IMF says AI cyber attacks could cause a global financial crisis

Financial institutions and other sectors globally have been shaken by Anthropic’s release of Mythos, which saw OpenAI follow suit with its own vulnerability-finding cyber security model. While accessible only to a select few screened vendors, the capabilities of these models could create cyber crises in the wrong hands.

This is a particular concern for the finance industry, with threat actors commonly driven by financial gain. At the same time, financial institutions rely heavily on shared cloud services, meaning a vulnerability discovered and exploited by a threat actor could impact banks and other firms globally.

This risk then extends again to other sectors that rely on financial services institutions, such as critical infrastructure managers, including energy, telecommunications, and government.

The IMF added that these models could find and abuse vulnerabilities “even when used by non-experts”.

The IMF did, however, acknowledge that the technology could be useful, but that “integration, governance and human oversight” would need to be prioritised for that to be the case. It also advised businesses to build on their “business continuity and disaster recovery, cyber and quality assurance programmes, and good cyber hygiene practices”.

“Without robust cyber resilience strategies and real-time visibility, the finance sector risks sleepwalking into deeper vulnerabilities,” said Andy Ward, international senior vice president at Absolute Security, a cyber resilience platform.

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“Attackers are already leveraging AI to accelerate and scale threats, which can lead to major consequences for businesses.

“Cyber defences must evolve with equal urgency, or risk being left dangerously exposed.”