Reconnaissance at scale: How AI redraws the attacker’s mapThe conventional narrative around AI-powered fraud emphasizes speed: Faster phishing, faster credential stuffing, faster social engineering. “The main threat from AI misuse isn’t faster execution, as automation has been leveraged for years,” Kikta says. AI-driven vulnerability scanning maps an institution’s unpatched endpoints while the security team is still scheduling the review meeting. The same synthetic identity that opens a fraudulent credit card account can exploit a payment authorization vulnerability discovered through automated scanning. Card-not-present fraud now accounts for 71% of all US card fraud losses, and the attack surface keeps expanding as digital wallets and e-commerce push more transactions into channels where physical card verification is impossible.