Cognition Chief Security Officer Stamos: AI Fuels Attack Wave, Cybersecurity Enters 'Dark Age'

Cognition Chief Security Officer and Stanford University cyber policy lecturer Alex Stamos said on The Verge podcast Decoder that AI is simultaneously helping attackers discover and exploit vulnerabilities; state-backed actors from Russia, North Korea, and elsewhere, along with private attackers, are using it to breach systems of all kinds, and the multi-billion-dollar traditional cybersecurity industry is struggling to keep up. The episode, released on 2026-11-07, is the first in The Verge's series exploring real-world applications of AI.

Stamos said that over the past month, multiple critical vulnerabilities have been exposed in foundational components such as PHP and Node, a large number of companies have been breached, and a series of AI-related new cloud service providers (neoclouds) have been compromised one after another; he also mentioned the Binance theft incident and an incident at Cursor. According to his account, the Binance case is "the largest theft in human history."

He likened the current situation to the "frontier feel" of the internet's early rise in the 1990s, arguing that the industry needs to go through a "dark age" before finding an adaptive path, but that in the long run he is not a pessimist.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/1029038/ai-cybersecurity-hackers-data-breach-dark-age-alex-stamos