1.1 ยท The AI Threat Landscape
Why Traditional Security Misses AI Threats
โฑ 10 minCourse 01
Most organisations assume their existing security posture extends to AI. It doesn't โ and the gap is significant.
What Your Security Stack Can't See
Consider what conventional enterprise security tools actually protect:
- โSIEM tools monitor network traffic and log events โ they can't detect a model returning biased outputs
- โEDR solutions watch for malicious processes โ they can't see a poisoned training batch
- โWAFs block known attack signatures โ they don't recognise adversarial examples designed to fool vision models
- โDLP tools watch for data exfiltration patterns โ they miss model inversion attacks that reconstruct training data
The Core Problem
AI threats often look like normal usage. An adversarial input that causes a fraud model to approve a fraudulent transaction looks identical to a legitimate transaction request from a network perspective. The attack lives in the semantics, not the syntax.
Building AI-Aware Security
Effective AI security requires a different set of controls โ layered on top of, not instead of, your existing stack:
- โInput monitoring โ Statistical analysis of inputs to detect distributional anomalies
- โOutput validation โ Sanity checks on model outputs before they affect decisions
- โModel performance tracking โ Continuous monitoring for accuracy degradation
- โAccess control on training pipelines โ Treating training data like production credentials
- โModel versioning and rollback โ The ability to revert to a previous model state quickly
โ Learning Outcome
You can now distinguish AI-specific threats from conventional cybersecurity risks, and identify the gaps in a standard enterprise security stack when applied to AI systems.
