The IT Nerd

Researchers have demonstrated an AI-powered ransomware framework known as “JadePuffer” that automates multiple stages of the attack lifecycle, including target identification, database interaction, encryption, and ransom execution. While the project is intended as a proof of concept rather than evidence of an active ransomware campaign, it illustrates how AI could significantly reduce the time, expertise, and resources required to conduct cyberattacks. The research highlights growing concerns that AI may enable attackers to automate operational workflows, accelerating the speed and scale of future ransomware and cybercrime operations.

If you want an overview of “JadePuffer”, click here: JadePuffer: The First Successful LLM-Driven Ransomware Attack

John Watters, Chairman and CEO, iCOUNTER Cybersecurity Intelligence had this to say:

“The most important takeaway from stories like this is not whether a specific AI-powered ransomware framework achieves widespread adoption, but what it signals about the direction of cybercrime operations. Threat actors have spent years automating individual stages of the attack lifecycle. AI has the potential to connect those stages together, accelerating reconnaissance, target selection, and execution in ways that compress attacker timelines significantly.

As cybercriminal operations become more automated, defenders face a growing mismatch between machine-speed attacks and human-speed decision-making. Security teams can no longer rely solely on detecting malicious activity once it reaches their environment. They need operational intelligence that provides visibility into emerging adversary behaviors, infrastructure, and campaign activity before attacks reach execution.

This is ultimately an intelligence challenge as much as a security challenge. Organizations that can identify shifts in attacker tradecraft early and adapt their defensive priorities accordingly will be far better positioned than those waiting to respond after automation has already increased the scale and speed of an adversary’s operations.”

Consider this to be fair warning that AI is going to be used in all sorts of attacks, and ransomware will be no different. Thus this should be all you need to get your defences in order.

UPDATE: Ensar Seker, CISO at SOCRadar, has provided the following commentary:

“JADEPUFFER demonstrates that the most important change isn’t that AI created new attack techniques, it didn’t. The campaign relied on a known vulnerability and familiar post-exploitation methods. What changed is that an AI agent was able to autonomously chain reconnaissance, exploitation, credential discovery, lateral movement, and extortion while adapting to failures in real time. That dramatically lowers the operational cost of ransomware campaigns and allows attackers to execute far more operations simultaneously than a human team could manage.

The ability to analyze an error, modify its own approach, and continue the attack within seconds is particularly concerning. Security teams should expect future ransomware operators to use AI not because it makes attacks more sophisticated, but because it makes them faster, more scalable, and far more persistent.

Organizations shouldn’t focus solely on the ‘AI ransomware’ headline. This incident began with an exposed Langflow instance vulnerable to a publicly known CVE. The defensive priorities remain the same: aggressively patch internet-facing AI infrastructure, eliminate exposed administrative services, enforce least privilege, protect secrets stored within AI frameworks, and continuously monitor for abnormal behavior. AI is accelerating attackers, but it is still exploiting fundamental security weaknesses.”

UPDATE x2: More commentary was provided to me in relation to this story:

Justin Beals, CEO & Founder of Strike Graph:

“JadePuffer is the moment the industry has been warning about since agentic tooling showed up: an AI model that can chain reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement, and extortion without a human touching any single step. None of the techniques are new. What’s new is that a model strung them together end to end, in 31 seconds from failed login to working exploit.

That speed is the real story. Traditional third-party risk programs run on quarterly questionnaires and point-in-time attestations, but an autonomous attacker doesn’t wait for your next audit cycle. If your vendor risk posture is a snapshot, and the threat is continuous, you’ve already lost the race before the assessment period even starts.

Organizations need to stop treating AI agents as productivity tools and start treating them as identities with access that has to be governed, monitored, and continuously verified, not reviewed once and forgotten. The ones who build that muscle now will be the ones still standing when this pattern scales, and Sysdig is telling us it will.”

