1.1 ยท The AI Threat Landscape

Why Traditional Security Misses AI Threats

โฑ 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:

  • โ—†SIEM tools monitor network traffic and log events โ€” they can't detect a model returning biased outputs
  • โ—†EDR solutions watch for malicious processes โ€” they can't see a poisoned training batch
  • โ—†WAFs block known attack signatures โ€” they don't recognise adversarial examples designed to fool vision models
  • โ—†DLP 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:

  • โ—†Input monitoring โ€” Statistical analysis of inputs to detect distributional anomalies
  • โ—†Output validation โ€” Sanity checks on model outputs before they affect decisions
  • โ—†Model performance tracking โ€” Continuous monitoring for accuracy degradation
  • โ—†Access control on training pipelines โ€” Treating training data like production credentials
  • โ—†Model versioning and rollback โ€” The ability to revert to a previous model state quickly
โœ“ 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.