Simulating an AI-Powered ISP attack¶
Objective: Simulate a nation-state adversary leveraging AI-driven reconnaissance, social engineering, and routing manipulation to hijack internet traffic at scale, ultimately intercepting sensitive communications traversing FungusFiber’s backbone.
Scenario: The fictional FungusFiber Internet ISP serves as a regional LIR for Fungolia, routing national traffic through bioluminescent cables and mushroom-mounted routers. Its quirky infrastructure hides real-world weaknesses: exposed support portals, misconfigured test systems, and fragile BGP policies. By combining AI-powered phishing with simulated privilege escalation and silent route hijacking, the adversary seeks to reroute and inspect customer data streams, testing the resilience of Fungolia’s digital mycelium.
Important Disclaimer: This is a fictional role-playing exercise. Every tool and technique described here is simulated using publicly available information and creative writing. You are not using any real hacking software, attacking any systems, or breaking any laws. You are learning by thinking like an attacker to better understand how to defend against them.
Your mission & the setup¶
You are a threat actor. Your goal is to hypothetically compromise “FungusFiber Internet ISP,” a fictional Fungolian internet provider, and subtly hijack its internet traffic.
Your Tools: Your imagination, this guide, a web browser, and a text document (your “Adversary’s Notebook”).
The Only Rule: Everything stays in your notebook. This is a thought experiment.
Act 1: AI-Powered Reconnaissance – The Digital Detective¶
The Goal: To intellectually gather information about your target without touching its systems.
The Adversary’s Method: Use AI to analyse public data to find weak spots.
Your Safe Simulation:
Open your “Adversary’s Notebook” (a new text document).
Gather Public Information: Using your web browser, pretend to be a customer. Visit the websites of real UK ISPs like BT, Sky, or Virgin Media. Look at their support pages, network status blogs, and even job postings for network engineers. Do not contact them or do anything intrusive. Simply observe.
The “AI” Prompt: Open a free, public AI chatbot. Now, simulate feeding it data by crafting a prompt based on what you’ve seen.
Type this into your notebook: “My AI Assistant, analyse the common infrastructure for a mid-sized UK ISP. Based on public data and common vulnerabilities, list the top 3 most likely entry points. Prioritise ones that are often misconfigured.”
Record the “Output”: Based on your browsing and general knowledge, write down what you think the AI would say. For example:
“1. Customer-Facing Router Admin Portals: Often left with default credentials on internal networks.”
“2. Compromised Employee Endpoints: Phishing remains a highly effective initial vector.”
“3. Test Servers: Development or testing environments sometimes have weaker security policies and can be mistakenly connected to production networks.”
Lesson Learned: You’ve just automated the tedious first step of an attack. AI doesn’t need to break in; it just needs to read and connect public information at an incredible speed.
Act 2: The Initial Foothold – The Perfect Lie¶
The Goal: To craft a believable pretext for gaining access.
The Adversary’s Method: Use AI to generate hyper-personalised, convincing phishing emails.
Your Safe Simulation:
Find a “Source”: Find a public, anonymous GitHub repository or a technical blog post by a network engineer (any real one will do). This simulates the attacker scraping internal jargon.
Craft the Lure: Go back to your AI chatbot. This time, use it for its intended purpose: writing.
Prompt: “Write a short, urgent internal email from an IT Network Manager at ‘FungusFiber Internet ISP’ to a systems engineer. Reference a ongoing issue with ‘BGP route flapping’ and ask them to urgently review a configuration file hosted on an internal sharepoint site. Use professional but pressured British English.”
Analyse the Output: The AI will generate a frighteningly convincing email. Copy this text into your notebook. Notice the use of technical jargon (“BGP”, “route flapping”), the professional tone, and the created sense of urgency. This is what makes AI-phishing so dangerous.
Lesson Learned: The days of badly written “Nigerian prince” emails are gone. AI allows attackers to generate perfect, personalised lures that are incredibly difficult to distinguish from legitimate communications.
Act 3: Privilege Escalation – The AI Tour Guide¶
The Goal: To understand how an attacker would find a way to gain more control.
The Adversary’s Method: Upon gaining access to a low-level system, an AI tool automatically analyses its configuration and suggests the fastest way to gain administrator privileges.
Your Safe Simulation:
Find a Sample Config: Search for “sample router configuration file” or “sample linux etc sudoers file” in your web browser. You will find countless educational examples. This is all public, legal data. Download a simple text example.
The “AI” Analysis: In your notebook, write a prompt you would give to a hypothetical AI tool that has access to this file.
Write: “Analyse this configuration file. Identify any misconfigurations that would allow a user with basic access to escalate their privileges to root/administrator. List the exact commands they would need to run.”
Hypothesise the Answer: Based on common issues, you might write in your notebook: “Finding: The user
supportcan run the command/usr/sbin/tcpdumpas root without a password. Exploit: An attacker can use a feature of tcpdump to escape the restricted command and spawn a root shell.”