Andrew Obadiaru, CISO at Cobalt:

“What stands out about JadePuffer isn’t that an AI-generated malicious code. It’s that a model was able to string together reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement, and destruction into a working operation without a human directing any single step. That removes one of the last practical constraints on attacker scale: the need for an operator with deep expertise at each stage of an intrusion. We’ve spent years talking about AI lowering the barrier to entry for attackers. This is what that actually looks like in practice: adaptive, self-correcting, and fast enough to move from a failed login to a working exploit in under a minute. For defenders, the lesson isn’t really about Langflow specifically, though patching exposed AI orchestration tools matters. It’s that periodic testing cycles were never built for adversaries that iterate in real time. Continuous validation of Internet-facing infrastructure, and tighter controls around what credentials and API keys sit next to AI orchestration environments matter more now than they did a year ago. Attackers no longer need to be sophisticated. They just need a model willing to keep trying until something works.”

Will Baxter, Field CISO at Team Cymru:

“Whether or not JadePuffer represents the first fully LLM-directed ransomware operation, it reflects a broader trend toward AI orchestrating larger portions of the intrusion lifecycle. We’ve already seen AI accelerate individual stages of an attack; if it’s now coordinating workflows end-to-end, defenders should expect faster adaptation and shorter response windows. That doesn’t eliminate the value of indicators or signatures, but it does increase the importance of tracking the infrastructure and behavioral patterns that persist even as tooling changes. Organizations that can observe attacker infrastructure as it evolves, not just the artifacts of a single campaign, will be better positioned to detect and disrupt these operations before they progress from initial access to impact.”

The launch of EDAMAME — a platform specifically designed to catch AI coding agents going off the rails — signals that the industry is starting to reckon with something important: autonomous AI agents in software development pipelines can take unintended actions, and existing security tooling wasn’t built to see it. But the conversation is almost entirely happening in AppSec and DevSecOps circles, and it’s missing the bigger structural problem underneath.

You can find out more here: https://www.securityweek.com/new-edamame-platform-aims-to-catch-ai-coding-agents-going-off-the-rails/

Justin Beals, CEO & Founder, Strike Graph, an AI-native GRC and compliance automation platform

“Building guardrails for AI coding agents is a meaningful step, and recognizing that autonomous code generation needs behavioral oversight is the right instinct. What’s incomplete is treating this as purely a developer tooling problem — the moment AI-generated code is deployed, it becomes a compliance and risk management challenge that most GRC teams have zero visibility into.

The real gap isn’t just catching an agent that misbehaves in real time. It’s that organizations have no systematic way to evidence that their AI-assisted development process meets the security requirements their certifications demand. Your SOC 2 or ISO 27001 was written assuming humans made the code decisions — it has nothing to say about what an autonomous agent pulled, modified, or deployed on your behalf.

As AI coding agents become standard in engineering orgs, compliance programs will need to evolve from auditing what humans built to auditing what AI built in humans’ names. The frameworks haven’t caught up yet, and the organizations waiting for them to before they act are building a gap that auditors — and attackers — will eventually find.”

Organizations need to ensure that the AI coding agents are as secure as the human agents they use. If they don’t, then it will end very badly for that organization indeed.

Two independent studies found that advanced AI cybersecurity models, including Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, have exceeded previous benchmarks for autonomous cyberattack capability. Researchers from the UK AI Security Institute (AISI) and Palo Alto Networks said the models are now capable of chaining together complex multi-stage attack paths and identifying vulnerabilities at rates that significantly outpace earlier systems.

The UK AI Security Institute said Claude Mythos Preview and GPT-5.5 became the first models to fully complete a simulated enterprise intrusion scenario without human intervention. According to the findings, the models successfully executed tasks including credential theft, privilege escalation, lateral movement, persistence, and protected system access during controlled testing. Researchers said the models consistently outperformed previous-generation systems on autonomous cyber capability benchmarks designed to measure real-world offensive potential.

