A dangerous new threat: A new and cunning scheme by cybercriminals has been exposed

31 October 2026, 13:41·59·Technology

A new and extremely dangerous trend is being observed in the field of cybersecurity: hackers have started using bots disguised as artificial intelligence (AI) agents to crash company servers. Analysts from the international cybersecurity firm StormWall recorded the first major DDoS attacks masked under the names of official neural networks in September and October 2026.

According to TASS, while such attacks had previously been observed in some countries around the world, this is the first time they have been used in this specific form against major organizations in the Russian segment.

Targeted networks and precise attack statistics

The cyberattacks primarily targeted online retail, major media resources, the financial sector (banks), and telecommunications companies. The general distribution of the attacks was as follows:

Mass Media: 32 percent — the biggest hit was taken by news portals and media platforms;
Online stores (E-commerce): 26 percent — major retail marketplaces and platforms;
Banking and financial organizations: 17 percent — payment systems and financial services;
Telecommunication networks: 14 percent — communication operators and internet service providers;
Other online services: 11 percent.

How are hackers bypassing security systems?

The most dangerous aspect of this attack is that companies are unknowingly "opening the door" for cybercriminals:

The desire to be indexed by neural networks: Today, many media outlets and online stores have opened free access to their web resources for AI bots so that ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Gemini, and other major artificial intelligence systems can retrieve (index) information from their sites when answering user queries;
Fake AI agents: Taking advantage of this, hackers are masking their malicious bots as supposedly useful and official neural network algorithms;
Crashing servers: Security systems, assuming these requests are legitimate artificial intelligence, do not block them. As a result, the operations of sites and applications are completely paralyzed under millions of fake requests.

Experts warn that even if companies benefit from AI indexing, they must implement deep verification systems that strictly check whether incoming IP addresses and requests actually belong to legitimate neural networks.