As Cyberattacks Increase Fear of AI Bank Access Makes Headline News

by Brian Shilhavy
Health Impact News

A major security threat happened on the Internet last week, where security flaws were revealed in PHP code, which is used by about 70% of the websites on the Internet.

Urgent security fix issued for code vital to estimated 70% of all websites

The code vulnerability could allow attackers to take over servers, experts say.

ABC News

Excerpts:

PHP may not be a household name, but the programming language, released over 30 years ago, powers a large share of websites and web applications. Nearly 70% of the internet is estimated to use PHP, including WordPress, which is used for more than 40% of websites.

Now the PHP development team is urging users to update immediately after fixing two critical vulnerabilities, rated 9.2 out of 10 in terms of danger, that if exploited could allow attackers to take over internet servers.

Full article.

This was not fake news; it was real. My entire IT team had to stop everything they were doing that day to address this problem and apply the fixes, as did most of the IT departments of the businesses we deal with everyday.

But a few days later, another story even more fearful appeared, leading readers to wonder if their bank accounts were safe from rogue “runaway AI bots.”

Banks Preparing for Aftermath of Unprecedented Catastrophe Caused by AI

“You can’t stop it.”

Excerpts:

Doomsaying about the coming AI apocalypse is no longer relegated to outbursts from a few tech billionaires.

Now, the major American banks whose policies dictate the flow of capital throughout the world are starting to worry about rogue AI, preparing contingency plans for the “day after” a theoretical AI-driven catastrophe.

That’s according to new reporting from Axios, which notes that banks are preparing for the worst as they experience a huge rise in AI agent activity on behalf of individual customers.

The main worry seems to be an influx of financial activity driven by autonomous AI agents, which have been authorized to access bank accounts by their human users.

In some cases, as Axios noted previously, those agents are making moves that haven’t explicitly been prompted by humans — a few even going so far as to contact call centers on behalf of their users, without being instructed to do so.

That’s become a major liability for top banks like Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo, which are scrambling to implement security procedures and policy updates to get ahead of the AI swarm.

Failing to stay on top of emerging risks, some experts say, could result in financial catastrophe.

As chief economist at the Apollo wealth management firm Torsten Slok explained in a late September brief, AI agents operating under instructions to “optimize the return” on their users’ money could mean banks “lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be a problem for the entire financial system.”

Full article.

This “story” is NOT news. It is editorializing and predicting the future based on the classic “appeals to authority” where “experts” supposedly know more than we stupid human beings know who are not considered “experts”.

So is there an agenda here? What might come next?

ReallyGraceful published a good video looking into all of this.