Separately, Palo Alto Networks said its internal testing showed advanced AI cyber models increased vulnerability discovery rates by more than seven times compared to traditional manual research workflows. Researchers said the models were particularly effective at identifying exploitable weaknesses in enterprise software, cloud configurations, and authentication systems, raising concerns that AI-assisted vulnerability discovery could dramatically accelerate exploit development timelines for both defenders and threat actors.

Josh Marpet, Senior Product Security Consultant, Finite State:

   “Unfortunately, this is about as surprising as saying that the sun rises. Nobody was not expecting it. The question is not, can an AI find and run an exploit? We know they can. The question is, can an AI find vulnerable code in a device or application with very little instruction given, write or find the exploit for that vulnerability, and successfully prosecute the exploit through to completion? If the answer is yes, then we are having a bad day.

   “The one interesting item is that the quality of the exploits, the discovery, the entire process, is still fairly dependent on the caliber of the person sitting behind the keyboard and directing that AI. For now.

Damon Small, Board of Directors, Xcape, Inc.:

   “The emergence of GPT-5.5 and Claude Mythos marks a paradigm shift where autonomous attack-path chaining moves from a theoretical lab risk to a quantifiable operational reality. When an AI can compress a twelve-hour expert reverse-engineering task into ten minutes for less than two dollars, the traditional economics of cyber defense collapse. This capability will inevitably commoditize the high-margin, bespoke manual testing currently sold by security consultancies, forcing a market pivot toward high-level strategy and remediation.

   “While these models currently demonstrate low reliability, succeeding in only 20% to 30% of end-to-end attempts, that failure rate is irrelevant to a persistent attacker with near-zero marginal costs. Security leaders must move beyond patching individual vulnerabilities and focus on time-to-break-chain, assuming attackers will use these models to identify and exploit multi-stage paths at machine speed. The priority is no longer just preventing the initial foothold, but ensuring that every compromised node is a dead end through aggressive segmentation and just-in-time access.

• “Death of the Boutique Pen-Test: The automation of complex, multi-stage attack chains will rapidly drive down the cost and delivery time for offensive engagements, turning premium security services into a baseline commodity.
• “Asymmetry of Persistence: A 20% success rate is a failure for a human consultant but a triumph for an AI that never sleeps and costs pennies to restart, allowing attackers to “brute-force” complex architectural flaws.
• “Architectural Resilience vs. Patching: As vulnerability discovery outpaces human remediation capacity, the focus must shift from the “patching treadmill” to building environments that are structurally resistant to lateral movement.

   “If your security posture relies on a $500-an-hour consultant to find the “bespoke” vulnerabilities that a $20-a-month chatbot just discovered in bulk, you aren’t paying for security; you are paying for an expensive PDF.”

Jacob Krell, Senior Director: Secure AI Solutions & Cybersecurity, Suzu Labs:

   “Palo Alto’s advisory data puts real operational weight behind the AISI benchmarks. Going from fewer than five CVEs per month to 26 in a single advisory cycle, with the majority found by AI scanning, is a preview of what every software vendor will face once these models are widely deployed. The bottleneck has shifted from discovery to remediation, and most organizations are not built to patch at the rate AI finds vulnerabilities.

   “Palo Alto estimates a three to five month window before AI driven exploits become the norm. That window is the planning figure security leaders should be working against. This capability is the new baseline, and because different models surface different vulnerability classes, the total volume of findings will only grow as more models reach this tier. Organizations running vulnerability management programs built for five CVEs a month need to start planning for a world where that number is measured in dozens.”

Tom Yates, Product SME, Ridge Security Technology Inc.:

   “These findings highlight the urgent and critical need for security companies to be at the leading edge of Gen AI technology. Security tooling must match the capabilities hackers use or your infrastructure will look like swiss cheese to the bad guys.  But security buyers need to beware, an avalanche of AI-washing has already hit the market.  Buyers must spend more time digging into product claims to ensure that AI is a first-class citizen of the solution, not a “bolt-on” to satisfy marketing needs.”

