Guides
Every guide to Data Poisoning
Start with the main guides, then go deeper on the parts that apply to you.
Last reviewed against Anthropic, UK AI Security Institute and arXiv. Sources
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The main guides
Risks
The specific risks data poisoning creates for organisations that build, fine-tune or buy AI, with the evidence behind each one.
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What to do
A practical order of work for UK organisations to reduce data poisoning risk in AI systems: inventory, provenance, suppliers and testing.
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Questions
Sourced answers on data poisoning in AI: what it is, how many documents it takes, whether it can be detected and what to do first.
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About this guide to data poisoning
Who publishes this guide to data poisoning, why it exists and how its sources are checked and kept up to date.
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Your product or situation
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.
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Attack types
The main ways training, fine-tuning and retrieval data can be poisoned, and how poisoned model files differ, with sources.
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The 250 study
What the Anthropic, UK AI Security Institute and Alan Turing Institute study found about poisoning language models, and what it does not show.
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Web datasets
How researchers showed that datasets crawled from the web can be poisoned cheaply, through expired domains and timed edits.
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Medical case
A reported Nature Medicine study on poisoning medical language models with 0.001% misinformation, and why benchmarks did not catch it.
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Prevention
Practical controls to reduce data poisoning risk, drawn from OWASP and NCSC guidance: provenance, versioning, vetting and sandboxing.
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Detection
How to look for signs of poisoned data: output checks, adversarial testing, monitoring and why benchmarks alone are not enough.
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Guidance
Where UK, US and industry guidance covers data poisoning: the NCSC guidelines and principles, NIST's taxonomy and OWASP's LLM risk list.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Vulnerability scanning
Find every internet-facing system you run, including the forgotten ones, and see which are still on a vulnerable build.
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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.
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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.
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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.