AI 'Vibe Hacking': How Cybercriminals Are Using AI as a Built-In Hacking Assistant

For years, cybersecurity professionals have ranked attacker threat levels by technical skill—nation-states at the top, organised crime groups next, and low-skill 'script kiddies' at the bottom, seen as easy to defend against. That ranking is becoming outdated.

A growing trend known as 'vibe hacking' sees attackers use AI tools to do the heavy technical lifting for them—writing malicious code, crafting convincing phishing messages, or identifying vulnerabilities—without needing deep expertise themselves. Effectively, AI is acting like a 'junior hacker' on demand, lowering the barrier to entry for cybercrime and making attacks from less-skilled individuals more dangerous and harder to predict.

This shift matters for small and medium businesses because it means attacks once assumed to require advanced skills can now be launched by almost anyone with access to AI tools. Traditional risk models based on attacker sophistication may no longer accurately predict the threat level a business faces.