Ex-NSA cyber-boss: AI will soon be a great exploit coder

At RSA Conference, former NSA cybersecurity director Rob Joyce cautioned that rapidly advancing AI will soon excel at bug finding and exploit development, while already supercharging phishing with individualized, culturally tuned messages; Sandfly Security’s Craig Rowland echoed AI’s dual-use impact, citing AI-assisted reverse engineering speedups. Joyce described a notable ransomware case where attackers, blocked by EDR on a desktop, pivoted to an unmonitored Linux video camera, mounted enterprise drives, and encrypted data from that device—highlighting attacker agility, defender blind spots, and the broader theme that those leveraging AI will outperform those who do not.