Ensuring the safety and alignment of Large Language Models is a significant
challenge with their growing integration into critical applications and
societal functions. While prior research has primarily focused on jailbreak
attacks, less attention has been given to non-adversarial failures that subtly
emerge during benign interactions. We introduce secondary risks a novel class
of failure modes marked by harmful or misleading behaviors during benign
prompts. Unlike adversarial attacks, these risks stem from imperfect
generalization and often evade standard safety mechanisms. To enable systematic
evaluation, we introduce two risk primitives verbose response and speculative
advice that capture the core failure patterns. Building on these definitions,
we propose SecLens, a black-box, multi-objective search framework that
efficiently elicits secondary risk behaviors by optimizing task relevance, risk
activation, and linguistic plausibility. To support reproducible evaluation, we
release SecRiskBench, a benchmark dataset of 650 prompts covering eight diverse
real-world risk categories. Experimental results from extensive evaluations on
16 popular models demonstrate that secondary risks are widespread, transferable
across models, and modality independent, emphasizing the urgent need for
enhanced safety mechanisms to address benign yet harmful LLM behaviors in
real-world deployments.