Criminal Use of AI Growing, But Lags Behind Defenders

At the 2024 RSA Conference, taking place this week in San Francisco, Trend Micro on Wednesday delivered an update on its 2023 investigation into the criminal use of gen-AI. “Spoiler: criminals are [still] lagging behind on AI adoption.”

In summary, Trend Micro has found only one criminal LLM: WormGPT. Instead, there is a growing incidence, and therefore potential use, of jailbreaking services: EscapeGPT, BlackHatGPT, and LoopGPT. (The RSA presentation is supported by a separate Trend Micro blog.)

There is also an increasing number of ‘services’ whose purpose is unclear. These provide no demo and only mention their supposed capabilities: high on claims but low on proof. FraudGPT is one example.

Trend is not sure about the relevance or value of these offerings, and places them in a separate category labeled potential ‘scams’. Other examples include XXX.GPT, WolfGPT, EvilGPT, DarkBARD, DarkBERT, and DarkGPT.

In short, when not scamming other criminals ...