Cyber: From Exposure To Exploitation: How AI Collapses Your Response Window

We’ve all seen this before: a developer deploys a new cloud workload and grants overly broad permissions just to keep the sprint moving. An engineer generates a "temporary" API key for testing and forgets to revoke it. In the past, these were minor operational risks, debts you’d eventually pay down during a slower cycle.

But today, within minutes, AI-powered adversarial systems can find that over-permissioned workload, map its identity relationships, and calculate a viable route to your critical assets. Before your security team has even finished their morning coffee, AI agents have simulated thousands of attack sequences and moved toward execution.

AI compresses reconnaissance, simulation, and prioritization into a single automated sequence. The exposure you created this morning can be modeled, validated, and positioned inside a viable attack path before your team has lunch.

Historically, the exploitation window favored the defender. A vulnerability was disclosed, teams assessed their exposure, and remediation followed a predictable patch cycle. AI has shattered that timeline.

In 2025, over 32% of vulnerabilities were exploited on or before the day the CVE was issued. The infrastructure powering this is massive, with AI-powered scan activity reaching 36,000 scans per second.

But it’s not just about speed; it’s about context. Only 0.47% of identified security issues are actually exploitable. While your team burns cycles reviewing the 99.5% of "noise," AI is laser-focused on the 0.5% that matters, isolating the small fraction of exposures that can be chained into a viable route to your critical assets.

To understand the threat, we must look at it through two distinct lenses: how AI accelerates attacks on your infrastructure, and how your AI infrastructure itself introduces a new attack surface.

AI attackers aren't necessarily using "new" exploits. They are exploiting the exact same CVEs and misconfigurations they always have, but they are doing it with machine speed and scale.

Attackers no longer need a "Critical" vulnerability to breach you. They use AI to chain together "Low" and "Medium" issues, a stale credential here, a misconfigured S3 bucket there. AI agents can ingest identity graphs and telemetry to find these convergence points in seconds, doing work that used to take human analysts weeks.

Machine identities now outnumber human employees 82 to 1. This creates a massive web of keys, tokens, and service accounts. AI-driven tools excel at "i

Source: The Hacker News