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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Technology
Johana Bhuiyan

‘Black October’: cybersecurity experts sound the alarm over new era of AI-enabled hacking

A website homepage.
The homepage of the PHP.net website on 22 October 2026 in Singapore. Photograph: Yong Teck Lim/Getty Images

Leaders in cybersecurity are sounding the alarm after the discovery of a major vulnerability this week. They are predicting that artificial intelligence tools will expose more fundamental weaknesses in global internet infrastructure in the months to come.

“I no longer think we’re going to be able to patch all bugs,” said Sam Altman on Thursday evening, joining the chorus of executives. In the midst of what’s being called “Black October”, for which researchers used AI to help identify critical flaws in a coding language that is used across millions of websites and may have been unpatched for years, tech executives are warning about the ways AI will be used both to identify and exploit security vulnerabilities at an unprecedented scale and pace.

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