From Theory To Pressure: What The Third AI-Enabled Cybercrime Tabletop Exercise Revealed
Fortinet, Tuesday, February 10th, 2026
Artificial intelligence is no longer an emerging factor in cybercrime. It is already shaping how attacks unfold, how trust is exploited, and how leaders are forced to make decisions with limited visibility and compressed timelines.
Over the past year, Fortinet has worked alongside the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) at UC Berkeley and global partners to examine these dynamics through a series of AI-enabled cybercrime tabletop exercises (TTXs). These exercises are designed to test real-world governance, coordination, and executive judgment, not theoretical attack mechanics.
The third exercise in this series, Operation Black Ice, marked a shift from exploration to pressure. It examined what happens when AI-enabled impersonation, third-party compromise, and ransomware-driven extortion converge in a single incident.
The outcome was not a new attack technique. It was a clearer understanding of where organizations struggle first when trust becomes a dependency and uncertainty dominates decision-making.