An international cybersecurity crisis is imminent. Artificial Intelligence has unleashed a hundreds-of-orders-of-magnitude surge in the power, scale, and speed of cyberattacks: thousands of organisations can now be targeted in parallel, every exposed API or endpoint probed at machine speed, and every defensive move analysed and countered in real time. This alone is a transformation so extreme that it renders yesterday’s security playbooks already obsolete.
On top of that is the present geopolitical volatility – where the compromise of business infrastructures can trigger nation-wide civic disruption and economic collapse. AI hacking’s technical escalation, combined with the current global political climate, has made way for a very real thousand-orders-of-magnitude quantum leap in danger.
Already yesterday, cybersecurity is no longer about a bigger IT budget or the next point solution. It is now more about survival, than it ever was before. Security must become a reflex built into every environment – security-born architecture, not retrofitted controls.
Effective immediately, cybersecurity spending can no longer be a line item inside an IT budget; it must be drawn directly from revenue, and recognised as critical infrastructure. This is not a distant risk. It is the front edge of a crisis already moving faster than most organisations can comprehend.
To picture what “orders of magnitude” really means, recall the mortar rounds of World War I—crude shells capable of levelling a building or a trench. Now compare that to a nuclear bomb, capable of erasing an entire city in a single blast. That is the kind of leap we face in cyber risk: a shift so vast it breaks the scale of what came before.
1. First Reach of AI-hacking – From Thousands of Attacks per Minute, to Millions
Long before the AI boom, cybercrime had already outgrown the cliché of a lone intruder stalking a single company.
With modern computing power and off-the-shelf toolkits, one skilled attacker could fire thousands of intrusion attempts every minute, sweeping across businesses until some weak link cracked.
Even then, “finding a victim” was already a numbers game.
AI now takes that reality and detonates it by hundreds of orders of magnitude.
A hacker who once launched thousands of shots a minute can, with AI-driven agents, unleash millions of intelligent probes almost instantly.
These are no blind brute-force strikes: they are machine-guided assaults that learn and adapt in real time, refining each tactic the moment a defence blocks it.
This—even before hijacked AI insiders or self-mutating malware—marks a quantum leap in danger: an orders-of-magnitude surge in both scale and capability that will swamp any defence built for yesterday’s pace of attack.
2. Hijacked AI Agents: Trusted Insiders Turned Hostile
A compromised AI agent is not just another endpoint—it is an autonomous insider. It already holds API keys, integrations and permissions. Once hijacked, it can exfiltrate data, reroute transactions, or silently disable security controls while logs record what looks like routine activity. It can remain undetected for months or years.
Consider the difference between a cat burglar breaking into a jewellery store and jumping over security lasers to grab the most expensive jewel in the store. Compare it with a burglary that shuts down the entire defense systems of the store and steals all the jewels, not just one, over many hours at night. This is an example of the difference in scale.
3. Self-Mutating AI-Powered Malware
Traditional malware is static code: once discovered, signatures are written, patches deployed and the threat contained. But AI-powered malicious agents can learn from every failed attempt. Each patch becomes a new training set; the malware mutates like a biological virus evolving new strains.
Defenders face a self-morphing target; the half-life of any new defence shrinks to near zero.
Cybersecurity becomes an arms race against an adversary that improves itself every time it is blocked. Point solutions that rely on static signatures or pre-defined behaviour are impotent in the face of this adaptive enemy: they will always be many steps behind. Any reactive innovations will likely be already-useless by the time they are readied.
4. The Civic Dimension of Cyber Risk
These threats are not confined to single companies. They endanger public safety, economic stability and social continuity.
A successful, large-scale attack can trigger nation-wide disruption and civic chaos: economic collapse, fear, broken supply chains, and loss of confidence in basic services.
This is not about patriotic nationalism or military defence; it is about protecting the civic fabric of a nation’s people and businesses. When critical infrastructure, financial networks or essential public services are crippled, the damage is measured in livelihoods and public trust, not in market share.
5. Twenty Years of Missed Warnings
The danger is not new. Breach statistics and cyber losses have grown exponentially for decades. The evidence of escalating risk has been visible to every serious observer.
Yet the industry has spent those decades fighting feature wars and price wars, selling tools instead of building protection. Governments have failed to elevate cybersecurity to the level of public-safety priority it has always deserved. The responsibility for educating businesses and the public rested with the cybersecurity industry—and it failed.