This is another example of AI welcoming us to the new reality of cybersecurity. Were the time to get pwned has been reduced so much that humans are simply not even in the game. That should scare anyone on that side of the fence.

Researchers at Check Point have identified multiple vulnerabilities in Anthropic’s development tool Claude Code, allowing malicious repositories to trigger remote code execution and steal active API credentials.

The observed security issues exploited built-in mechanisms including Hooks, Model Context Protocol servers, and environment variables to run arbitrary shell commands and exfiltrate API keys before trust prompts could be confirmed.

Two specific tracked vulnerabilities, CVE-2025-59536 and CVE-2026-21852, were documented and patched by Anthropic following disclosure by security researchers. The first enabled arbitrary code execution via overridden configuration settings that bypass user consent dialogs, while the second could redirect API traffic to malicious endpoints, exposing developers’ Anthropic API keys in plaintext.

All reported flaws have been remedied in subsequent Claude Code updates prior to public advisory publication.

According to researchers, even after the specific vulnerabilities were fixed, the underlying risk does not disappear. The issues exposed how project configuration files can directly shape execution behavior inside AI-assisted development tools, and a malicious repository can still act as a delivery mechanism if safeguards are insufficient, which expands the threat model beyond the individual CVEs that were addressed.

As a result, applying patches resolves the documented flaws but does not fully remove the broader exposure created when AI tooling automatically interprets and acts on repository-level settings. 

Jacob Krell, Senior Director: Secure AI Solutions & Cybersecurity, Suzu Labs:

“These CVEs are real and Anthropic was right to patch them. The broader issue is not unique to Claude Code. The AI development tool industry as a whole is prioritizing enablement over security, and these vulnerabilities are a symptom of that design philosophy, not an isolated product failure.

“In the case of Claude Code, hooks ran shell commands before the developer even saw the trust dialog. The security control existed. It just executed after the damage was already done. AI agents are deployed with broad permissions by default because restricting them reduces productivity. That is the same tradeoff the industry made with admin accounts two decades ago, and it took years of breaches to correct. The principle of least privilege does not stop applying because the user is an AI model instead of a human. Agents should be treated as untrusted by default, with strict zero trust boundaries between the agent and any command surface, credential store, or system resource it touches.

“This is not a new class of attack surface. Malicious Makefiles, poisoned scripts, and git hooks have compromised developers for years. What AI tools change is the scope of what runs once triggered. The attack surface is not new. The blast radius is.

“AI development tools are going to become more autonomous, not less. The industry is building the capability first and retrofitting the security later. That pattern has never aged well in software, and it is unlikely to age any better with AI.”

I am aware of a large number of developers who are using tools like Claude Code to speed up the coding pf

A new social media platform called Moltbook, designed for AI agents to interact with each other and “hang out”, was found to have a misconfiguration, leaving its backend database publicly accessible allowing full read and write access to all data, according to a recent blog post by Wiz Security.

Researchers discovered a Supabase API key exposed in client-side JavaScript revealing thousands of private AI conversations, 30,000 user email addresses, and 1.5 million API keys..

   “Supabase is a popular open source Firebase alternative providing hosted PostgreSQL databases with REST APIs. It’s become especially popular with vibe-coded applications due to its ease of setup,” explained Wiz head of threat exposure, Gal Nagli.

   “When properly configured with Row Level Security (RLS), the public API key is safe to expose – it acts like a project identifier. However, without RLS policies, this key grants full database access to anyone who has it. In Moltbook’s implementation, this critical line of defense was missing.”

In a message posted to X before the Wiz posted the blog, Moltbook’s creator, Matt Schlicht said he “didn’t write one line of code” for the site. Wiz reported the vulnerability to Schlicht, and the database was secured.

   “As we see over and over again with vibe coding, although it runs very fast, many times people forget the basics of security,” Wiz cofounder Ami Luttwak said.

Sunil Gottumukkala, CEO, Averlon:

   “What this highlights is the tradeoff vibe coding creates. It massively compresses idea-to-product time, but often skips essential security steps like threat modeling, secure defaults, and review gates that account for real user behavior and adversarial abuse.

