How hackers are using AI

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to EnterpriseAM AI + Innovation! It’s a sunny early-fall morning in Cairo, where the team is still gathered after our EnterpriseAM Egypt Forum on Monday. More on that below. Let’s get started.

Isn’t it great when AI can take over a boring task for you? Yeah, hackers feel that way too.

Ye Olde AI Days: In the earliest days of AI, hackers might use the technology to help them craft a phishing email in a language they didn’t speak or to write a tricky piece of malicious computer code, Waseem Youssef (LinkedIn), Palo Alto Networks’ senior manager of systems engineering for the MENA region, told the audience at our Egypt Forum, which focused entirely on AI this year.

Now, hackers are handing the entire operation over to AI agents. And, just like legitimate businesses, some are achieving huge efficiencies. “You give it instructions and tell it, ‘I want to break into that company,’ and the agentic AI can actually go do reconnaissance,” Youssef said. “They can go and discover tools, try one way or another way, and then they will, at the end of the day, break in.”

Pwned in under an hour: The result is a massive decrease in the lag time between when attackers first target an organization and when they infiltrate it, per the 2026 Incident Response Report from Palo Alto’s Unit 42 division. The fastest 22% of hacks included in the report took under an hour, Palo Alto found, and the average time for the top quarter of attacks was 72 minutes. That’s down from roughly five hours in the previous year’s report.

What to do? Companies in the Arab world can follow some basic steps to protect themselves, panelists said: Invest more in cyber defense, make it a priority for the CEO and other top executives, and insist that everyone do the boring grunt work that makes companies better defended. That means updating software, ensuring company information can only be accessed by company employees, and canceling employees’ credentials as soon as they quit.

“Even if I have the top technology in my organization, I can still be penetrated if I’ve got a person who’s not able to use it wisely,” says Mohamed ElGarf (LinkedIn), Fortinet’s regional business development manager for Egypt and East Africa security operations, who spoke on the same panel.

But even after all of that, hackers enabled by AI — working harder and smarter than any human — will definitely have the advantage, says Sherif Shaltout (LinkedIn), managing executive for MENA at Liquid C2. “We always modeled security on the hacker mindset, which is that they would prioritize the highest value targets,” Shaltout says. “Now AI collapses all of that. They don’t have to make the choice between organization A and B. They can attack both and 10k more at [the same] time.”

Want more news and insights from our Egypt Forum on AI? There’s lots more in the Tuesday and Wednesday editions of EnterpriseAM Egypt — and still more to come in Forum Playback, which we’ll be sending out on Tuesday. –Joe