ai-risk
The Top 5 AI Issues Every CISO Should Know
July 18, 2024
For CISOs, the rapid adoption of AI presents significant security challenges. From data poisoning to adversarial attacks, new threats are appearing that CISOs must confront to build resilience and minimize risk. The list below details the five top AI issues every CISO should know.
1. AI-Enhanced Cyber Attacks
AI-powered cyber attacks are a growing issue for CISOs due to their increased sophistication and stealth. These attacks leverage AI to automate tasks, personalize phishing attacks, craft deepfakes to bypass security, and efficiently scan for vulnerabilities. Unlike traditional attacks, cyber attacks leveraging AI can constantly adapt and learn, making them harder to detect with traditional methods. This raises the risk of successful breaches, potentially causing data exfiltration, financial losses, and reputational damage.
How to Approach AI-Enhanced Cyber Attacks
CISOs can address these threats by incorporating AI-powered security solutions into their defensive strategy. AI-powered tools, along with traditional methods like MFA and staff training, help CISOs keep pace.
2. Misuse of Generative AI and Data Leaks
Generative AI, a powerful tool for creating realistic content, presents a double-edged sword for CISOs. While beneficial, it can be misused to craft highly believable phishing emails or social engineering attacks, tricking employees into surrendering sensitive information. Furthermore, data leaks are a major concern. Generative AI, if trained on unvetted data, could inadvertently learn and expose confidential information like internal documents or source code. These leaks, whether accidental or malicious, can have severe consequences, including financial losses, regulatory fines, and a damaged reputation.
How to Approach Misuse of Generative AI and Data Leaks
CISOs can address these threats by implementing data classification in which sensitive data is encrypted or anonymized. Training generative AI on sanitized data sets will help to minimize leak risks and ensuring human oversight to review output will flag potential issues.
Our DeepSeas CISOs can guide you through AI enabled threats and how to leverage AI within your cyber defense program.
3. Lack of Explainability and Bias
Lack of explainability and bias in AI can be serious concerns for CISOs. Imagine a complex AI security system making critical decisions about access control or threat detection, but you cannot understand how it arrives at those choices. This could make it difficult to identify and fix biases that could lead the AI to overlook certain threats or unfairly target specific user groups. A biased AI application might systematically approve fraudulent transactions from a certain region or fail to detect malware written in a less common language. These blind spots can leave organizations exposed to serious security risks.
How to Approach Lack of Explainability and Bias
CISOs should demand transparent AI systems that they can trust and audit to ensure unbiased decision-making.
4. Security of AI systems
The very tools designed to protect an organization can become its Achilles’ heel for CISOs. AI systems themselves are vulnerable to hacking. Malicious actors could manipulate the training data used to build the AI, feeding it poisoned data that skews its decision-making. Even worse, they could hack the AI model itself, causing it to malfunction or prioritize attacker goals over legitimate user requests. This could lead to granting unauthorized access, compromising sensitive data, or even launching attacks on the organization’s own systems.
How to Approach the Security of AI systems
The interconnectedness of AI and core security functions makes securing the AI itself paramount for CISOs. Ensuring robust defenses for the AI systems will prevent them from becoming a backdoor for attackers.
5. Skilled AI Workforce Shortage
The current cybersecurity talent pool is stretched thin, and those with the specific skills needed for AI security are even scarcer. This lack of qualified personnel makes it difficult for CISOs to fully leverage AI’s advantages. They may struggle to implement AI security tools effectively, leaving them vulnerable to the very threats AI was designed to combat.
Skilled AI Workforce Shortage
Investing in training existing staff, attracting new talent with specialized AI security knowledge, and/or augmenting the in-house cybersecurity team with Managed Detection & Response is crucial for CISOs to harness the full potential of AI for defense.
CISOs are facing a new frontier of cyber threats with the rise of AI, and traditional defensive measures alone are not enough to protect against AI-powered attacks. Data poisoning and adversarial attacks raise concerns about the integrity of AI systems themselves, while leaks from generative AI models using large data sets also pose a significant threat. Also, building trust and ensuring explainability in AI decisions is critical to its successful adoption. To navigate this challenging landscape, CISOs must drive a transformational cyber defense program, leveraging AI and traditional methods to continuously mitigate risks associated with this disruptive technology.