Zscaler Inc. has launched its inaugural “ThreatLabz 2024 AI Safety Report,” and the outcomes doc explosive progress in synthetic intelligence, a concurrent rise in blocked AI visitors and a rising menace panorama as unhealthy actors more and more leverage the expertise.
The report drew from over 18 billion transactions within the Zscaler Zero Belief Alternate between April 2023 and January 2024. The report’s findings spotlight the necessity for enterprises to securely allow AI as international adoption continues to rise.
“It’s a transformative time for cybersecurity as a complete,” stated Deepen Desai, chief safety officer of Zscaler. “With the appearance of generative AI, there’s a large alternative the place it involves making use of each generative and predictive fashions in remodeling how safety operations are completed. We additionally should be cautious of the truth that the unhealthy guys are additionally going to be leveraging this and concentrating on your group. It’s already occurring.”
Desai spoke with Shelly Kramer, managing director and principal analyst with theCUBE Analysis, about key findings from the Zscaler evaluation.
Report from Zscaler notes progress in utilization and blockage
Zscaler’s report discovered explosive AI progress, with enterprise AI/machine studying transactions surging 595% over the past three quarters in 2023.
“The information makes it very clear that AI is not simply an modern factor, it’s truly beginning to grow to be enterprise as regular,” Desai stated. “It’s throughout a number of totally different industries the place we’re seeing this adoption. That pattern will proceed as extra organizations undertake these purposes.”
The report additionally famous that though AI utilization has accelerated dramatically, enterprises are blocking 18.5% of all AI transactions, a rise of 577%. This rise in blocked transactions displays concern round unsanctioned or “shadow” AI use inside a company.
“That’s a pure response when there are numerous unknowns round new expertise and the dangers that it brings,” Desai stated. “You’ll begin with that large hammer method and as you perceive extra, you’ll be able to open issues up.”
The report’s outcomes highlighted an rising AI menace panorama as malicious actors search to leverage the expertise. This consists of AI-driven phishing campaigns, social engineering assaults and the usage of more and more extra refined deepfake instruments, based on Desai.
“As you allow organizations to undertake AI securely, it’s nonetheless including to your assault floor,” he defined. “You see very, very persuasive phishing pages, phishing emails being crafted utilizing AI. You’ll want to have zero belief. It’s solely going to maintain getting worse.”
Actually, Desai requested Zscaler’s safety analysis arm, ThreatLabz, to simulate an assault utilizing ChatGPT.
“With cautious immediate engineering, they have been in a position to have it [generate] phishing e-mail, phishing pages that appeared similar to the true pages on the market,” Desai stated. “There are various extra [variants] that preserve popping up which are already accessible as a service for the unhealthy guys to make use of.”
What can enterprises do within the face of rising AI use and an elevated menace panorama? Desai advises a course of that screens AI purposes and carefully examines the safety posture of personal giant language mannequin environments.
“Insurance policies and efficient management would be the distinction between doing this factor the fitting means versus the unsuitable means,” Desai stated. “Most organizations are engaged on some form of non-public LLM infrastructure. It’s a must to have a plan in place to guard that atmosphere. That is the place we’re going to see extra adversarial assaults occurring.”
Right here is the entire video interview, and make sure you try extra of theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations:
Picture: Getty Pictures
Your vote of assist is necessary to us and it helps us preserve the content material FREE.
One click on beneath helps our mission to supply free, deep, and related content material.
Be part of the group that features greater than 15,000 #CubeAlumni specialists, together with Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Applied sciences founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and plenty of extra luminaries and specialists.
“TheCUBE is a vital associate to the business. You guys actually are part of our occasions and we actually respect you coming and I do know folks respect the content material you create as effectively” – Andy Jassy
