08/06/2026
"AI is becoming both an attack tool and a high-value target, with attacks by AI-enabled adversaries rising 89 percent in 2025, according to CrowdStrike.
The security firm's annual Threat Hunting Report details criminal gangs and nation states using AI throughout the attack chain. Attackers are also targeting organizations' AI infrastructure and poisoning popular software packages to compromise their users.
"AI is both the weapon and the target," CrowdStrike counter adversary division senior VP Adam Meyers told reporters. "AI is a high-value attack surface, and it's being used by more and more threat actors."
These attacks include LLMjacking, in which criminals steal corporate credentials to access frontier-model APIs, and cost harvesting – deliberately inflating a victim's AI usage to run up its bill. In one campaign, CrowdStrike documented a token thief sending about 200,000 API requests in just two minutes.
The security vendor's threat hunting team now tracks AI agent-triggered leads at 2.5x the rate of human-triggered threats, and Meyers said this increased volume remains true across both government-backed goons and financially motivated criminals."
CrowdStrike tracks 89% surge in machine-assisted activity as patch windows shrink to 48 hours
