GCD AI RADAR
incidents/AIR-2023-0026

Underground Market for LLMs Powers Malware and Phishing Scams

AI-enabled attack3 Confirmed exploitationAI-generated malwareAI phishing / social engineering

Cybercriminals leveraged LLMs and malicious variants like WormGPT to develop malware and phishing scams. These underground tools bypassed safety controls to scale cyberattacks.

Details

type
AI-enabled attack
Attackers used AI as a meaningful part of a cyberattack against someone else.
categories
  • AI-generated malwareprimary
    Malware written, adapted or operated with meaningful help from AI models.
  • AI phishing / social engineering
    Phishing, lures and social engineering produced or personalised at scale with AI.
owasp llm top 10
no entry for these categories
mitre atlas
Both rows are derived from the type and categories (OWASP 2025 edition, ATLAS release 2026.09), not classified per record. How
severity
3 · Confirmed exploitation
Used against real targets; limited or unclear impact.
targets
OpenAI, Open-weight model
products
GPT-3.5, GPT-4, WormGPT, FraudGPT
incident date
1 Dec 2023
first reported
1 Dec 2023
origin
AI Incident Database
Derived from the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0).
classifier confidence
0.90 · published at or above 0.80; see the methodology
tags
wormgpt · fraudgpt · malware · phishing
record
created 2026-10-18 06:33Z · updated 2026-10-18 06:59Z · json

Sources · 1

  1. 2023-12-01
    Underground Market for LLMs Powers Malware and Phishing Scams
    AI Incident Database · incidentdatabase.ai/cite/736

Titles and links belong to their publishers. The summary above is written by GCD AI RADAR in its own words; data is CC BY-SA 4.0.

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