“AI may represent the opportunity of the century for global businesses. But those rushing in too fast without taking adequate security precautions may end up causing more harm than good.”

Rachel Jin
Chief Enterprise Platform Officer
Trend Micro
.…on the cybersecurity company’s new State of AI Security Report.

Rachel Jin

Global cybersecurity leader Trend Micro—whose U.S. HQ is in Irving—is urging AI engineers and IT leaders to heed best practices in developing and deploying secure systems—warning that if they don’t, they’ll risk exposure to “data theft, poisoning, ransom, and other attacks.”

The company’s new State of AI Security Report details how network defenders and adversaries alike are using AI.

“As our report reveals, too much AI infrastructure is already being built from unsecured and/or unpatched components, creating an open door for threat actors,” Jin said in a statement.

The report highlights a number of AI-related security challenges, including vulnerabilities/exploits in critical components; accidental exposure to the internet; vulnerabilities in open-source components; and container-based weaknesses.

Trend Micro said that organizations wishing to develop, deploy, and use AI applications “must leverage multiple specialized software components and frameworks, which may contain vulnerabilities one may find in regular software.”

The report reveals zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits in core components including ChromaDB, Redis, NVIDIA Triton, and NVIDIA Container Toolkit.

“There are still lots of questions around AI models and how they could and should be used,” Stuart MacLellan, CTO, NHS SLAM, said in a statement. “We now get much more information now than we ever did about the visibility of devices and what applications are being used. It’s interesting to collate that data and get dynamic, risk-based alerts on people and what they’re doing depending on policies and processes. That’s going to really empower the decisions that are made organizationally around certain products.”

So what should the developer community and its customers do? Trend Micro said concrete steps could include:

Improved patch management and vulnerability scans
Maintaining an inventory of all software components, including third-party libraries and subsystems
Container management security best practices, including using minimal base images and runtime security tools
Configuration checks to ensure AI infrastructure components, like servers aren’t exposed to the internet

You can see Trend Micro’s full State of AI Security Report by going here.

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