The thieves started at 11 p.m. on a Friday. By morning, startup founder Colin Parsons had about 50 emails waiting. Each one was a receipt for a few dollars of AI services. The bills came to $449. He hadn't bought a thing.
The thieves got in with credentials Parsons had stored with OpenCode, an AI-coding site. OpenCode's co-founder said on X that the site has been under nonstop AI-driven attack since Oct. 16. When Parsons went to its support channel to report the fraud, the channel was flooded with nonsense messages. Fresh junk arrived every two seconds, and his note sank in moments. Other OpenCode users chimed in with the same story. One put his loss at $1,700.
Parsons is one small victim in a very big month. A new set of website bugs could let attackers seize as many as 70% of the world's sites, and the rush to patch them began Wednesday. Amazon (AMZN) says hackers are trying to use those flaws right now. The National Security Agency and the FBI had blunt advice for any company that couldn't patch at once. Unplug the site. Government sites in several countries went dark, among them Canada, Belgium, France and the Netherlands. "We've been seeing an explosion of these agentic adversaries," said Adam Meyers of CrowdStrike (CRWD). Robert McMillan of the Journal reports that pundits now call the month "Black October." The firms that clean up after breaches can't keep up.
A $200 license and a stolen key
The tools are cheap and fast. One is Artex, open-source software from China. It lets AI do the grunt work of breaking into a network. Microsoft (MSFT) said this week that attackers in many regions are using it against hundreds of companies. One attack this month used it to take data on about 68,000 people held by South Korean banks. Researchers at Sophos watched a Russian-speaking ransomware gang lean on AI more and more through the year. The gang reached AI models through a $200-a-month license from a coding service. Its people work faster than the average human, Sophos's Colin Cowie said. Sherri Davidoff of LMG Security polls her peers every three months. Twelve months ago they reported almost no AI in real attacks. Now they call it routine. CrowdStrike, Microsoft and Amazon are held at weight in 20, 29 and 19 books. Nothing added.
Our read
This is a Consumer Protection story, module M11, and the lesson is in the size of the charges. Parsons lost $449 a few dollars at a time, overnight, from a key he'd saved with a service he trusted. That's the shape of the new theft. It's small enough to slip past a monthly glance and fast enough to run while you sleep. Nobody can patch the internet for you. You can shrink what a thief can reach. Every saved card number, every reused password and every old login is a door, and most of us have dozens we've forgotten.
The one thing in your plan this touches is the list of places your money lives online. The check for this week is simple. Open your card app and turn on an alert for every charge, including the small ones. Then write down each site that holds a card number or a password you also use somewhere else, and close the ones you don't need. Turn on two-step login for the rest. It takes an evening. We'd rather you spend it now than spend a morning reading 50 emails. Bring the list to your next review if you want a second pair of eyes on it.