   “When those controls are missing, a routine misconfiguration, such as shipping without proper authorization or RLS policies, can quickly turn into an instant, internet-scale incident. Some vibe-coding platforms are starting to add guardrails, but we’re still early. As long as speed continues to outpace security analysis and remediation, this will be a bumpy road.”

Lydia Zhang, President & Co-Founder,Ridge Security Technology Inc. gave me this comment:

   “This leads to another mandatory step: testing. Zero-trust principles should also be applied to Vibe coding. Vibe-coded solutions can miss basic security practices, and configuration or misconfiguration issues are often outside the scope of the code itself. I’m glad Wiz Security caught this before the damage spread further.”

Michael Bell, Founder & CEO, Suzu Labs added this comment:

   “The Moltbook incident shows what happens when people shipping production applications have no security training and are relying entirely on AI-generated code. The creator said publicly that he didn’t write a single line of code. Current AI coding tools don’t reason about security on the developer’s behalf. They generate functional code, not secure code.

   “The specific failure here was a single Supabase configuration setting. Row Level Security was disabled, which meant the API key that’s supposed to be safe to expose became a skeleton key to the entire database. That’s not a sophisticated vulnerability. It’s a checkbox that never got checked, and nobody reviewed the code to notice. When 10% of apps built on vibe coding platforms (CursorGuard) have the same misconfiguration, that’s not a user error problem. That’s a systemic failure in how these tools are designed.

   “The write access vulnerability should concern anyone building AI agent infrastructure. Moltbook wasn’t just leaking data. Anyone with the exposed API key could modify posts that AI agents were reading and responding to. That’s prompt injection at ecosystem scale. You could manipulate the information environment that shapes how thousands of AI agents behave.

   “Users shared OpenAI API keys in private messages assuming those messages were private. One platform’s misconfiguration turned into credential exposure for unrelated services. As AI ecosystems become more interconnected, these cascading failures become the norm.

   “The 88:1 agent-to-human ratio should make everyone skeptical of AI adoption metrics going forward. Moltbook claimed 1.5 million agents. The reality was 17,000 humans running bot armies. No rate limiting. No verification. The platform couldn’t distinguish between an actual AI agent and a human with a script pretending to be one.

   “We’re going to see a lot of “AI-powered” metrics that look impressive until you examine what’s actually behind them. Participation numbers, engagement statistics, autonomous behavior claims. Without verification mechanisms, the numbers are meaningless. The AI internet is coming, but right now it’s mostly humans wearing AI masks.

   “If you’re deploying vibe-coded applications to production, you need security review by someone who understands both the code and the infrastructure it runs on. AI tools don’t have security reasoning built in, which means every configuration decision is a potential exposure. We help organizations identify exactly these kinds of gaps through security assessments that trace data flows and access controls. The discovery process that found this vulnerability took Wiz researchers minutes of looking at client-side JavaScript. That’s the same level of effort an attacker would spend.

   “AI development velocity and AI security maturity are on completely different curves. Teams are shipping production applications in days. Security practices haven’t caught up. Until AI tools start generating secure defaults and flagging dangerous configurations automatically, humans (or hackers) need to be in the loop reviewing what gets deployed.”

Ryan McCurdy, VP of Marketing, Liquibase contributed this:

   “Moltbook is a textbook example of what happens when you ship at AI speed without change control at the database layer. A single missing guardrail turned a “public” Supabase key into full read and write access, exposing private agent conversations, user emails, and a massive pile of credentials. This is why Database Change Governance matters.

   “The highest risk changes are often permissions, policies, and access rules, and those need automated checks, separation of duties, drift detection, and audit-ready evidence before anything hits production. AI agents and vibe-coded apps will only amplify the blast radius if database change is not governed.”

