An article by Josh Taylor of Fortra begins:
Ransomware groups are increasingly inserting AI bots into the negotiation loop to triage victims, collect leverage and scale their operations.
At Fortra, I have observed a growing trend of attackers deploying chatbots for first contact, with humans stepping in only after certain thresholds are met. This approach allows criminal organizations to manage multiple simultaneous negotiations efficiently while reserving human effort for the most profitable cases.
AI enables attackers to bridge language barriers, present more polished and sophisticated communications and, in some instances, obscure attribution signals by varying style and metadata, making it harder for defenders to trace activity to a single actor.
Defenders now face faster attack tempos due to agentic AI that can chain tasks and compress the timeline from intrusion to ransom demand.
Read more at Information Week.
