But while AI empowers analysts to operate with greater speed and precision, this evolution is forging a dangerous divide: between defenders adopting AI, and those who are being outmaneuvered by AI-powered adversaries.
Adversary use of GenAI is evolving. They are now manipulating threat indicators to obscure attribution, mimicking the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of known threat actors to confuse analysts and delay response. These AI-powered campaigns adapt dynamically and automate deception at scale, making traditional detection increasingly unreliable. AI also enables fully autonomous attacks that identify vulnerabilities, craft exploits, and launch multi-stage campaigns with little to no human input. The speed and complexity of these operations continue to evolve beyond the reach of legacy defenses.
To test the limits of this threat, CrowdStrike’s offensive engineering team built an AI-powered attack simulation engine capable of launching multi-stage campaigns in minutes. The engine dynamically alters TTPs, generates evasive payloads, and continuously adapts its behavior to evade detection. These simulations expose critical gaps in conventional defense postures and highlight where defenders must evolve. The insights gained are not just warnings — they’re a blueprint for building AI-augmented defenses that think, adapt, and respond as fast as the adversary. With the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon® platform, defenders gain the speed, context, and automation required to seize the advantage in this new era of cyber warfare.
AI-driven Modular C2 Dashboard: A dynamic, modular interface provides real-time visibility into compromised hosts, executed actions, and system responses. Every action result is automatically interpreted by an embedded AI engine, which analyzes outputs and recommends next steps. This enables a near-autonomous, adaptive feedback loop for streamlined C2 operations.
This blog explores this new paradigm in two parts: a deep dive into how adversaries weaponize AI to build scalable, evasive, and intelligent attack chains, followed by a technical walkthrough of how CrowdStrike Charlotte AI™, our agentic AI analyst, enables defenders to triage, investigate, and respond to attacks at machine speed.
CrowdStrike’s Offensive Lab engineers built a simulated adversarial command-and-control (C2) platform to test what happens when threat actors harness the power of agentic and generative AI to launch attacks.
CrowdStrike Engineers Explore Offensive AI: The Adversary’s New Weapon of Scale
The Threat Model: The AI-augmented Adversary and C2 Framework
The AI battleground is here. Adversaries are weaponizing AI to launch attacks with unprecedented scale, speed, and effectiveness. In response, defenders are turning to AI as an analyst force-multiplier, using it to offload repetitive tasks, accelerate decision-making, and scale expertise across the SOC.
Key Features of the AI-powered C2 Framework:
- Adversaries increasingly adopted GenAI throughout 2024, the CrowdStrike 2025 Global Threat Report found. GenAI tools are, for example, being used to create deepfake audio and video: A .6 million USD business email compromise used the cloned voice and likeness of a CFO, CrowdStrike observed.1 An Arvix study found phishing emails generated by large language models had a 54% click-through rate — significantly higher than the 12% rate for likely human-written messages — underscoring genAI’s effectiveness in social engineering.2
