Defending Against the 11 Deadly Threats to AI Security: How CISOs are Fighting Back

How AI-Enabled Attacks are Changing Enterprise Security

Enterprise security teams are facing new challenges as AI-enabled attacks become more prevalent. The threat model has shifted, making it difficult for traditional security measures to keep up. Attackers are exploiting weaknesses in runtime environments, where breakout times are measured in seconds and patch windows in hours.

CrowdStrike’s 2025 Global Threat Report highlights the rapid pace of attacks, with breakout times as fast as 51 seconds. This means that attackers can move from initial access to lateral movement before security teams even have a chance to respond. The report also notes that 79% of detections are malware-free, as adversaries use techniques that bypass traditional endpoint defenses.

The Rapid Evolution of AI-Enabled Threats

Mike Riemer, a field CISO at Ivanti, has witnessed how AI has accelerated the weaponization of vulnerabilities. Threat actors can now reverse-engineer patches within 72 hours, leaving organizations vulnerable if they don’t patch quickly. The speed of attacks has been greatly enhanced by AI, forcing security teams to adapt rapidly.

Traditional security measures are struggling to keep up with the evolving threat landscape. While security teams have become adept at blocking known threats like SQL injections, new attack methods are semantic rather than syntactic. This means that attacks can cloak themselves and evade detection, posing a significant challenge to defenders.

Challenges Faced by CISOs in the AI Era

Gartner’s research indicates that businesses are increasingly adopting generative AI, regardless of security concerns. This poses a dilemma for CISOs, as they must balance the need for innovation with the imperative to secure their systems. Threat actors are leveraging AI to launch sophisticated attacks, putting defenders at a significant disadvantage.

As AI continues to advance, CISOs must consider how to incorporate AI into their defense strategies. AI can be used not only for threat detection, such as deepfake detection, but also for identity management. By leveraging AI, organizations can better identify and respond to emerging threats.

Addressing New Attack Vectors

The OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2025 highlights eleven attack vectors that bypass traditional security controls. These vectors, such as direct prompt injection and camouflage attacks, require a new approach to defense. Security leaders and AI builders must understand the mechanics of these attacks and implement countermeasures accordingly.

1. Direct prompt injection: Models can be manipulated to prioritize user commands over safety training, leading to successful attacks.
2. Camouflage attacks: Attackers embed harmful requests within benign conversations to evade detection.
3. Multi-turn crescendo attacks: Distributing payloads across multiple turns can defeat single-turn protections.
4. Indirect prompt injection (RAG poisoning): This attack strategy targets RAG architectures and is difficult to stop.
5. Obfuscation attacks: Malicious instructions can be encoded to bypass filters while remaining interpretable to the model.

Deployment Priorities for CISOs

Gartner predicts that a significant percentage of enterprise breaches will be the result of AI agent abuse in the coming years. CISOs must act now to strengthen their defenses against AI-enabled attacks. Five key deployment priorities emerge from these new threats:

1. Automate patch deployment: Autonomous patching is essential to respond to vulnerabilities quickly.
2. Deploy normalization layers first: Decode malicious instructions before analysis to prevent successful attacks.
3. Implement stateful context tracking: Detect and prevent multi-turn attacks by tracking conversation history.
4. Enforce RAG instruction hierarchy: Wrap data in delimiters to control how it is interpreted by the model.
5. Propagate identity into prompts: Inject user metadata to provide context for authorization.

It’s crucial for organizations to adopt a zero-trust approach to security, especially in the face of evolving AI-enabled threats. By staying vigilant and implementing proactive defense measures, CISOs can protect their organizations from becoming the next cautionary tale in the rapidly changing cybersecurity landscape.