. AI also expands the attack surface beyond systems making identity verification, compliance, legal response, and decision-making more complex during real incidents.
The exercises also revealed that defenders currently lag attackers in leveraging AI. While security teams are cautious due to governance and operational controls, adversaries have few constraints, allowing them to automate reconnaissance and attack execution at scale. Fortinet and partners found that organizational clarity knowing who makes what decisions during an incident often mattered more than the tools available.
Collaboration between public, private, and academic sectors clearly adds value. By sharing knowledge and preparing together, organizations gain better visibility into emerging AI-enabled threats and improve crisis coordination.
Three Strategic Actions for Organizations
Based on these insights from Fortinet, here are three practical priorities organizations should adopt now.
1. Strengthen Human and AI Collaboration in Defense
AI can accelerate detection and response, but human judgment remains essential. Security teams should integrate AI tools for tasks like large-scale data triage while keeping humans in the loop for decision-making and investigation. This reduces false positives and ensures trustworthy outcomes.
2. Improve Governance and Incident Preparedness
Fortinet’s exercises showed that delays during breaches often come from uncertainty about decision rights. Establish clear governance frameworks that define roles and responsibilities for incident response, including legal, HR, and operational stakeholders, not just technical teams.
3. Invest in Cross-Sector Collaboration
No organization can defend in isolation. Participating in information sharing groups, industry exercises, and public-private collaborations enhances visibility into evolving threats and response strategies. These relationships help organizations anticipate attacker behaviours and coordinate more effective responses at scale.
Final Perspective
AI is not merely a new tool for cybercriminals. It is a force multiplier that makes familiar threats faster, more scalable, and more accessible to a wider range of attackers. Organizations that treat AI-enabled risk as a current reality and prepare their people, processes, and partnerships accordingly, will be significantly better positioned to defend against the next era of cybercrime.
Source Credit
This article is based on AI Is Reshaping Modern Cybercrime by Derek Manky on the Fortinet blog.
