Survey Surfaces Rise on Cyberattacks Fueled by AI
An annual survey of 1,021 cybersecurity and IT professionals finds the number of breaches increased 17% in the past year, with well over half (58%) now seeing a surge in ransomware attacks that appear to have been created using artificial intelligence (AI).
Conducted by the market research firm Vitreous World on behalf of Gigamon, a provider of a network observability and security, the survey also finds nearly half of respondents (47%) are also witnessing a rise in attacks targeting their organization’s large language model (LLM) deployments.
As a result, 46% of respondents said managing AI-generated threats is now their top security priority.
Finally, a third of respondents noted that network data volumes have more than doubled in the past two years due to AI workloads.
Chaim Mazal, chief security officer at Gigamon, said the survey makes it clear that the overall size of the attack surface that needs to be defended in the age of AI has increased considerably. The challenge is that many organizations are already struggling to manage complex hybrid IT environments, he added.
For example, 91% of respondents concede to making compromises in securing and managing their hybrid cloud infrastructure. The key challenges that create these compromises include the lack of clean, high-quality data (46%) and visibility across their environments, including lateral movement of east-west traffic (47%).
Workloads running in those hybrid IT environments are also more likely to be moved. A full 70% said their organization is actively considering repatriating data from public to private cloud due to security concerns, with an equal percentage now viewing the public cloud as a greater risk than any other environment. Well over half (54%) are reluctant to use AI in public cloud environments, citing fears around intellectual property protection.
More than half (55%) also said they lack confidence in their current tools’ ability to detect breaches. As a result, nearly two-thirds (64%) identified their number one focus for the next 12 months is to be able to monitor threats in real-time. A total of 89% also noted that deep observability has become fundamental to securing and managing hybrid cloud infrastructure, with 83% noting that deep observability is now being discussed at the board level to better protect hybrid cloud environments.
Overall, the survey makes it clear that as the overall size of the attack surface continues to expand, there is no substitute for a defense-in-depth approach to cybersecurity, especially as the amount of data being exposed across hybrid IT environments continues to exponentially increase in the age of AI.
Less clear is the degree to which adversaries are adopting AI to launch attacks that might go well beyond simple ransomware. In theory, at least, it’s now relatively trivial to use existing tools to discover vulnerabilities that an AI model can then be prompted to create a means to exploit. In effect, the amount of time between when a vulnerability is discovered and a way to exploit it is created has been sharply reduced.
The challenge now becomes how quickly organizations can not only remediate vulnerabilities before they are discovered, but also contain any breach within seconds of it actually being made.
