01 — attack families

AdvPrefix

automated

A prefix-forcing attack: rather than arguing with the model, it prepends text chosen so the model's most likely continuation is already compliant — typically by seeding the beginning of an affirmative answer ("Sure, here are the steps:"). The prefixes are optimised automatically against the target rather than hand-written. It attacks the completion dynamics, not the model's stated policy, which is why a refusal-trained model can still be led into the answer.

See also jailbreak · model refusal

Related terms

  • Jailbreak Attack concepts

    Defeating a model's safety training so it produces output it would normally refuse. The distinction from prompt injection is about whose intent is being…

  • Model refusal Testing & measurement

    The underlying model declining the request on its own, with no security product involved.

Attack families

The ten families in the HackAgent attack taxonomy (AISecurityLab/hackagent ↗), which is the taxonomy MoorAI's red-team corpora are keyed to. They are not ten unrelated tricks — they cluster into two groups that behave very differently. Obfuscation families hide the payload so the model never recognises it as harmful. Persuasion families state the harmful request plainly and argue the model into it. That split matters, because a model that refuses persuasion outright will happily comply with an encoding it cannot decode — see marginal value.

AdvPrefix is term 7 of 10 in this part of the glossary.

Get started free Full glossary → How we test → Community agent on GitHub ↗

This page is one entry from the agentic AI security glossary, which defines 60 terms in the same style. Where a term belongs to a published taxonomy or standard — the HackAgent attack families, the OWASP lists, AMTSO's guidelines, MITRE ATLAS, ISO/IEC 42001, the NIST AI RMF, the EU AI Act — the authoritative wording is the source document's, not ours, and specifics should be verified there. "Lethal trifecta" is Simon Willison's term. OWASP® is a trademark of the OWASP Foundation; ATT&CK® and ATLAS™ are trademarks of The MITRE Corporation. Naming a framework here is description, not a claim of certification or endorsement.

glick.run — AGPL-3.0