Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity: Ally or Threat?

Artificial intelligence has become an indispensable tool in corporate IT strategies in just a few years. Automation, anomaly detection, process optimisation… its promises are real. But behind these benefits lies a more nuanced reality: the same technologies that strengthen your defences are also in the hands of those seeking to attack you.

For IT managers, ignoring this duality is no longer an option. Understanding how AI infiltrates both sides of the cybersecurity spectrum is the first step towards building a truly adapted defensive posture.

AI in the Service of Cybersecurity: Unprecedented Capabilities

Real-Time Threat Detection

Traditional security systems rely on fixed rules and known threat signatures. AI changes the game: it analyses massive volumes of data in real time, detects abnormal behaviour and identifies novel threats — including those that have never been catalogued before.

AI-powered EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) and SIEM solutions significantly reduce intrusion detection times, dropping from several weeks on average to just a few hours in the best-equipped environments.

Automated Incident Response

When an attack strikes, every minute counts. AI enables the automation of first-response actions: isolating a compromised workstation, blocking a suspicious connection, triggering targeted alerts. Security teams can then focus on analysis and decision-making, rather than repetitive low-value tasks.

Predictive Vulnerability Analysis

AI is also capable of anticipating threats. By analysing past attack patterns and cross-referencing them with your infrastructure configurations, it can identify the vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited — before they are. This is particularly relevant for front-end flaws such as XSS attacks, which mechanisms like Content Security Policy (CSP) can effectively neutralise.

AI as a Weapon: What Your Adversaries Have Already Understood

Undetectable Phishing

The era of artisanal phishing campaigns — riddled with spelling mistakes and clumsy phrasing — is over. Thanks to large language models, cybercriminals now generate perfectly written, personalised, contextualised phishing emails that are far more convincing. Some go further with spear phishing, targeting specific individuals using data harvested from their social media profiles or online activity.

Augmented Social Engineering

Audio and video deepfakes are opening a new dimension in social engineering attacks. Documented cases show employees authorising fraudulent wire transfers after receiving voice calls that perfectly mimicked their CFO. These attacks, still perceived as futuristic two years ago, are now accessible to malicious actors with limited resources.

Large-Scale Automated Cyberattacks

AI allows attackers to parallelise and industrialise their operations. Automated vulnerability scanning, generating malware variants to bypass antivirus software, automated penetration testing across thousands of targets simultaneously… What once required entire teams can now be orchestrated by a single threat actor with the right tools.

False Confidence: The Real Blind Spot for Businesses

Having AI-powered security solutions is not enough. The real risk for many organisations is not a lack of tools — it is the overestimation of their protection.

Several biases deserve to be questioned:

Blind trust in automation. AI can produce both false positives and false negatives. An alert dismissed because the system “handles it automatically” can allow a real attack to slip through.

Neglecting the human layer. The most sophisticated tools offer no protection against an employee who clicks on a malicious link or reuses the same password across ten different services. Awareness training remains an essential pillar.

The gap between attack and defence. Attackers adopt new AI capabilities quickly, with no regulatory constraints or validation processes. Businesses, by contrast, evolve more slowly. This gap creates an exposure window that must be actively worked to close. The ANSSI Cyber Threat Panorama provides concrete evidence of this acceleration in attacks in recent years.

What This Means Concretely for Your IT Strategy

In light of this reality, a few key principles stand out:

Adopt a Zero Trust approach. Never assume that a user, device or connection is trustworthy by default — even within your own network. AI integrates naturally into this approach by enabling continuous, contextual verification.

Regularly audit your attack surface. AI can continuously map your exposed assets and potential attack vectors. This should be part of a proactive approach, not a post-incident reaction.

Train your teams on new threat forms. AI-generated phishing, deepfakes, contextual manipulation… attack scenarios are evolving. Training must keep pace.

Evaluate your tools based on their ability to evolve. A relevant solution today may become obsolete within 18 months if it does not incorporate continuous learning mechanisms.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence does not make cybersecurity simpler. It makes it faster, more sophisticated, and more asymmetric. The companies that get the most out of it are those that integrate it into a global strategy — and refuse to confuse the presence of tools with genuine protection.

Being on both sides is also an opportunity: to understand adversarial methods in order to better guard against them. The question is no longer whether you will be targeted. It is whether you will be ready.