Bottom line: Google Threat Intelligence chief Sandra Joyce observes that AI tools are driving a record number of zero-day discoveries and a flood of bug bounty reports, while users and companies increasingly become targets of AI-powered attacks.
Sandra Joyce, head of Threat Intelligence at Google, warns of an AI-accelerated shift in the threat landscape: attackers and defenders are increasingly deploying automated tools, resulting in more zero-day vulnerabilities being discovered than ever before. At the same time, bug bounty programs and companies are coming under pressure from AI-powered attacks.
According to Sandra Joyce, who heads the Threat Intelligence division at Google, the use of AI systems is currently fundamentally transforming the cybersecurity field. Bug bounty programs, through which security researchers report vulnerabilities to vendors, are being flooded with a wave of bug reports, according to her observations. A key driver of this is AI-powered tools, which make it easier for both legitimate security researchers and attackers to automatically identify vulnerabilities in software. As a result, according to Joyce, more zero-day vulnerabilities are currently being discovered than ever before.
For security leaders, this creates two parallel challenges. On one hand, the number of vulnerability reports requiring assessment is increasing, placing additional strain on the capacities of security teams and bug bounty programs, since not every automatically generated report is actually relevant or accurate. On the other hand, Joyce reports that users and companies are increasingly becoming direct targets of AI-powered attacks, for example through automatically generated phishing campaigns or attack tools that exploit vulnerabilities faster than has previously been common.
For CISOs, this development means that traditional processes for prioritizing vulnerability reports and responding to zero-day discoveries need to be reviewed. Since attackers are using AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities faster, defenders also face a growing need to deploy corresponding automation in their own threat detection and patch prioritization in order to keep pace with the increased speed.
Source: www.heise.de · Published August 8, 2026
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