Threat actors are using AI chatbots in ransom negotiations. They are not setting the price.

Matthew Butler, Director of Cyber Risk Services at Travelers, tells Martin Hinton that the bots provide availability across every time zone, which compresses the early rounds of communication. What that removes is the hours a victim would otherwise spend standing up incident response, checking whether backups are clean, and working out what was actually taken.

Butler calls it the automation of urgency rather than pricing. The pricing decision, he says, is still very human.

The conversation covers the Q2 2026 Cyber Threat Report in full. Why The Gentlemen, a group absent from the data a year ago, posted 248 victims and now sits second only to Keelan. Why Butler describes the report's Mythos-class risk as a forecast rather than an observation. What session token theft does to multi-factor authentication, and why he calls MFA "definitely not the silver bullet that everyone says it is."

Plus a half-million-dollar house purchase wired to a fraudulent account, and the full recovery that came from filing with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center fast enough to freeze it.

Referenced links in the show notes below.

Guest: Matthew Butler, Director of Cyber Risk Services, Travelers

https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-butler-38ba1b35/

https://www.travelers.com/

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Music licensed through Soundstripe.

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