AI inching closer to exploiting industrial control systems — but still too costly for criminals

Full text

Forescout researchers showed AI can port RCE exploits to PLCs, achieving DoS and shellcode execution

Effort required heavy researcher input and $500+ in API usage, making attacks impractical for criminals

Nation‑state actors remain a concern, as seen in Sandworm’s 2025 attack on Poland’s power grid

If you are worried cybercriminals will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate the discovery and exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in Operational Technology (OT) such as Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) you can sleep peacefully, at least for a little longer.

Recently, security researchers from Forescout set off on a simple mission - to understand if crooks can use AI to target the ever-increasing population of exposed industrial devices. The short answer is “yes, but it’s not yet worth the trouble”.

In their mission, they launched an experiment - to port a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability from one PLC to another. These devices were built on closed-source software and thus were not that easy to manipulate, yet the experiment was a success.

Yes, but...

Not only did they manage to trigger a Denial of Service (DoS) state that crashed the device but ended up with a working RCE capable of executing attacker-supplied ARM shellcode.

It is indeed a worrying development, but one that comes with a huge “but”:

“It required significant researcher input. The final RCE development stage consumed more than $500 in API usage. An attempt to extend the exploit beyond the initial RCE ultimately bricked the PLC,” the researchers said in the report.

“These limitations taught us valuable lessons about AI-assisted exploitation in OT. It can be done, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. For now, the difficulty, cost, and specialist expertise required are likely to make this kind of attack less attractive than easier alternatives.”

In other words, cybercriminals still have easier avenues to explore, and as long as that is the case, OT is relatively safe. What the report, unfortunately, does not discuss, is nation-state attackers with significant resources. For such attackers, industrial devices are a prime target, and spending $500+ in API usage is a drop in a bucket. We’ve already seen it back in 2025 when Sandworm struck Poland’s electricity suppliers .