How I would choose and hack a victim in the age of AI

As Darktrace's Global Field CISO and a former white hat hacker, I'll walk you through how I would plan an attack in today’s AI-enabled environment. I’ll reveal the thought processes, target points, tools, and techniques that sophisticated threat actors consider when they select and compromise their targets, and how today's rapidly evolving landscape helps them. The talk will offer you invaluable insights you can apply to your own defence strategies.

Using new data and case studies, I'll explore the perfect storm of factors making my life as a hypothetical attacker easier: your organisational resource constraints, widespread cloud adoption, the professionalisation of Cybercrime-as-a-Service (CaaS), and the revolutionary impact of AI on offensive capabilities. And I'll show you which cutting-edge tools would excite me if I wore a black hat—from autonomous agents and advanced LLMs to emerging CaaS platforms—and provide a detailed walkthrough of how I would select and breach a target using these capabilities.

Looking forward, I'll examine how my attack methodologies would likely evolve over the next five years, with particular focus on increasingly aggressive autonomous systems that could transform the threat landscape. Throughout this journey into the adversarial mindset, I'll translate these insights into actionable defence strategies, highlighting how defensive AI creates a differentiated approach to cybersecurity and examining how regulatory frameworks like Australia's mandatory ransomware reporting requirements might influence my targeting decisions as an attacker.

Drawing on research from Darktrace's incident response team and real life cases, fresh analysis from our threat researchers, and deep dives into emerging cloud attack techniques, I'll equip you with the adversarial thinking needed to strengthen your security posture against tomorrow's threats.