How to Avoid Your First Devastating AI Data Breach

Discover why the widespread use of gen AI copilots will inevitably lead to more data breaches

Picture this: a competitor suddenly accesses sensitive account information and uses it to target your organization’s customers with ad campaigns. You’re left scratching your head, wondering how this happened. It’s a cybersecurity nightmare that could shatter your customers’ confidence and trust.

Upon investigation, your company discovers the culprit: a former employee who used a gen AI copilot to access an internal database full of account data. They copied sensitive details, like customer spending habits and products purchased, and took them to a competitor.

This incident sheds light on a growing concern: the broad use of gen AI copilots will inevitably increase data breaches.

According to a recent Gartner survey, the most common AI use cases involve generative AI-based applications, like Microsoft 365 Copilot and Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot. While these tools can boost productivity, they also present significant data security challenges.

In this article, let’s dive into these challenges and learn how to protect your data in the era of gen AI.

The data risk of gen AI

Did you know that nearly 99% of permissions are unused, and over half of those permissions are high-risk? Unused and overly permissive data access has always been a problem for data security, but gen AI adds fuel to the fire.

When a user asks a gen AI copilot a question, the tool generates a natural-language answer based on internet and business content through graph technology.

Since users often have overly permissive data access, the copilot can easily expose sensitive data — even if the user didn’t realize they could access it.

Many organizations don’t even know what sensitive data they possess, and manually right-sizing access is nearly impossible.

Gen AI makes data breaches easier

Bad actors no longer need hacking skills or intricate knowledge of your environment. They can simply ask a copilot for sensitive information or credentials, enabling them to move laterally within your systems.

Security challenges of enabling gen AI tools include:

• Employees having access to too much data
• Sensitive data often being unlabeled or mislabeled
• Insiders quickly finding and exfiltrating data using natural language
• Attackers discovering secrets for privilege escalation and lateral movement
• Manual right-sizing of access being impossible
• Generative AI rapidly creating new sensitive data

While these data security challenges aren’t new, they become highly exploitable due to the speed and ease with which gen AI surfaces information.

How to prevent your first AI breach

The first step in mitigating gen AI risks is to ensure your house is in order. Don’t let copilots run wild in your organization if you’re not confident that you know where your sensitive data is, can analyze exposure and risks, and can efficiently close security gaps and fix misconfigurations.

Once you’ve got a handle on data security and implemented the right processes, you’re ready to roll out a copilot. Focus on permissions, labels, and human activity:

• Permissions: Make sure your users’ permissions are right-sized, and the copilot’s access reflects those permissions.
• Labels: Once you understand what sensitive data you have, apply labels to enforce DLP (data loss prevention).
• Human activity: Monitor how employees use the copilot and review any detected suspicious behavior. Keeping an eye on prompts and the files users access is crucial to prevent exploited copilots.

Addressing these three data security areas isn’t easy and can’t be done with manual effort alone. Few organizations can safely adopt gen AI copilots without a holistic approach to data security and specific controls for the copilots themselves.

Stop AI breaches with our help

Our IT Services help customers worldwide protect what matters most: their data. We’ve applied our deep expertise to safeguard organizations planning to implement generative AI.

If you’re just starting your gen AI journey, begin with our free Data Risk Assessment. In less than 24 hours, you’ll have a real-time view of your sensitive data risk to determine whether you can safely adopt a gen AI copilot.

To learn more, explore our AI security resources.

Sponsored and written by Varonis.