18 Months Ago, AI Could Barely Start a Simulated Cyberattack. Now It Can Get Nearly Halfway Through One for About $87
Government Research AI Threat Trend September 2026 · 7 min read For years, your best defense was that attacking your business took real skill and real time. UK government researchers just measured how fast that's changing, and put a price on it: about $87 for an AI system to work through nearly half of a realistic attack sequence that would take a trained human roughly fourteen hours. Small businesses are still largely defending at human speed. Attackers increasingly don't have to. For years, one of the quiet advantages defenders had was that attacking a business took work. Someone had to find the target, probe it, understand what was exposed, figure out what might work, try something, fail, adjust, try again, move deeper into the network, find credentials, and decide what to do next. Automation has always been part of cybercrime, but much of that difficult middle stretch still required a person with real expertise and...