Weaponizing Organization Data - The Rise of target-specific LLMs
Taking a page from DarkBERT’s book to predict the future of Red Teaming. Moving towards LLMs specifically trained for target organizations.
Recent research into DarkBERT—a language model trained specifically on Dark Web data—has shown that AI performs significantly better when it understands the specific language of its environment. While DarkBERT was built to help researchers identify cyber threats, the methodology behind it provides a blueprint for modern red teaming.
Standard AI models are trained on general internet data, which often results in a “Surface Web” bias. When applied to a specific organization, these general models fail to capture the unique tone, acronyms, and internal habits of the employees. A red team can bridge this gap by training a locally hosted model on target-specific data to create highly customized social engineering campaigns and identify internal behavioral patterns.
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The Target-Specific Model
The core idea is to move away from generic AI and toward a model that understands a specific company’s “internal language.” If a red team can access internal communications, documentation, or even public-facing technical blogs, they can fine-tune a model to mimic that specific environment.
This allows for the creation of phishing emails that are nearly indistinguishable from actual internal correspondence. Instead of using generic corporate templates, the model uses the exact vocabulary and tone common within a specific department. This level of customization makes traditional “red flags” in phishing—such as unusual phrasing or slightly off-brand language—almost non-existent.
Identifying Hidden Patterns
Beyond social engineering insights, these models can be used to extract deep intelligence from an attacker’s perspective. By feeding the model large volumes of internal data, a red team can identify systemic weaknesses or even sensitive intellectual property.
For example, an attacker might feed the model technical documentation and project discussions to infer an organization’s trade secrets or upcoming product details. Once this information is extracted, it can be used as leverage for extortion or to gain a competitive advantage. Effectively, the AI acts as a specialized analyst that can connect dots across millions of lines of text to find the organization’s most valuable information.
Re-purposing Leaked Data
The most dangerous application of this tactic involves using data from past security incidents. If an organization was involved in a previous data breach, an attacker could take that dumped data and use it to train a new model.
This process essentially creates a working map of the organization’s internal knowledge based on historical files. Even if the organization has since improved its security, the attacker now has a tool that understands the historical context of the company. They can use this to craft attacks that reference real past projects, people, or internal issues, making their attacks highly credible because they are grounded in the company’s actual history.
The Shift to AI-Driven Red Team Operations
This approach marks a major shift in how we think about “stolen data.” Historically, a data breach meant an immediate loss of credentials or financial info. Now, stolen data has a long-term “half-life.” Even old, non-sensitive internal text becomes a training set that helps an attacker understand exactly how your organization thinks and operates. The data isn’t just a trophy anymore; it is the fuel for a custom-built weapon.
However, the ability to build these custom weapons is not yet universal. Just because an attacker has the data does not mean they can instantly use it. There is a wide gap between owning a data dump and successfully training a domain-specific model that produces reliable results. Moving from a general model to a highly specialized one requires a specific set of resources that most red teams—and many organizations—might not have access to.
Constraints and Feasibility
There are significant hurdles to this approach that must be evaluated:
Hardware and Time - Training or fine-tuning a model like DarkBERT is resource-intensive. The researchers used four NVIDIA A100 80GB GPUs and took 15 days to complete the process. For a red team, the cost of specialized hardware and the time required may not always make economic sense for an engagement.
Data Availability - A red team is limited by what the client is willing to share. Most organizations are hesitant to provide the massive amounts of internal text data required to train an effective model.
Attacker Advantage - Unlike red teams, motivated attackers are not bound by time limits, legal permissions, or monetary constraints. They can spend significant funds on computing power and leverage stolen data from any source, taking months to refine their models for a single high-value target.
The success of DarkBERT proves that domain-specific AI is the future of both defense and offense. For red teams, the next step is moving toward target-specific AI. While hardware and data remain a constraint today, the decreasing cost of local LLM execution means this tactic will soon become a standard part of high-tier adversarial simulations. Understanding how an attacker might use your own data to train a model against you is a critical new frontier in risk assessment.
TL;DR
- Research shows that language models like DarkBERT perform better when trained on data specific to their environment.
- Standard AI models are trained on general data like Wikipedia, making them less effective at understanding internal corporate language.
- Red teams can use internal documents to train models that mimic a company’s exact tone, making phishing attempts nearly impossible to detect.
- Specialized models can connect disparate pieces of internal data to uncover trade secrets or systemic security habits.
- Attackers can use data from previous breaches to create models that understand an organization's historical context.
- While powerful, this approach requires significant GPU hardware and time, which may favor attackers over red teams.Follow my journey of 100 Days of Red Team on WhatsApp, Telegram or Discord.