Microsoft: RU, China increasingly using AI to escalate cyberattacks on the US (apnews.com)

Microsoft’s annual digital threats report warns that Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — along with criminal gangs — are rapidly escalating their use of AI to create deceptive online content and mount cyberattacks against U.S. targets. In July alone Microsoft flagged more than 200 instances of AI-generated fakes, over twice July 2024’s count and more than ten times 2023’s. Adversaries are using generative models to automate social engineering (translating and polishing phishing lures), produce digital clones of officials, craft synthetic personas for remote-job scams (a tactic attributed to North Korea), and streamline espionage, supply-chain intrusion and ransomware operations. The U.S. remains the most-targeted country, followed by Israel and Ukraine. The significance: generative AI lowers the cost and raises the scale and sophistication of deception, making traditional defenses—signature-based tools and poorly maintained controls—insufficient. Technically, attackers combine language models, voice/video synthesis, and automated reconnaissance to personalize attacks at scale and pivot into critical systems like hospitals and transport. Microsoft and security leaders urge organizations to invest in core cyber hygiene, threat detection, and AI-powered defenses (e.g., models that detect synthetic content and anomalous access), because AI is now both an accelerator for attackers and a necessary part of modern defenses in this fast-moving “cat-and-mouse” landscape.