Cybercrime losses near $20B a year as LLMs set to collapse the 'secure by apathy' era

davidmanheim · x · 2026-10-04

In a LessWrong post, security researcher David Manheim predicts the end of the "secure by apathy" era:

Status quo: Modern systems are insecure but mostly safe because attacks don't pay. FBI data shows reported internet-crime losses growing 40% a year, approaching $20B, though mostly from scams rather than hacking.
The shift: Cheap LLMs are rapidly lowering the cost of both automated hacking and scams, with the AI Risk Explorer already documenting rising sophistication.
Argument: The assumption that nobody bothers attacking you is collapsing, and the fixes needed — fundamentally better security primitives, least-privilege sandboxing — are the same decades-old problems security researchers deem possibly unsolvable, making the transition era dangerous.

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