GCD AI RADAR
incidents/AIR-2026-1397

Backdoor-as-a-Service Black-Box ML Backdoor Activation Attack

Attack on AI1 Research / proof of conceptSupply chainData poisoning

Researchers developed a fully black-box technique utilizing genetic search to activate latent secondary behaviors in machine learning models without training-time manipulation. The approach highlights risks in models lacking traditional data poisoning indicators.

Details

type
Attack on AI
An AI model, agent or AI-powered product was the thing exploited, abused or leaked.
categories
  • Supply chainprimary
    Malicious or backdoored models, poisoned packages, unsafe deserialization and other compromised AI dependencies.
  • Data poisoning
    Training or retrieval data manipulated to change model behaviour.
owasp llm top 10
mitre atlas
Both rows are derived from the type and categories (OWASP 2025 edition, ATLAS release 2026.09), not classified per record. How
severity
1 · Research / proof of concept
Demonstrated by researchers; no known real-world exploitation.
targets
Open-weight model
products
Backdoor-as-a-Service
incident date
19 Oct 2026
first reported
19 Oct 2026
origin
News & research feeds
classifier confidence
0.90 · published at or above 0.80; see the methodology
tags
backdoor · black-box · genetic-search · machine-learning
record
created 2026-10-19 05:07Z · updated 2026-10-19 05:07Z · json

Sources · 1

  1. 2026-10-19
    Everyone's a little bit racist: a novel ML backdoor attack in black-box mode
    arXiv · arxiv.org/abs/2610.22459

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