These companies were joined by major breaches involving the Gauteng Provincial Government<\/a>, Statistics South Africa<\/a>, and the African National Congress (ANC)<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lee said that the capabilities of AI models, like Anthropic’s Mythos, are not overstated. “If anything, these models are more capable than first understood.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n He said that the shift for cybercriminals already embracing AI was clear for South Africa, with the company now among the top 20 worldwide for cybercrime complaints as of last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “AI-driven attack capability changes the economics for attackers. What once required skill, time, and resources can now be done faster, more cheaply and at a greater scale,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We have moved from a world where AI assists attackers to one where AI can drive attacks autonomously, and the pace of change means traditional security approaches need to evolve quickly.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lee said Anthropic’s latest AI models were being used worldwide to find system vulnerabilities and prevent potential exploits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Palo Alto was a launch partner of Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s limited release of Mythos, which it said was its most powerful model yet for coding and development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lee said Palo Alto has extended its testing to include advanced AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, including Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5 Cyber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The scale of what these models can find is telling. Testing that previously took a full year can now be completed in days,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In one of the company’s most recent patches, Lee explained that the majority of security findings were discovered by these advanced AI models scanning code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He said they identified 75 security flaws across 26 vulnerabilities, compared to a typical monthly volume of fewer than 5. This represented a 1,400% increase in capability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bijan Sanii, CEO of Canadian fraud detection provider Inetco, told MyBroadband that South African institutions, including its banks, should be concerned about the power of AI-driven cybercrime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Not because Mythos is necessarily being used in fraud scams and bank fraud schemes today, but because it signals where the cyber threat environment is heading,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The issue is that AI is accelerating the discovery, testing and potential weaponisation of software weaknesses.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n In May, a small team of cybersecurity researchers found an active, exploitable vulnerability in Apple’s famous Mac cybersecurity protection, which had never been breached.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Apple reportedly spent five years building the protection system, which the researchers were able to find an exploit to breach in just one week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The advantage was Mythos, which helped the researchers accelerate their efforts and find methods to crack Apple’s hardware-assisted memory safety system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Memory corruption remains the most common vulnerability class everywhere, including iOS and MacOS,” the researchers explained previously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “In security, if you can’t fully prevent something, you mitigate it by making exploitation more expensive.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n They explained that part of their motivation was to test the limits of the best AI models in cybersecurity, especially in coding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The danger was that while cybersecurity experts used AI to find vulnerabilities before bad actors did, the other side of the fence was investing in AI too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Threat actors employed their own large language models to identify the most vulnerable processes and systems to attack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Check Point Software security engineering head for Africa, Ian van Rensburg, said that threat actors are now using AI as “mega hacking” assistants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Hackers are using AI, and their attacks are now at the speed of a machine and not a human. These things get exploited very quickly,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" South Africa has at most five months to prepare for widespread cyberattacks targeting local organisations driven by the increased popularity and performance of AI models.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341213,"featured_media":651411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92837,27],"tags":[69026,84095,105078,104783,6032,104784,103907,104674,77622,35318,5380,1851],"class_list":["post-651248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-security","tag-adumo","tag-anthropic","tag-bijan-sanii","tag-check-point-software","tag-esquire","tag-ian-van-rensburg","tag-justin-lee","tag-mythos","tag-palo-alto","tag-palo-alto-networks","tag-pick-n-pay","tag-standard-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651248"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=651248"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":651419,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/651248\/revisions\/651419"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/651411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=651248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=651248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=651248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}AI making it 1,400% easier to find security flaws<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Claude-Mythos-Anthropic-1200x675.jpg\")
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