Recently, Google's Threat Intelligence Group detected the first known instance of a hacker group using an AI-developed zero-day exploit in the wild. This foreign hacker tried to hack the two-factor authentication process which many consumer applications, including those from banks and e-commerce, rely on for security.
Google said that their own Gemini AI tool was not used for this hack, as the Python script used by the hackers was filled with educational docstrings, including a hallucinated CVSS score, and followed a structured, textbook Pythonic format highly characteristic of LLMs training data (like detailed help menus and the clean _C ANSI color class).
While the attackers planned a wide-scale strike, Google's Threat Intelligence Group had deployed proactive counter-discovery, successfully stopping it from occurring. In light of this threat, Google has published a new report on AI-powered cyber threats including how AI was used to hack.
In the report, Google mentions that threat actors are leveraging AI to augment various phases of the attack lifecycle. This includes supporting the development of vulnerability exploits and malware, facilitating autonomous execution of commands, enabling more targeted and well-researched reconnaissance, and improving the efficacy of social engineering and information operations.
How was AI was used to hack the two-factor authentication process
Google in the report said that Gemini AI tool was not used in this hack but rather some other AI tool was used.
Tarun Wig, Co-founder & CEO, Innefu Labs, told ET Wealth Online that what Google caught this time is genuinely new territory.
Wig says: "Their threat intelligence team found criminals who used AI to discover and build one of these exploits before anyone else spotted it. The plan was to run it at mass scale, hitting a huge number of systems at once. Google intervened before that could happen."
Wig says that the target was the two-factor authentication process on a widely used server administration tool. That matters because 2FA is the safety net most people trust after their password.
The AI found a flaw in how the developer had written the logic, a hidden contradiction buried in the code that traditional security scanners would never flag. Those tools look for crashes and errors. According to Wig, AI reads intent, and that is precisely what made this discovery so dangerous and different from anything that came before it.
For those who aren't familiar, most software has bugs. Some bugs are harmless but some can be dangerous. But what's even more dangerous is zero-day.
Wig says that zero-day is a type of bug no one is aware of yet, not the company that built the software, not the security teams watching it. Attackers who find one get a free pass into systems with no alarm going off.
