About
About this guide to data poisoning
This guide comes from the consultants at CyPro Consulting Ltd, who wrote it to give readers in the UK a single, plainly sourced explanation of data poisoning.
Last reviewed against Anthropic, UK AI Security Institute and arXiv. Sources
CyPro Consulting Ltd is a consultancy whose clients are UK organisations seeking help with cyber security. The research on poisoned training data sits in academic papers, standards documents and press coverage, so a decision maker has to hunt for it. We gathered it into one place that a security lead can read and act on.
Accuracy
How it stays correct
Each fact is tied to a numbered source, and the sources page lists them with their publishers. We lean on primary sources first: the UK AI Security Institute, the NCSC, NIST and OWASP. Research papers and press reports appear only where they are the sole place a fact is stated, and the text says so. When a source could not be read in full, the relevant page says that as well.
The review date at the top shows when we last went through the site. We revisit it whenever new research or guidance changes the picture.
Contact
Get in touch
Spotted a mistake, or want to ask something? Write to us through the contact page.
Keep reading
Read next
Risks
The specific risks data poisoning creates for organisations that build, fine-tune or buy AI, with the evidence behind each one.
Read the guide
What it is
A plain explanation of data poisoning: how tampered training data changes what an AI system does, and why backdoors are hard to find.
Read the guide
Attack types
The main ways training, fine-tuning and retrieval data can be poisoned, and how poisoned model files differ, with sources.
Read the guideHow CyPro can help
Need a hand planning for this?
Understanding the change is one job. Working out what it means for your systems, your suppliers and your roadmap is several more. CyPro's consultants can take any of them on.
Fractional CISO for the board
A senior security lead who advises the board on what to fix first, what to accept and what to tell customers, and owns the decision record.
More on cypro.co.uk
Hardening and segmentation
Our consultants put the controls in place that limit the damage when something is missed: firewall rules, network isolation and tighter admin access.
More on cypro.co.uk
Penetration testing
A focused test of your systems and the controls around them, so you know they hold before an attacker finds out for you.
More on cypro.co.uk
Vulnerability scanning
Find every internet-facing system you run, including the forgotten ones, and see which are still on a vulnerable build.
See the scanning service
24/7 security monitoring
Our SOC analysts watch your systems day and night for the signs of an attack in progress: unexpected processes, new outbound connections, logins that do not fit.
More on cypro.co.uk
Incident response
If you may already be compromised, our responders contain it, preserve the evidence, find out what was touched and get you running again safely.
More on cypro.co.uk
Plan ahead
Want a plan for your organisation?
Defending against data poisoning starts with knowing which AI systems you run, where their data comes from and who owns the risk. CyPro can help set the governance, risk assessment and controls around that.