Noelle Murata, Sr. Security Engineer, Xcape, Inc. served up this comment:

   “Matt Schlicht’s admission that he “didn’t write one line of code” isn’t something to celebrate, given the fundamental nature of the security flaw. The database completely lacked Row Level Security (RLS) policies, allowing anyone to access it without authentication. This misconfiguration exposed the entire database structure and content, including tokens that granted read/write/edit access to non-authenticated users – a basic oversight with serious consequences.

   “Vibe-coding,” or relying on AI to generate code, can produce functional results but often sacrifices best practices in architecture and security for speed and convenience. Without code review or highly specific prompting, AI-generated code prioritizes “fast and easy” over “resilient and secure.” This is analogous to why junior developers need oversight; the same principle applies to AI-generated code.

   “Despite Moltbook being marketed as a social platform “for bots, by bots,” it had a significant human user base: 17,000 humans alongside 1.5 million bots, creating a roughly 1:88 ratio. Notably, no CAPTCHA or human/bot validation system was implemented, raising questions about the platform’s actual purpose and user management.

   “This incident demonstrates that AI-generated applications require careful monitoring and professional oversight. Software development still demands review by trained, experienced humans to ensure security and reliability.”

This highlights the danger of vibe coding. You can get stuff done. But how it gets done might be a problem. You might want to keep that in mind if you rely on vibe coding.

Yesterday, U.S. Senators Mitt Romney (R-UT), Jack Reed (D-RI), Jerry Moran (R-KS), and Angus King (I-ME) released a letter to the Senate artificial intelligence (AI) working group leaders outlining a framework to mitigate extreme AI risks. I encourage you to read the letter, but here’s the TL:DR:

Congress should consider a permanent framework to mitigate extreme risks. This framework should also serve as the basis for international coordination to mitigate extreme risks posed by AI. This letter is an attempt to start a dialogue about the need for such a framework, which would be in addition to, not at the exclusion of, proposals focused on other risks presented by developments in AI.

Under this potential framework, the most advanced model developers in the future would be required to safeguard against four extreme risks – the development of biological, chemical, cyber, or nuclear weapons. An agency or federal coordinating body would be tasked to oversee the implementation of these proposed requirements, which would apply to only the very largest and most advanced models. Such requirements would be reevaluated on a recurring basis as we gain a better understanding of the threat landscape and the technology.

Sounds interesting. But is it useful? Here’s what Kevin Surace, Chair, Token had to say:

This is great politics and important to state publicly, but it won’t protect anyone from these threats. The major model providers already have strong safeguards in place for these and similar threats (you cannot get an answer from ChatGPT on how to create a chemical weapon).

This changes nothing from all major US providers. They already strongly limit access to such content. However open source models being used by bad actors and rogue countries are not subject to these laws and will misuse the technology anyway.

Anyone can already Google how to create a biological weapon. Having the answers faster doesn’t really help someone with the chemistry, procurement, production and so on anymore than Google already did. But AI could create perhaps new compounds not well documented elsewhere. And the bad actors are already taking advantage of that with open source models.

This has zero impact on OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and so on. And it has zero impact on a rogue country using open source models.

I’m all for guardrails and safeguards. But they have to be useful. I am not yet convinced that this effort by these senators is useful. But I am free to be convinced otherwise. Let’s see if they can convince myself and others that this is a useful exercise.

UPDATE: I have additional commentary from Madison Horn, Congressional Candidate (OK-5) and cybersecurity leader:

The plan proposed by the Senators is crucial. We are in the midst of a new kind of Cold War with China, one that includes the race to harness AI. A comprehensive strategy to not only secure but also to fully harness the potential of AI is essential. The nation that leads in AI will not only dictate global markets but also define international norms for decades to come.

Executing a plan to mitigate AI risks is loaded with challenges. First, we need a solid strategy to retain top talent for any new agencies we might set up, and we must also forge strong partnerships with the private sector. Then there’s Congress—sometimes it seems like they’re in a tech time warp, which doesn’t help. Plus, we can’t let our drive for security strangle American innovation. We need to stay agile, adapting as new models and classifications emerge, and ensure we’re not shutting out new startups or inadvertently creating monopolies.