6. Recent Alarms We Cannot Ignore
The signs are everywhere. Chinese state-sponsored groups have repeatedly compromised U.S. telecom networks and other critical infrastructure. In September 2025 a ransomware attack shut down Nevada’s Department of Motor Vehicles and State Insurance agencies, crippling essential public services for days.
These incidents are not isolated. They are previews of what AI-accelerated attacks can—and soon will—scale to.
7. Industry and Government in a Shared Stupor
Even now, most governments have yet to publicly declare cybersecurity a top civic priority. This inertia mirrors the stupor of the cybersecurity industry:
- Vendors behave as profit-driven technology sellers, not as educators and service providers of public safety.
- They fight for market share and discourage competition – engaging in price wars with newcomers to try to eliminate them from the market – instead of collaborating to protect society.
- Their R&D is reactive and slow; by the time a response ships, both the threat and the fix are obsolete.
The gap between the threat landscape and the defensive posture is already vast and growing wider by the month.
8. Security Must Now Be Native: Not Reactive, but an Ingrained Reflex
The gap between the cybersecurity threat landscape and business IT environments will soon be hundreds and thousands of orders of magnitude wider. Reactive, retrospective retrofitting and after-the-fact “securing” of IT environments will be completely ineffective.
Security must not – and can no longer be – reactive or retrospective.
Business leaders and chief information officers must immediately call a state of emergency and recognise that cybersecurity budgets must now start coming from revenue – to support critical infrastructure, to protect their own business, and to protect the nations they belong to.
It can no longer be a percent-of-IT-budget game in which one year funds this point solution and the next year another. Such incremental approaches have already been foolhardy for the last seven years. But at this critical juncture in the overall context of human civilisation, it is not only foolhardy – it is playing Russian Gun Roulette with a fully loaded barrel, not with just one bullet.
Companies must immediately radically shift their security posture—from “securing” their existing environments – to instead rebuilding their environments from the ground up as security-born and security-first IT environments. Look for technologies that deliver Cybersecurity-as-Infrastructure, not merely point solutions that happen to be classified as cybersecurity tools.
Protection must become muscle memory—risk awareness and defensive action that are instinctive, not a special review step.
When you walk down a dark alley at night in a neighbourhood you know is unsafe, you do not stop to calculate which tools you wish you had brought, or debate the ideal protective gear. The moment the threat becomes hair-raisingly real, your reflexes take over; it is life-or-death alertness.
That same kind of immediate, built-in alertness must exist at the very base of every cybersecurity infrastructure. It has to be in the DNA of the IT environment and of employee behaviour—so that secure action happens automatically, long before conscious planning or retrospective analysis.
9. A Long-Vacant Role That We Are Now Stepping Up to Fill
The cybersecurity industry has had a complete vacuum of true cybersecurity leaders—vendors willing to take majority ownership of customer outcomes and to truly educate the public. For over twenty years that role has remained empty.
We are now stepping up. As a company with deep, long-standing cybersecurity DNA and backbone, dating back to the inception of the domain around the year 2000, we are prepared to:
- assume majority ownership for our customers’ security outcomes, and
- become the first public face of private-sector cybersecurity education and solutions—both advisor and provider.It is a commitment that should have guided the industry from the very beginning, and it is the responsibility we are taking on from today.
10. Call to Action for Business Leaders
Businesses can no longer “sleep” on cybersecurity:
- Demand to know how your vendors are preparing for AI-powered attacks.
- Ask how much ownership they will assume for your security outcomes.
- Treat cybersecurity decisions with the same automatic weight as financial decisions.
11. Immediate Recommendation
There are two steps that all businesses should take right away for early safeguarding against advanced AI threats.
- Evaluate your current cybersecurity vendors. Ask them—today—how much of your security outcomes they are willing to take ownership for. Demand to know their concrete plans for protecting your business when the impending international cybersecurity crisis reaches full scale.
- Move from two-factor to three-factor authentication. This is a simple, immediate step toward cyber-resilience that can be implemented with existing solutions. A third factor – whether a hardware token, biometric check or contextual verification – adds a critical layer of defence which dramatically raises security against external threat actors.
These two actions can be executed without waiting for new technology cycles or long-term projects. They will not close every gap, but they will materially reduce your exposure while you start planning a deeper transformation toward security-born infrastructure.
