Traditional security frameworks have a default premise: the attacker is expensive, slow, and has shortcomings. ISO standards, CVSS scoring, and penetration testing cycles are all built on this assumption. What AI eliminates is that assumption.

Previously, to write a stealthy malware and bypass antivirus software, you needed a reverse engineer to pull several sleepless nights; now, with a moderately skilled prompt, in just a few minutes you can generate a “never-before-seen” malicious script.

Before, social engineering a finance professional meant spending weeks to infiltrate LinkedIn, studying their routines, and writing tailored emails; now, with voice cloning plus large models, within minutes you can mass-generate “indistinguishable-from-the-real” audio and text.

So what’s the result? The “scarcity” and “cost” that traditional security depends on disappears.

In the encrypted world, this shift is most clearly reflected in the fact that attacks change from “targeted phishing” to “all-day, all-weather harvesting.” Previously, hackers focused on large hot wallets and projects’ multisig setups; now AI can scan GitHub commit records, Discord chat logs, and Telegram group conversations 24/7, automatically identifying who just received new contract permissions and who is complaining about the hassle of managing private keys.

What’s more troublesome is that AI drives the “attack verification cost” close to zero. Traditional penetration testing is done once a year, mainly because manual work is expensive; AI can scan your systems fully every day, even simulating thousands or tens of thousands of attack paths. What you think of as an “annual compliance audit” is, in AI’s eyes, a publicly accessible “defense map”—it knows where you didn’t test and where patches weren’t applied.

That’s why many projects, even those with “perfect compliance,” still get compromised. It’s not that the standards are wrong; it’s that the standards were written for an old world where “attackers are expensive,” and we’re now living in a new world where “attackers are free.”

For ordinary users, this means: you can no longer rely on exchanges or project teams’ “compliance certifications” to protect your assets. When the cost of attack drops to zero, any single point of defense may fail overnight.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about: when AI learns to “make phone calls,” why do MFA and back-office permission recovery processes become the biggest backdoor?