India, Oct. 21 -- Ransomware is not new. The playbook is familiar: get initial access, move laterally, escalate privileges, reach critical systems and disrupt the business.

What is new is how these attacks can now be executed. AI can help with reconnaissance, phishing, vulnerability research, credential attacks and attack planning. Work that earlier needed skilled people and time can increasingly be automated. The problem is old, but the avatar is new.

We are already seeing this happen. Anthropic has documented a cybercriminal using AI to build ransomware despite having only basic coding skills. Attackers also have access to capable open-weight models. UK AISI found leading open-weight models only four to seven months behind frontier cl...