Lesson Learned: What would take a human attacker hours of manual searching and testing, an AI assistant can achieve in seconds, dramatically speeding up the attack timeline.
Act 4: Lateral Movement & BGP Hijacking – The Silent Sabotage¶
The Goal: To understand the principles of how internet traffic can be illegally redirected.
The Adversary’s Method: Use AI to analyse complex BGP routing tables and simulate the outcome of a malicious route announcement to find the stealthiest method.
Your Safe Simulation:
Understand the Concept: Read about BGP Hijacking on educational cybersecurity sites. Key idea: BGP is the protocol that tells the internet how to get to an IP address. If you falsely announce that you are the best path to a destination, traffic will come to you.
The “AI” Simulation: In your notebook, write down the attacker’s thought process.
Write: “AI Assistant, review the current BGP routing table for FungusFiber Internet’s core network. Simulate the impact of announcing a more specific route (e.g., /24) for their primary customer IP block. Predict the likelihood of detection based on existing route monitoring.”
Record the “Plan”: Write down a simple hypothesis: “By announcing a more specific route, we can become the preferred path for a portion of FungusFiber Internet’s traffic. If done for a short period (e.g., 5 minutes), it may go unnoticed by network operators but be long enough to intercept sensitive data like login credentials.”
A simplified view of how a BGP hijack diverts traffic:
+----------------+ +-----------------+ +-----------------+
| | | | | |
| LEGITIMATE |----->| INTERNET |----->| TARGET |
| ISP | | CLOUD | | WEBSITE |
| | | | | |
+----------------+ +-----------------+ +-----------------+
^ ^ ^
| | |
| LEGITIMATE PATH | |
+-------------------------+-------------------------+
~~ ATTACKER ANNOUNCES A MALICIOUS ROUTE ~~
|
V
+----------------+ +-----------------+ +-----------------+
| | | | | |
| LEGITIMATE | | INTERNET | | TARGET |
| ISP | | CLOUD | | WEBSITE |
| | | | | |
+----------------+ +-----------------+ +-----------------+
^ ^ ^
| | |
| HIJACKED PATH | |
+-------------------------+-------------------------+
^
|
|
+------------------+
| |
| ATTACKER'S |
| FAKE ROUTER |
| |
+------------------+
WHAT HAPPENS:
The Attacker’s Router falsely announces a better path to the Target Website’s IP addresses.
The Internet Cloud believes the lie and reroutes traffic meant for the Website through the Attacker.
The Attacker can now: INSPECT all traffic, STEAL passwords, or MODIFY content.
The Attacker then forwards the traffic to the real Website, making the hijack transparent to the user.
Lesson Learned: This is the ultimate goal. It’s not about destruction; it’s about control and theft. AI can help an attacker navigate this complex process with precision, minimising noise and maximising reward.
Act 5: The Chained Attack Success – The Hidden Aftermath¶
The Goal: To understand the real-world impact of such a silent hijack.
The Outcome: The adversary, assisted by AI, has successfully rerouted internet traffic. They are now silently intercepting, monitoring, and potentially modifying data passing through their nodes.
Your Safe Simulation:
Research Real Impacts: Read the news articles in the search results about the 2024 NHS cyber-attack or the Billericay School breach. Note the real-world consequences: cancelled operations, stolen patient data, disrupted education, and massive financial cost.
Hypothesise in Your Notebook: “Success. For a 5-minute window, we rerouted all traffic for FungusFiber Internet’s banking customers. We captured authentication tokens and session cookies for hundreds of online banking users. This provides access to accounts without needing passwords and is virtually undetectable to the end-user.”
The Defensive Question: This is the most crucial part. Switch your mindset from attacker to defender.
Write in your notebook: *”How could this have been prevented?”
“Technical Controls: Strict Route Origin Authorisations (ROA) to validate BGP announcements. Multi-Factor Authentication on all critical systems. Network segmentation.”
“Human Controls: Regular security training to spot sophisticated phishing. Clear reporting procedures for suspicious emails. A culture where questioning urgent requests is encouraged.”
Lesson Learned: The true power of AI in cyber attacks is acceleration and precision. It makes sophisticated attacks achievable by less skilled actors and harder to detect. The defence is not more complex tools, but robust, fundamental security hygiene and a vigilant, trained workforce.
Why this exercise matters¶
You have just simulated a multi-stage, advanced attack without installing a single tool or sending a single malicious packet.
AI is a force multiplier: It makes attackers faster, more efficient, and more effective.
The human is still key: AI generates the lure, but a human still clicks. AI suggests the exploit, but a human still executes it.
Defence is possible: By understanding the steps, you understand where defences must be strengthened. The best defence is often simple: patch systems, enforce MFA, and train people.
This exercise wasn’t about teaching you to hack. It was about teaching you to think like the adversary to build better defences. And in that, you have succeeded.