Cybersecurity Perspectives

S1:E5 - In 2025 AI assisted attacks used an average of 15 MITRE techniques, a year later its averaging 50

• Paul Marco & Owahn Bazydlo • Season 1 • Episode 5

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 26:13

In this episode of Cybersecurity Perspectives, Paul Marco and Owahn Bazydlo unpack a striking data point from the 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report: the median threat actor researched or used AI assistance across 15 different MITRE ATT&CK techniques in 2025, with some actors leveraging as many as 40 to 50. What follows is a candid discussion of what happens when the very frameworks defenders rely on become the roadmaps adversaries feed to unrestricted large language models.

The conversation frames a fundamental asymmetry that has always existed in cybersecurity but is now accelerating at machine speed. MITRE ATT&CK was built to codify known adversary tradecraft and give defenders a common language for identifying coverage gaps. That same catalog, once handed to an AI agent, becomes an efficient checklist for probing enterprise environments. Attackers need only one technique to succeed. Defenders need every control to hold. AI compresses the time and expertise required on the offensive side, while defenders remain constrained by procurement cycles, architectural complexity, incomplete asset inventories, and log coverage gaps that no framework alignment exercise can quickly resolve.

The episode also touches on broader industry context, including recent departures from frontier AI labs by researchers raising alignment concerns, and updated ransomware payment data pointing to manufacturing, education, and healthcare as the most frequently paying verticals. Together, these threads reinforce the central takeaway: the defender's advantage now depends less on tooling sophistication and more on operational discipline, environmental clarity, and the ability to contain a compromise before it outpaces the humans defending against it.

https://www.talas.io/podcast

People on this episode