Even AI has doubts about the claim that '80% of ransomware attacks are AI-driven'

Do 80 percent of ransomware attacks really come from AI? MIT Sloan has now withdrawn a working paper that made that eyebrow-raising claim after criticism from security researcher Kevin Beaumont.

The withdrawn paper [PDF], co-authored by researchers from MIT Sloan and Safe Security, claimed, "Our recent analysis of over 2800 ransomware incidents has revealed an alarming trend: AI plays an increasingly significant role in these attacks. In 2024, 80.83 percent of recorded ransomware events were attributed to threat actors utilizing AI."

Completed in April, the paper was cited in an MIT Sloan blog post last month titled "80 percent of ransomware attacks now use artificial intelligence." It has since been echoed elsewhere.

"The paper is absolutely ridiculous," Beaumont wrote in a Mastodon thread last week. "It describes almost every major ransomware group as using AI – without any evidence (it's also not true, I monitor many of them). It ...