The top hacker in America is an AI bot

Mr. Robot's got nothing on the real deal.

Xbow, an AI model developed by a startup of the same name, recently became the first bot to reach the top of HackerOne’s prestigious US leaderboard by reputation.

Can you hack it? HackerOne connects US-based companies and organizations with ethical hackers to participate in bug bounty programs. Its leaderboard ranking system tracks which hackers have found and reported the most vulnerabilities, with each one weighted by how important it is.

• Xbow reached the top spot on HackerOne by a wide margin after submitting ~1,060 vulnerabilities within a 90-day period, including 54 classified as “critical” and 242 as “high.”

Good news, bad news: In a blog post describing the road to #1, Xbow notes ~45% of the vulnerabilities its AI discovered are still awaiting resolution, in yet another example of how security teams are struggling to keep up with AI-assisted cyberattacks.

Zoom out: Experts say malicious actors are increasingly using AI to not only launch autonomous cyberattacks at scale, but also craft highly convincing fake content that consistently “blur[s] the line between what’s real and what’s not” across audio, video, and text.