# Abliterated and Resold AI Models Fueling Cybercrime Underground; ARTEX-Assisted Intrusions at South Korean Banks (Flare Quantitative Analysis)

> Flare Research reports abliterated AI model mentions on cybercrime forums rose 745% from January to October 2026 (11 to 93 unique mentions in a trailing 30-day window), with Telegram and elite-forum vendors selling model access well below official prices. The report ties AI-enabled tooling to real intrusions, including attacks on South Korean financial institutions using the open-source agentic pentest tool ARTEX with DeepSeek, GLM-5.3 and Grok models.

- **Published:** 2026-10-20T20:44:58Z
- **Last reviewed:** 2026-10-20T20:44:58Z
- **Canonical:** https://intel.threadlinqs.com/threat/TL-2026-3986
- **ID:** TL-2026-3986
- **Severity:** HIGH
- **Category:** THREAT_INTEL
- **Status:** ACTIVE
- **Detections:** 9 · **IOCs:** 21 (full data via the Threadlinqs MCP server — Purple tier)
- **CVEs:** CVE-2025-3248, CVE-2021-29441, CVE-2026-81578, CVE-2026-82078, CVE-2021-42278, CVE-2021-42287

## Description

Flare Research (author Eric Clay, published 2026-10-20) analyzed more than 100,000 Telegram channels and 100 dark web forums (data collection January 2025 to October 16, 2026) to quantify the underground market for abliterated and resold AI models. Abliteration strips refusal behavior from open-weight models by identifying and projecting out safety-tuning vectors in the weights; it needs direct weight access and preserves most other capabilities. Mentions rose 745% (about 11 unique mentions in January 2026 to 93 in the 30 days to October), with a sharp inflection after the GLM-5.2 release in mid-June 2026 and further escalation after GLM-5.3 in September 2026. Flare identified 17 distinct Telegram vendor handles (9 active in the trailing 30 days) and 11 handles across XSS.is, Exploit.in and BreachForums (7 active). 65% of Telegram vendors advertise multiple models. Access is sold as web panels or logins, self-hosted weights, API keys and Telegram bots. Pricing is far below official rates: DeepSeek median about 1/16 of the official price, Kimi about 1/100, while GLM trades at a median 2.6x markup. Of 100,342 Exploit.in posts from January 1 to October 20, 2026, 2,913 (2.9%) were AI-related, and 15 of 101 GLM-mentioning AI posts were flagged critical-risk (automated fake-account creation with proxies and virtual cards, jailbreaking frontier LLMs through warm-up prompts and multi-agent chaining, autonomous agent networks with exploitation playbooks, multi-model pipelines that bypass safety filters). Forum posts also describe agent harnesses aimed at IoT devices (zero-auth RCE research, masscan enumeration) and rented GPU capacity such as 16x B200 offers and RunPod instances.

The report links this market to operational incidents. Per CrowdStrike (report of 2026-10-07), an unattributed Chinese-speaking, financially motivated operator (moderate confidence) used ARTEX, an open-source agentic penetration-testing tool from China (developer Autumn-27, GitHub since 2026-07-26, AGPL-3.0, closed-sourced 2026-10-08), against South Korean financial institutions from late September to early October 2026. DeepSeek v4.1-flash was the primary backend, reached through the API reseller xcai[.]pro, with GLM-5.3 and Grok 4.6 used in additional Claude Code sessions. Open directories on attacker servers exposed Claude Code session histories, ARTEX configs and memory files, including reconnaissance on Korean data-sale channels and Telegram groups. Reported victims include Shinhan Bank (about 25,000 customers: names, phone numbers, annual income, loan limits), KB Kookmin, Hana, BNK Busan and Yegaram Savings Bank; press reports total roughly 68,000 people.

Flare also cites related 2026 AI-driven cases: JadePuffer (Sysdig), where an LLM agent ran the chain from Langflow RCE CVE-2025-3248 through Nacos (CVE-2021-29441 auth bypass) to AES_ENCRYPT-encrypting 1,342 Nacos configuration items with an unrecoverable key; the PaperCut campaign (GreyNoise), where hundreds of agents using OpenAI Codex and DeepSeek exploited CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078 to compromise 440 instances at 395 organizations in 48 countries from 2026-08-31; and a Pakistan-based vibe-coded OSINT tool found through stealer logs. Defenders should expect lower skill barriers, faster exploit development, and predictable LLM-generated payloads that create detection opportunities. Single primary source (Flare); secondary details corroborated via CrowdStrike coverage (Security Affairs, Cyber Magazine), BleepingComputer and Help Net Security.

## MITRE ATT&CK

- T1588.007 Obtain Capabilities: Artificial Intelligence
- T1588.002 Obtain Capabilities: Tool
- T1587.004 Develop Capabilities: Exploits
- T1595.002 Active Scanning: Vulnerability Scanning
- T1190 Exploit Public-Facing Application
- T1059.006 Command and Scripting Interpreter: Python
- T1053.003 Scheduled Task/Job: Cron
- T1136.002 Create Account: Domain Account
- T1552 Unsecured Credentials
- T1003.001 OS Credential Dumping: LSASS Memory
- T1003.006 OS Credential Dumping: DCSync
- T1550.002 Use Alternate Authentication Material: Pass the Hash
- T1572 Protocol Tunneling
- T1090 Proxy
- T1485 Data Destruction

## Sources

- [AI Models Are Fueling a New Wave of Cybercrime: A Quantitative Analysis (Flare Research)](https://flare.io/learn/resources/blog/ai-models-cybercrime-quantitative-analysis)
- [AI-Driven tool ARTEX used in attacks against South Korean Banks (Security Affairs)](https://securityaffairs.com/?p=200661)
- [CrowdStrike: How a Cyber Attacker hit South Korean Banks (Cyber Magazine)](https://cybermagazine.com/news/crowdstrike-on-south-korea-bank-ai-cyber-attack)
- [CSA research note: ARTEX agentic pentest bank breaches](https://labs.cloudsecurityalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/CSA_research_note_artex_agentic_pentest_bank_breaches_20261009-csa-styled.pdf)
- [ARTEX Developer Closes AI Pentest Tool After Korea Bank Hacks (AI Weekly)](https://aiweekly.co/alerts/artex-developer-closes-ai-pentest-tool-after-korea-bank-hacks)
- [JadePuffer ransomware used AI agent to automate entire attack (BleepingComputer)](https://bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/jadepuffer-ransomware-used-ai-agent-to-automate-entire-attack)
- [AI-powered attack exploited PaperCut flaws to hack 395 organizations (BleepingComputer)](https://bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ai-powered-attack-exploited-papercut-flaws-to-hack-395-organizations)
- [RCE flaw in tool for building AI agents exploited by attackers (CVE-2025-3248) (Help Net Security)](https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2025/05/06/langflow-cve-2025-3248-exploited/)
- [U.S. CISA adds Langflow flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (Security Affairs)](https://securityaffairs.com/?p=177481)
- [CVE-2025-3248 (GCVE-0-2025-3248)](https://cve.circl.lu/cve/CVE-2025-3248)

## Full data

Detection queries (Splunk SPL / Microsoft KQL / Sigma) and IOC values require the Threadlinqs MCP server (Purple tier): https://intel.threadlinqs.com/mcp

Canonical: https://intel.threadlinqs.com/threat/TL-2026-3986