For the price of Netflix, crooks can now rent AI to run cybercrime

Cybercrime has entered its AI era, with criminals now using weaponized language models and deepfakes as cheap, off-the-shelf infrastructure rather than experimental tools, according to researchers at Group-IB.

In its latest whitepaper, the cybersec biz argues that AI has become the plumbing of modern cybercrime, quietly turning skills that once took time and talent into services that anyone with a credit card and a Telegram account can rent.

This isn't just a passing fad, according to Group-IB's numbers, which show mentions of AI on dark web forums up 371 percent since 2019, with replies rising even faster – almost twelvefold. AI-related threads were everywhere, racking up more than 23,000 new posts and almost 300,000 replies in 2025.

According to Group-IB, AI has done what automation always does: it took something fiddly and made it fast. The stages of an attack that once needed planning and specialist hands ...