Synthetic Minds | The Next Cyberattack Wants Your Confidence, Not Your Data

Synthetic Minds | The Next Cyberattack Wants Your Confidence, Not Your Data

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No Ransom, No Stolen Data. Just Chaos

The most dangerous hackers in Europe are not after your data or your money. They are after your confidence, and they likely work for states whose only objective is chaos.

That chaos is cheap to create. The Dutch supermarket's shelves of Albert Heijn ran empty after a cyberattack stopped its Dutch distribution centres, which Ahold Delhaize expects to cost up to €250 million in lost sales. In a separate attack that same weekend, someone warmed the freezers of about 700 French supermarkets, came back across Belgium, Ireland and Sweden, then reached France's blood service, where plasma freezers were reset to heat up to 110C through a refrigeration supplier, although no blood was lost as the monitoring caught it on time.

What ties these attacks together is what is missing. No ransom was demanded for the freezers, and the pro-Russian groups that claimed the supermarket attacks offered proof nobody has verified. When attackers hit one part of society after another, people start to feel a shadow operating among them that can create havoc. It might not kill anyone, yet, but it creates sufficient chaos.

The lone hacker has an army too

The companies hit look as if they never had their security in order, and many did not, yet a state brings capabilities few companies could resist. However, that shadow does not always belong to a state. Thanks to AI, a lone hacker no longer needs a state: Acronis found one individual in Taiwan running 12 AI agents against hundreds of organizations in 11 countries.

A butcher can lose everything overnight

If one person can reach that far, any business owner can become a target, often without knowing they own a connected machine. Picture a butcher whose freezer links to its manufacturer: attackers break into the manufacturer, set the freezer to heat, and the stock is gone by morning. The same logic runs through AI accounts, where Google found thieves switching on AI services companies had never enabled, called LLMJacking, and billing $100,000 in a day, which is why I hold the vendor responsible for raising the alarm.

Either way, attackers might not ask for money, but it will certainly cost a lot of money. Only 10% to 20% of small and mid-sized firms carry cyber insurance, and a few years ago a medical debt collector, AMCA, filed for bankruptcy after a breach drove away its four largest clients. What would your company be worth the morning after its stock, its systems or its customers' trust disappeared?

Trust is the real target

That last loss may be the one attackers want most. Trust will start to break down, and a society that stops trusting its machines becomes more vulnerable. If fridges, cameras and controllers start to misbehave at scale, the internet of things will take serious reputational damage, and small firms will demand action from governments, insurers and manufacturers.

The silver lining is that device makers may finally take security seriously, and US agencies have told every organization that depends on refrigeration it "should assume it could be a target." How many connected machines does your business own that nobody has counted?

One more thing: the splinternet is powering up

Apple will put Alibaba's Qwen inside Siri in mainland China, after China's internet regulator cleared it, while building on Google's Gemini elsewhere. I see this as one step closer to a splinter internet, where different regions see a different internet, powered by different AI that hold different biases. Even democracies have grown careful with foreign AI tools, because those tools can be switched off.

What is your business, once security decides whether it survives?

The core of a business is rapidly becoming data and security, and without them it is end of story. Black October showed what is most likely to come, so be ready for a chaotic 2027.

If your leadership team meets before the year is out, the Intelligence Age Leadership Program gives them one question to answer together: which of the machines the business depends on could be turned against it overnight.

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Thank you.
Mark