A visitor poses for pictures with a humanoid robot at the 2025 Global Artificial Intelligence Machines and Electronics Expo in Macao, South China, Dec 4, 2025. [Photo/Xinhua]

　　As artificial intelligence accelerates both digital transformation and cyber threats, enterprises must move from passive, reactive security models to proactive and autonomous defense systems to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated attacks, a senior cybersecurity executive said.

　　Adrian Chan

　　According to the latest forecasts by cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, 2026 will mark the "year of the defender", as autonomous AI-driven security becomes essential to counter AI-enabled identity attacks, data poisoning and emerging quantum risks, said Adrian Chan, vice-president of Palo Alto Networks Greater China.

　　"As enterprises adopt AI, attackers are doing the same,"Chan said. "Once hackers discover a vulnerability, they can use generative AI to rapidly create attack tools, generate variants and launch large-scale attacks. In many cases, before companies are able to deploy patches, systems may already be compromised."

　　The speed of cyberattacks has increased dramatically in recent years, he noted. In 2021, it took an average of nine days to form a full attack chain. By 2023, that time had shortened to about two days. "In 2025, there are cases where attacks were executed within 30 minutes," the senior executive said.

　　"This shows that traditional, passive defense methods are no longer sufficient in the AI era," Chan said, warning that attackers are increasingly leveraging AI to scale up threats across a hybrid workforce, where autonomous agents already outnumber humans by an estimated ratio of 82 to 1.