AI-Powered Cyberattacks Are Here: How They Are Supercharging Ransomware Attacks and How You Can Mitigate Them

In today’s landscape of evolving cyber threats, assuming your business is safe is no longer an option – it’s time to take proactive steps to defend against cyberattacks. In the arms race between cyberattacks and organizations defending their IT infrastructures and network systems, malicious actors are compelling businesses to bolster cybersecurity resiliency and vigilance to create a more level playing field. By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI), cybercriminals are beginning to surpass manually generated threats in speed, sophistication and the damage they inflict.

The numbers speak for themselves:

• $10.22 million is the average cost to U.S. companies per cyber breach*

• Every 39 seconds a cyberattack takes place globally

• 70% of attackers target small- and medium-sized businesses**

• 60% of small businesses shut down within six months after a cyberattack

As criminal AI applications continue to advance, organizations must ensure that they stay prepared.

How AI Is Reshaping Cybercrime

Dynamic, autonomous, and lightning-quick AI supercharges every stage of cyberattacks, making each one harder to protect against, detect, respond to, and contain. Threats are infiltrating more successfully through methods such as AI-generated phishing emails that provide users with convincing, personalized, and often lengthy message threads with perfect grammar. Generative AI bots simulate human response times, leveraging social media and company data for back-and-forth text threads that appear authentic. Additionally, AI-produced deepfakes are replicating employee voices with an alarming 98% accuracy. For example, AI attacks mimic C-suite officers to pass voice authentication checkpoints. This is just the beginning. Cybercriminals can also lease ransomware kits with AI-powered malware and phishing lures, resulting in 80% of ransomware attacks incorporating AI.

Once the attack is inside a company’s systems, it can rewrite itself every few minutes to bypass defense measures, evade detection and prioritize high-value targets. The scale of each attack has ballooned as well – days of manual hacking are being replaced with mere hours of AI automation. Each of these enhancements expands the devastation a single attack can unleash, and current cybersecurity systems aren’t keeping up.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s Adversarial Machine Learning: A Taxonomy and Terminology of Attacks and Mitigations identifies and categorizes types of cyberattacks that manipulate or exploit AI systems, providing a deeper understanding of the fast-evolving field of adversarial machine learning (AML).

Leveraging AI for Defense Solutions

AI-powered cyberattacks require far less technical expertise to execute – opening up the opportunity for more criminals. However, AI-driven security mechanisms are emerging, and corporations are effectively deploying them.

Case studies of AI-driven solutions are yielding promising results: organizations with extensive AI security measures are experiencing shorter breach lifecycles by 108 days, and an average of $1.9 million in lower costs per breach. Specifically, AI security measures enable:

• fewer, more refined alerts

• earlier identification of vulnerable data and security gaps

• better detection of in-progress attacks

• quicker, more precise responses

Proactive Steps to Protect Your Business

With the adoption of AI solutions, security teams can move faster, and in the current digital climate, every second counts. There are several fundamental steps businesses can take to reduce the opportunity, impact, and recovery of AI-powered attacks. Whether you are a small organization, a medium-sized company, or a multinational conglomerate, there are actionable steps for your business to consider implementing for prevention and recovery.

Preventive Measures:

• Conduct regular cybersecurity assessments and internal audits. Routinely identifying vulnerabilities and ensuring defenses remain robust against evolving AI-powered threats, such as deepfake impersonations or mutating malware, is critical. Proactively uncovering gaps in security controls helps businesses avoid costly breaches and ensures they stay ahead of sophisticated threats, such as AI-driven phishing or ransomware.

• Deploy an advanced anomaly detection and behavioral analytics tool. These solutions use AI, machine learning, and statistical modeling to identify unusual patterns and behaviors in the network traffic, user activity, and system operations that may indicate a cyber threat, such as an AI-generated phishing attempt.

• Implement a zero-trust architecture across the enterprise. Continuous verification of users and devices with tools such as multi-factor authentication operates on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” Also, monitor sessions that utilize micro-segmentation to minimize risks from AI-powered cyberattacks, insider threats, or compromised credentials.

• Perform regular software updates. All too often, cybercriminals enter network systems due to inadequate patch management practices. Timely software updates are a staple in any cybersecurity defense strategy, as well as retiring legacy systems.

• Implement ongoing employee cybersecurity training. Your employees are typically your first line of defense against cyberattacks. Human error is often considered the “weakest link” in an organization’s security, contributing to 95% of cyber breaches in 2024. Conducting targeted training on AI threats such as deepfakes can be one of the most effective countermeasures an organization can take to reduce human error vectors.

Recovery Steps:

• Develop and test a comprehensive incident response plan. Establish a structured cybersecurity framework (e.g., based on NIST or the SANS Institute). These outline specific controls and measures that cover detection, containment, eradication, and recovery phases to minimize downtime – demonstrating that a clear plan is in place, which is also critical for regulatory compliance.

• Maintain tested backup and data recovery procedures. Ensure constant offline, immutable backups with regular testing to quickly restore operations without reinfecting systems. Additionally, building and maintaining data inventories have often been critical artifacts for many organizations during a data breach. A complete record of a company’s data assets with comprehensive metadata and classifications enables essential visibility into the types of data potentially compromised.

• Leverage AI for post-incident forensics and analysis. Conduct thorough investigations using AI tools to attribute attacks and identify root causes for future prevention. Doing so enhances organizational resilience by learning from incident patterns to strengthen defenses against recurring or evolving AI-powered threats.

Start your cyber-readiness journey

AI-enhanced cyberattacks are faster, smarter, and more powerful than their predecessors, so businesses must proactively fortify their security systems. Fortunately, AI is not just a risk but an effective cybersecurity ally, and organizations that adopt intelligent, thorough defense measures see concrete improvements in breach prevention and recovery. Now is the time to ensure your business is protected.

Whether you're building a new cybersecurity program or strengthening an existing one, Gray Reed Advisory provides the foundation for better decision-making that protects what matters most to your organization. We customize practical solutions that yield risk management and compliance postures critical for keeping pace with evolving regulations and increasingly complex cyber threats. Contact us today to see how we can support your path to cyber-readiness.

* IBM: 13% Of Organizations Reported Breaches Of AI Models Or Applications, 97% Of Which Reported Lacking Proper AI Access Control

** Key Cyber Security Statistics for 2025