And let’s not overlook cybersecurity challenges. Ensuring these AI models aren’t leaked or stolen is crucial—our adversaries are definitely taking notes and will be trying to tap into this wealth of information that will be retained.

Artificial intelligence poses a significant threat, one that reshapes the global landscape in ways we haven’t witnessed since the post-WWII era. With new alliances forming, notably between Russia and China, the stakes in the AI war are extraordinarily high. The power of AI doesn’t just accelerate a country’s ability to dominate global markets; it also has the potential to shift global values depending on who emerges as the leader in this technology. In the most extreme scenarios, the misuse of AI could lead to catastrophic outcomes, potentially destroying the world in a matter of seconds. The race to harness AI, therefore, is not just about technological superiority but also about steering the future ethical and moral compass of our entire planet.

We need to keep the spark of American innovation alive—it’s also crucial for our national security. Collaboration with the private sector? Non-negotiable. With many of the few qualified individuals in Congress retiring or being pushed out of office by partisan politics, it’s up to the American people to step up. We must elect leaders who are not just filling a seat but who truly understand the complexities of today’s tech challenges. Leaders who have the understanding to craft and pass laws that safeguard our citizens without choking out our innovation and economic growth. This is about securing a future where America continues to lead, not follow.

Today is November 30th which makes it one year since ChatGPT became available to the public. ChatGPT has taken the world by storm for good and bad reasons. History will be the ultimate judge of how impactful ChatGPT will be. But John Pritchard, CPO at Radiant Logic has some thought on ChatGPT:

“The one-year anniversary of ChatGPT marks a revolutionary moment for Generative AI. It has completely surpassed our expectations of what technology is capable of and enabled businesses of all sizes to leverage AI without significant upfront investments. However, we must consider how we can best utilize this advanced tool – businesses may feel inclined to rush and hop on the AI train to keep up with their competitors, but without a strong foundation and data ecosystem, businesses can unintentionally cause more problems.  

Before organizations invest time, finances and resources in integrating Gen AI into their decision-making processes, they need to first and foremost ensure their data is clean and of the best quality. GenAI’s effectiveness is directly dependent on the data it receives and if businesses aren’t careful, they can exacerbate existing issues by making decisions based on inaccurate AI results. This means making sure your data set is accurate, up-to-date and does not have anomalies. 

Businesses must also train their employees who will be overseeing the AI. While GenAI is an intelligent tool, it has not yet been perfected and can produce errors and wrong answers – human oversight remains critical to significantly reduce GenAI hallucinations and unwanted output. As GenAI is not advanced enough to fully function on its own, using it is more like collaborating with it. So, employees must also know how to frame instructions that an AI model can properly understand and interpret, a technique known as prompt engineering. With these steps, businesses can fully move forward with implementing GenAI and harness its full potential.” 

With everything that surrounds AI, the next year or two will be interesting to watch to see how it is used, and how it is controlled.

The US, UK, among 16 other countries have jointly released secure AI system guidelines based on the principle that it should be secure by design:

This document recommends guidelines for providers of any systems that use artificial intelligence (AI), whether those systems have been created from scratch or built on top of tools and services provided by others. Implementing these guidelines will help providers build AI systems that function as intended, are available when needed, and work without revealing sensitive data to unauthorised parties.

This document is aimed primarily at providers of AI systems who are using models hosted by an organisation, or are using external application programming interfaces (APIs). We urge all stakeholders (including data scientists, developers, managers, decision-makers and risk owners) to read these guidelines to help them make informed decisions about the design, development, deployment and operation of their AI systems.

