Why You Need to Learn AI for Cybersecurity ASAP

Cybersecurity is all about preparation and response. Can you find the vulnerabilities before hackers do, and fix them in time? And if they do get in, can you stop them before things get worse?

But here's the thing...

AI has changed the game on both sides of that equation. That means if you want to defend or test systems in 2026, you need to know how to use AI alongside your cybersecurity skills, and understand the threat it poses.

The good news is our amazing cybersecurity instructor just dropped a brand new course on this topic:

Intermediate

AI for Ethical Hacking & Cybersecurity Bootcamp

8.5 Hours •67 Lessons

Learn how AI is changing the cybersecurity world and how to harness its power for yourself. You’ll build practical tools, improve workflows, explore AI threats and defenses, and use AI in hands-on security scenarios.

Aleksa Tamburkovski

I’ll talk about it more later but before that, I want to give you 4 solid reasons why you need to learn this ASAP this year. Heck, you should probably learn this even if you’re not in cybersecurity because the impact is huge.

So let’s get into it…

Reason #1. The bad guys are already using AI

In November last year, Anthropic found out that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group had been using their AI to run a full-blown cyber espionage campaign:

So not just a single company under threat, but attacks on multiple tech companies, banks, government agencies, and more, for roughly 30 targets in total. 

Not only is that crazy enough, but Anthropic claims that the AI handled somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of the whole operation!

The AI:

• Scanned for weaknesses

• Wrote the exploit code

• Stole credentials

• And even wrote up a report afterward to really rub salt in the wound 

This means that the hackers basically just pointed at a target and said "go," then checked in at the end.

Wild, right? 

Now, in the interests of being transparent, a few well-respected security researchers weren't totally convinced it was as autonomous as it sounds, and even Anthropic admitted the AI messed up sometimes. 

In fact, it made up fake credentials at one point, and thought it had found secret data that was actually just public, so it's not perfect. However, even a flawed AI still did the work of an entire hacking team, in a fraction of the time.

Scary right?

And I know what you might be thinking: “This was probably because the hackers were government-trained spies”.

Well yeah, possibly, but that’s not the real issue. The issue is that these tools allow pretty much anyone with a basic understanding to get up to mischief.

For example

A bunch of teenagers with basically zero coding skills used ChatGPT to hammer a telecom company's systems about 220,000 times!

However, there is a somepositives, because as long as you understand AI + cybersecurity, you can actually start to use these tools to help you instead…

Reason #2. AI can help you fight back too

As I said in the intro, a lot of cybersecurity is staying on top of your game, and looking for potential issues before hackers can find them.

Now in the future, a lot of common hacking tools will have AI assistance built in. But I'll be honest, that's not the real benefit of using AI alongside cybersecurity skills. It's when you apply them to your own goals instead.

For example

Let's say that you wanted to check your systems for any issues. Well right now, that probably means digging through logs and command histories by hand, hoping you spot the one bad line hiding among a thousand normal ones, right?

But what if you had a tool that could do that for you, that you built yourself?

Well, that's exactly what's possible when you learn how to use AI properly. In fact, in Aleksa’s new course he even shows you how to build a malicious bash command detector, so that you can catch dangerous commands before they actually run:

Handy right, because you could even build other tools to help you. The key though is not to just offload these tools to do the job. 

I cannot stress this enough, but just because AI helps us gets a lot done with zero skill, you still need to have the required cybersecurity skills to do this properly. Simply because you need to be able to think like a hacker if you want to defend against them...

Reason #3. AI isn't just a weapon; it's also a vulnerability…

So far we've talked about AI as a tool that hackers can use to attack, as well as a tool that you can use to defend. 

But there's another side to this that most people don't think about, and that’s the fact that AI itself can be the way in (or even the thing that bankrupts you!)

For example

Have you ever heard of "LLMjacking"? If you're running an enterprise-level LLM account, then you need to understand this ASAP, because it can make you broke overnight from an angle you would havenever thought of.

Basically hackers will steal an exposed API key connected to your AI tool accounts, and then use it to run AI requests for themselves and rack up insane bills. In fact, one developer's stolen Google API key turned their normal $180 a month bill into $82,314 in charges within 24 hours:

And that's just the money side of it. You might not even have an enterprise account that can rack up bills like this, but that doesn't mean you're not at risk from other issues.

What like?

Well the fact that everyone is in a mad rush to add in AI features, means that they also open up themselves to new vulnerabilities via prompt injection. This is were someone feeds a tool the right (or wrong) words to make it do something it was never meant to do. 

The thing is, AI's even more vulnerable to it, because it's built to follow instructions, and it's not always great at telling a real one from a fake one hiding inside an email or a support ticket!

And it's not just chatbots you need to worry about either.

Think about how many employees have Copilot or some other AI agent baked straight into their PC, with access to their files, their email, sometimes even having the ability to run commands for them.  Or worse, how many businesses have slapped together multiple AI agents on the backend to edit their code and systems without any oversight…

It's kind of terrifying.

Microsoft actually had to patch a vulnerability like this in Copilot, nicknamed "EchoLeak," where a single malicious email was enough to get it to pull data out of OneDrive and Teams on its own:

This is yet another reason why it's so important to also have cybersecurity skills alongside understanding these new tools, because if you're only learning traditional cybersecurity (or just winging it and adding all this stuff without understanding how to secure it), then you're under threat from an entire attack surface that didn't even exist a few years ago.

Even worse?

Because these hackers are aware of these new vulnerabilities, they can literally just get the AI to find anyone and everyone out there that's able to be hacked, and go after them while they take a nap. It doesn't matter if you're a small business, because they're after you for the exploit that you didn’t even know you have….

This is actually one of the things Aleksa goes deep on in his course. You build an AI agent attacker yourself, so you see exactly how these attacks work in practice. This way you can then understand the threat so you can secure against it, while also getting some peace of mind that you can deal with this.

But let’s be honest, it’s not just your peace of mind that matters…

Reason #4. It makes you way harder to replace (and easier to hire)

Fun fact but the vast majority of cybersecurity job listings right now specifically ask for AI, skills because of how important this is becoming:

Trust me on this.

I recently wrote an article on the best US cities to start an entry-level tech career. Basically I looked at 344 cities and all the thousands of entry level tech jobs manually, to create the report.

Two of the main things I found?

• Almost 30% of the jobs that were not cybersecurity, asked for cybersecurity skills.

• While around 50% of ALL jobs asked for AI skills also. Including the cybersec roles that I looked at

Simply put, there is HUGE demand for this skill in the industry right now, and it’s only going to grow. So if you want to be future proofed moving foward, you need this skill!

Time to learn this

As you can see, learning how to use AI with cybersecurity is not so much a nice new skill to learn, but a vital one moving forward. You need to know it to protect, to understand threats, to fix issues, and to be the hire they all look for when you're applying for roles.

The good news of course is that we have a brand new course on this:

Intermediate

AI for Ethical Hacking & Cybersecurity Bootcamp

8.5 Hours •67 Lessons

Learn how AI is changing the cybersecurity world and how to harness its power for yourself. You’ll build practical tools, improve workflows, explore AI threats and defenses, and use AI in hands-on security scenarios.

Aleksa Tamburkovski

You’ll learn to use AI for real cybersecurity work, both offensive and defensive. You’ll also build practical tools, improve ethical hacking workflows, explore AI threats and defenses, and use Python, ChatGPT, LangChain and the OpenAI API in hands-on security scenarios, and much more.

Definitely check it out and start learning it today.