Experiment: Porting a PLC Exploit With AI Takes Hours and Hundreds of Dollars

Researchers at Forescout used Claude (an AI assistant) to adapt an RCE (remote code execution, where an attacker runs commands on a system they don't own) exploit from one industrial control device to another, succeeding after several hours and hundreds of dollars in costs. The work required significant human guidance to redirect the AI when it made mistakes, and a later attempt to build additional capabilities accidentally bricked a device. The researchers suggest that as AI becomes more capable, the cost of porting exploits to many similar targets could drop significantly, raising security concerns for critical infrastructure.