 Anurag Gurtu , Chief Product Officer, StrikeReady had this comment:

The recent secure AI system development guidelines released by the U.K., U.S., and other international partners are a significant move in enhancing cybersecurity in the field of artificial intelligence. These guidelines emphasize the importance of security outcomes for customers, incorporating transparency and accountability, and promoting a secure organizational structure. They focus on managing AI-related risks, requiring rigorous testing of tools before public release, and establishing measures to counteract societal harms, like bias. Additionally, the guidelines advocate a ‘secure by design’ approach covering all stages of AI development and deployment, and address the need to combat adversarial attacks targeting AI and machine learning systems, including prompt injection attacks and data poisoning.

The fact that 18 countries agreed on a common set of principals is great. The thing is that more nations have to do the same thing. Otherwise you may still have AI that is closer to the “Terminator” end of the spectrum rather than being helpful and friendly.

UPDATE: Troy Batterberry, CEO and founder, EchoMark had this comment:

   “While logging and monitoring insider activities are important, we know they do not go nearly far enough to prevent insider leaks. Highly damaging leaks continue to happen at well-run government and commercial organizations all over the world, even with sophisticated monitoring activities in place. The leaker (insider) simply feels they can hide in the anonymity of the group and never be caught. An entirely new approach is required to help change human behavior. Information watermarking is one such technology that can help keep private information private.”

UPDATE #2:  Josh Davies, Principal Technical Manager, Fortra adds this:

The AI arms race and rapid adoption of open AI systems* have created concerns in the cyber security sector around the impact of a supply chain compromise – where the AI source code is compromised and used as a trusted delivery mechanism to pass on the compromise to third party users. These guidelines look to secure the design, development, and deployment of AI which will help reduce the likelihood of this type of attack.

As systems and nation states are increasingly interdependent on each other, global buy in is crucial. We have already seen how collective security is important, otherwise threats are allowed to grow, become more sophisticated, and attack global targets. Ransomware criminal families are a prime example. This levels the playing field by homogenising guidance across national states and limiting a race to the bottom with AI tech.

The guidelines recommend the use of red teaming. Red teaming surfaces the gaps in systems, and security strategies, and ties them directly to an impact. The AI Executive Order also mandates red teaming to identify flaws and vulnerabilities in AI systems. Mandating red teaming future proofs these guidelines (and other regulations) as it is hard to anticipate the threats of tomorrow and the appropriate mitigations – especially at the pace governments can legislate. It’s an indirect way of saying you need to make sure that your security strategies are always up to date, because if not, attackers will surely find and expose your gaps. This is important as we have seen other security regulations quickly become outdated and redundant as controls cannot be agreed upon and updated at the pace required to achieve good security.

Will we see adoption? Or does it just serve to re-assure the public that AI issues are being considered? What is the consequence of not following the guidance? I would hope to see soft enforcement through the exclusion of organisations that cannot show adherence to guidance from government or B2B collaborations.

Without any punitive measures, a cynic would say organizations have no motivation to implement the recommendations properly. An optimist might lean on the red team reports and hope for buy in on reporting flaws and issues, removing the ‘black box’ nature of AI which some executives have hid behind, and opening up these leaders to the court of public opinion if there is evidence they were aware of a flaw and did not take appropriate action, resulting in a compromise and/or data breach.

These guidelines are a step in the right direction. They pull together key AI stakeholders, from nation states and industry, and call for collaboration and consideration of the security of AI. Hopefully this is a continued theme, as we’ve seen with the United States AI executive order, and that AI systems are developed responsibly, without stifling innovation and adoption.

My personal opinion is that the real value we might see from such collaboration will be when we do see a large-scale AI compromise. Hopefully the involved parties are brave enough to lift the lid on what happened so everyone can learn how to be better prepared, and we can define further guidance (preferably as a requirement) beyond just secure build practices and a general monitoring requirement. But this is a good start.

Is it ground breaking? In my opinion, no. Security teams should already be looking to apply the principles outlined to any technological development. This has taken long standing DevSecOps principles and applied them to AI. I would expect it will have the most impact on startups entering the space, i.e. those without an existing level of security maturity.

*open source data sets, i.e. the internet, not OpenAI the company