crooks can now rent AI to run cybercrime

For the price of Netflix, crooks can now rent AI to run cybercrime www.theregister.com/2026/01/2… Cybercrime has entered its AI era, with criminals now using weaponized language models and deepfakes as inexpensive, off-the-shelf infrastructure rather than experimental tools, according to researchers at Group-IB. In its latest white paper, the cybersecurity firm argues that AI has become the underlying plumbing of modern cybercrime, quietly transforming skills that once required time and expertise into services that anyone with a credit card and a Telegram account can rent. Group-IB’s data suggests this is not a passing trend. Mentions of AI on dark web forums have increased by 371 per cent since 2019, with replies growing even faster—nearly twelvefold. In 2025, AI-related threads generated more than 23,000 new posts and almost 300,000 replies. According to Group-IB, AI has followed a familiar automation pattern: it has taken complex, labour-intensive tasks and made them fast and scalable. Attack stages that once required careful planning and specialist skills can now be executed through automated workflows and sold via subscription models, complete with pricing and packaging resembling those of a dubious SaaS provider.