How to Prevent Your First AI Data Breach

How to Prevent Your First AI Data Breach

August 13, 2024 at 10:17AM

The broad use of gen AI copilots poses a growing risk of data breaches. These tools can access and expose sensitive data, leading to security challenges such as unauthorized access, data exfiltration, and increased vulnerabilities. To mitigate these risks, organizations must focus on right-sizing permissions, labeling sensitive data, and monitoring employee activity. Varonis offers solutions to protect against AI breaches. For a real-time view of data risk, they provide a free Data Risk Assessment.

After reviewing the meeting notes, the key takeaways regarding the use of gen AI copilots and the potential increase in data breaches are:

1. The broad use of gen AI copilots, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot and Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot, presents significant data security challenges and may lead to an increase in data breaches.

2. Gen AI tools can easily surface sensitive data, especially when users have overly permissive data access, and it can lower the bar for potential data breaches.

3. Security challenges associated with enabling gen AI tools include employees having access to excessive data, mislabeled or unlabeled sensitive data, the potential for insiders to exfiltrate data using natural language, and the difficulty in right-sizing access manually.

4. The first step in mitigating the risks associated with gen AI is to ensure that organizations have a comprehensive understanding of their sensitive data, have analyzed exposure and risks, and have the necessary processes and controls in place to secure their environment.

5. Varonis offers expertise and solutions to help organizations protect their data, including providing a Data Risk Assessment to determine the readiness for adopting gen AI copilots and offering AI security resources.

In summary, the focus is on understanding and managing sensitive data, ensuring proper permissions and labels, monitoring human activity, and adopting a holistic approach to data security to prevent potential AI breaches when implementing gen AI copilots.

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