NSA official turned founder: AI multiplies attackers’ expertise while defenders are still short on talent

Jay Kaplan is the co-founder and CEO of Synack, which completed its merger with NetSPI in October. Before founding Synack in 2013, he worked in computer network operations at the National Security Agency.

Between late September and early October, an attacker broke into seven South Korean financial institutions and exfiltrated the personal data of about 68,000 people. CrowdStrike traced the campaign to ARTEX, an open-source AI hacking agent built in China and run alongside Anthropic’s Claude Code, and said the actor could be a 26-year-old. President Lee Jae Myung warned that AI can now make hacking “easy for even those without special skills.” An official at the Korea Financial Security Institute added, “It is correct that AI was used in the attack, but the AI did not act autonomously without human involvement — a hacker used the AI as a tool.”

Look closely at that hacker. CrowdStrike found no sign of an elite team or a state program, only an actor who paired agentic tools with established techniques. The human contribution looks thin: choosing Korean lenders as targets, aiming the agents at them, and asking Claude where the stolen data might be sold. The software supplied most of the technical legwork. The operator supplied the intent.

This is not the first example of state-backed groups leaning heavily on AI. In November 2025, Anthropic disclosed that a group it........

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