Report: Weaponized LLMs escalating cybersecurity risks

Cybersecurity professionals are facing new threats as weaponized large language models customized for offensive operations become increasingly accessible and sophisticated. according to a report by VentureBeat.

Variants such as FraudGPT, GhostGPT, and DarkGPT are available on the dark web and platforms like Telegram for as little as $75 per month, offering capabilities for phishing, exploit development, code obfuscation, and more. These models resemble commercial software-as-a-service products, often including dashboards, APIs, and customer support, making them easy to deploy by cybercrime groups and nation-state actors. According to Ciscos State of AI Security Report, fine-tuned models are 22 times more likely to produce harmful outputs than base models, significantly expanding the attack surface. Tests across sectors like healthcare and legal revealed that fine-tuning weakens safety controls, with jailbreak attempts and malicious outputs increasing dramatically, by 2,200% in some cases. Cisco researchers also highlighted the vulnerability of open-source training data to poisoning attacks, which can be carried out for as little as $60 by manipulating datasets like LAION-400M. Additional threats include decomposition prompting, which enables models to leak copyrighted or sensitive content by bypassing guardrails.