- Zscaler warns that the company’s AI systems can be broken in less than two hours
- AI adoption rises 91% annually, with massive enterprise data flowing into GenAI tools
- Researchers Call for AI-Powered Zero Trust Defenses Against Machine Speed Attacks
The risk of integrating AI tools into business processes without being fully aware of potential security issues may be far greater than anyone thinks, new research has claimed.
Zscaler found that many companies can be breached in less than two hours, and then – could lose their sensitive data in minutes.
“When enterprise AI systems are tested under real-world adversarial conditions, they break almost immediately,” the researchers said, noting how in controlled scans they were able to find critical vulnerabilities in under 90 minutes for the majority of systems tested (90%). The median time to first critical failure was 16 minutes, and in most extreme cases the defense was bypassed in a single second.
Autonomous attacks at machine speed
Despite the bleak outlook, artificial intelligence is being introduced into the enterprise at breakneck speed. AI and ML activity increased 91% year-over-year across an ecosystem of more than 3,400 applications.
Finance & Insurance remains the most AI-driven sector by volume, accounting for almost a quarter (23%) of all AI and ML traffic. Technology and education on the other hand exploded in spending, 202% and 184% respectively.
Enterprise data transfers for AI applications increased 93% year-over-year, hitting 18,033 terabytes.
The massive influx of data has turned tools like Grammarly (3,615 TB) and ChatGPT (2,021 TB) into “the world’s most concentrated repositories of business intelligence,” it said.
Yet the companies are not paying attention to security. Many organizations “lack a basic inventory of active AI models and embedded functions, leaving them unaware of exactly how sensitive data is exposed.”
“AI is no longer just a productivity tool, but a primary vector for machine-speed autonomous attacks from both crime and the nation state,” said Deepen Desai, EVP Cybersecurity at Zscaler.
“In the Age of Agentic AI, an intrusion can move from discovery to lateral movement to data theft in minutes, rendering traditional defenses obsolete. To win this race, organizations must fight AI with AI by implementing an intelligent Zero Trust architecture that closes down the potential paths of attackers of all kinds.”
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