India, Nov. 24 -- The era of slow, manually executed cyberattacks is disappearing. Ransomware today is becoming faster, cheaper, and significantly more scalable. What is driving this shift is the rapid adoption of generative AI by threat actors. GenAI is now woven into multiple stages of the attack lifecycle, accelerating everything from reconnaissance to extortion and reshaping the underlying economics of cybercrime. While agentic AI remains on the horizon, the groundwork being laid today signals a future where parts of a ransomware campaign could be conducted with minimal human intervention.

An IBM report suggests that roughly 16% of breaches in 2025 involved some form of attacker-used AI, most commonly in AI-generated phishing campaig...