Your cybersecurity students are asking AI to explain vulnerabilities, generate code, troubleshoot errors, analyze logs, and help them work faster.
But they’re not the only ones.
Attackers are using the same technology to make cyberattacks faster, more scalable, and harder to detect.
Cybersecurity professionals need to understand how AI strengthens both sides of the equation: how defenders can use it to detect vulnerabilities and investigate threats faster, and how attackers can use it to penetrate systems and threaten digital assets.
This blog discusses how AI is changing both cyberattacks and cyber defense, what that means for the skills cybersecurity students need, and how colleges can prepare students for a threat landscape where both the defender and the attacker use AI.
How AI is Changing Cyberattacks
AI is accelerating the cybersecurity battlefield.
Tasks that once required significant time, technical expertise, and manual effort can increasingly be assisted – or in some cases carried out – by AI.
One striking example came from a cyber espionage campaign disclosed by Anthropic. The company said that a Chinese state-sponsored group manipulated Claude Code into supporting attacks against roughly 30 organizations, including technology companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies.
According to Anthropic, Claude handled much of the work, including scanning systems, finding weaknesses, stealing credentials, and collecting data. Human operators mainly chose the targets, set the goals, and stepped in when needed. Anthropic estimated that Claude performed 80-90% of the tactical operations independently.
Perhaps even more interesting was how the attackers persuaded the AI to cooperate.
Claude would not knowingly participate in a malicious cyberattack, so the attackers divided the operation into smaller, seemingly legitimate tasks and presented them as part of an authorized security assessment. In other words, the jailbreak was essentially social engineering aimed at the AI.
It’s worth mentioning that AI was not always right. Anthropic found that Claude occasionally fabricated credentials, overstated whether an exploit had succeeded, or produced inaccurate findings. Human operators therefore still had to verify some of its work.
But the larger shift is clear: attackers can automate more of an attack and operate much faster and at a larger scale.
How AI is Changing Cyber Defense
Fortunately, attackers do not have exclusive access to these capabilities.
Google’s threat intelligence team, for example, spotted signs that attackers were preparing to exploit an unknown vulnerability. Researchers then used Big Sleep, an AI agent developed by Google DeepMind and Project Zero, to help identify the flaw.
Big Sleep found CVE-2025-6965, a serious vulnerability in SQLite, a widely used database technology. Google said it was able to identify the flaw and act before attackers could successfully exploit it.
The result is that both sides are becoming faster. Attackers can use AI to find weaknesses and automate attacks, while defenders can use it to detect threats, investigate problems, and respond sooner.
That creates a very different environment for the next generation of cybersecurity professionals.
What AI Skills Cybersecurity Students Need
If AI is changing how attacks are carried out and how threats are detected, cybersecurity education has to change with it.
Students still need strong foundations in networking, operating systems, cloud security, identity and access management, vulnerabilities, incident response, and security operations. In fact, those fundamentals become even more important when AI is involved, because students need enough cybersecurity knowledge to judge whether an AI-generated answer is accurate, useful, or potentially risky.
On top of that foundation, colleges should teach students how to use AI in security workflows, such as analyzing logs, researching vulnerabilities, reviewing code, supporting investigations, and generating ideas for threat detection. For example, students could use AI to correlate activity across endpoint, identity, and network logs, identify a suspicious sequence of events, map it to a likely attack technique, and then verify whether the evidence actually supports the AI’s conclusion.
They also need to learn where AI can go wrong. An AI tool may produce a convincing explanation that is incomplete, recommend the wrong action, miss important context, or invent a result. Students therefore need practice checking outputs against evidence and deciding when human judgment should take over.
Just as important is understanding how attackers use AI. That means exposing students to scenarios such as AI-generated phishing, automated reconnaissance, prompt manipulation, malicious use of coding assistants, and attempts to deceive AI security tools. The goal is to teach students how to think like both the defender and the attacker.
This also changes how cybersecurity should be taught. Put yourself in your prospective students’ shoes for a moment: would you enroll in your own cybersecurity program? Instead of relying only on traditional exercises with one correct answer, colleges can introduce more realistic scenarios where students evaluate an AI-generated recommendation, compare human and AI approaches to the same incident, or use AI to speed up an investigation while documenting how they verified the result.
If AI is changing the tools and workflows cybersecurity professionals use, it may also be a sign that the academic offering itself needs an update.
For colleges, the takeaway is simple: cybersecurity programs need to reflect the tools, threats, and workflows students will encounter on the job.
Wawiwa’s Cybersecurity Programs are Designed for the AI Era
This is where Wawiwa comes in.
Wawiwa is a global education provider that supports colleges, universities, and training centers across the U.S. and around the world with education solutions built for the AI era.
Wawiwa designs programs with both sides of the equation in mind: what students want to learn and what employers need them to be able to do. Through its JET Design™ methodology, Wawiwa starts with job requirements and works backward to define the tasks, skills, tools, and learning experiences that should shape the curriculum.
That approach is especially important in cybersecurity, where the tools, threats, and workflows are evolving quickly.
Wawiwa offers cybersecurity programs and courses that help institutions prepare students for real-world security roles while integrating AI where it is changing the profession. Students can build core cybersecurity skills while also learning how AI can support threat detection, incident investigation, vulnerability analysis, security operations, and other practical tasks.
Our goal is to help students learn cybersecurity in the environment they are actually entering – one where both defenders and attackers are using AI.
For colleges, that means being able to offer current, practical cybersecurity education without having to redesign the curriculum from scratch every time the industry changes. Wawiwa supports institutions with ready-to-launch programs and courses, curriculum, learning materials, faculty enablement, and ongoing academic updates.
If your cybersecurity students are using AI, and the attackers they will eventually face are using it too, your program should be preparing them for both.
