# AI is supercharging hacking, and your local hospitals and banks aren't ready

> **Publication**: aitalky (Independent AI Journalism)
> **Canonical Citation URL**: https://aitalky.vercel.app/news/ai-is-supercharging-hacking-and-your-local-hospitals-and-banks-arent-ready
> **Original Source**: [The Verge AI](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1001427/ai-is-supercharging-hacking-and-your-local-hospitals-and-banks-arent-ready)
> **Author**: Hayden Field (undefined)
> **Published Date**: Monday, September 28, 2026
> **Category**: CULTURE
> **Tags**: News, The Verge AI, AI

## Executive Summary
In March, Janice Malone began getting calls about suspicious activity from her nonprofit organization, Vivian's Door. Vivian's Door, headquartered in Alabama, typically provided training, resources, and community to underserved and minority-owned businesses. T

## Key Takeaways
- “I welcome the innovation and the changes, but with any major shift in technology, there needs to be a lot of responsibility that goes along with it,” Smith said.
- For small- and medium-size organizations, no matter the industry, their systems and cybersecurity defenses are already often more fragile than those of large corporations, particularly in an age when AI is increasing hackers’ manpower and supercharging cyberattacks.
- “All it takes is one vulnerability somewhere,” Kelly said.


## Full Coverage
New models are helping Big Tech shore up its cyber defenses. What about everyone else?

In March, Janice Malone began getting calls about suspicious activity from her nonprofit organization, Vivian's Door. Vivian's Door, headquartered in Alabama, typically provided training, resources, and community to underserved and minority-owned businesses. The work sometimes put it in close contact with these companies' financial data, which was stored on its systems. But suddenly, concerned callers from all over the world warned they'd been getting emails "begging for money" — which she hadn't sent

The organization's third-party IT team pulled its systems offline for three days while they investigated the issue and plugged up the vulnerability, leaving Malone with a bill of about $3,000. She feared that she'd exposed information about the companies she was trying to help. Even more ominously, she wasn't completely sure if the attack was engineered by a human hacker or helped along by an AI system, or whether more were on the way

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