Your New Employee is a Genius... and a Security Risk 🤖
Generative and Agentic AI are like brilliant new hires. They can accelerate innovation, automate tasks, and create enormous value. However, just like any new employee, you wouldn't give them the keys to the entire building on day one without understanding the risks. This guide will walk you through the security landscape of modern AI so you can innovate responsibly.
Meet the New AI Workforce
Generative AI: The Creator
These are systems that create new content like text, images, and code. They're used for everything from personalized marketing to automating client interactions.
Agentic AI: The Doer
AI agents are autonomous systems that perform tasks and make decisions to achieve a goal. They automate complex workflows in R&D, customer service, and IT, increasing productivity and reducing costs.
The New Security Playbook: 3 Key Risks to Watch
With great power comes new vulnerabilities. Here are the top threats managers need to understand:
1. The Impersonator: Supercharged Phishing & Deepfakes
AI can create highly convincing deepfakes, phishing emails, and social engineering attacks at an unprecedented scale and sophistication. This undermines trust and dramatically increases the risk of fraud.
2. The Puppeteer: Prompt Injection Attacks
This is like social engineering for bots. An attacker feeds your AI malicious instructions hidden within a seemingly normal prompt. This can trick the system into generating harmful content, leaking sensitive data, or ignoring its safety rules.
3. The Heist: Model & Data Theft
Your proprietary AI models and the data they're trained on are valuable assets. Attackers can steal, reverse-engineer, and exploit these models for their own gain. Broader risks also include poisoning your training data to corrupt the model's future outputs.
Your Essential Cybersecurity Briefing: Recommended Videos
To dive deeper into this critical topic, we highly recommend these insights from the world's best (and IBM's) Security Guy and Teacher, Jeff Crume: