Exploiting enterprise AI
As enterprises connect AI agents to corporate data, applications, and identity systems, these tools are becoming another potential attack surface. Semperis found that 44% of respondents experienced attacks involving the manipulation of their own AI agents or systems.
Courtney Guss, Semperis AVP of Crisis Management, said that if a company is adopting AI agents, one should consider that at some point, those agents will try to compromise identity systems, even if that action isn’t meant to be malicious. She added, “AI agents typically try to accomplish their assigned tasks by any means they can. One way they can gain more ability to operate in the environment is by getting permissions to other systems. The fastest path to get those permissions is to compromise your identity system, which effectively puts the agent into ‘god mode,’ enabling it to grant itself whichever permissions it needs to accomplish its task. Unfortunately, the agent then becomes a ticking time bomb.”
Dhar noted that AI can be used by attackers to speed up the processes of reconnaissance, personalize social engineering, and accelerate the processing of information. Besides, weakly secured AI agents are another entry point for hackers into systems. In most cases, AI serves as an accelerating tool but does not stand alone behind attacks. While organizations increase their capabilities for restoring encrypted data, attackers continue to become even more aggressive in exploiting weaknesses of people and organizations.
