Zero trust has been a stalwart of cyber security for some time. It’s the idea that, when it comes to your business’s security, you assume that everyone poses a threat until you can explicitly verify otherwise.
By expecting everyone to be a bad actor, you can attain optimal protection across your business network and assets. Everyone must go through a high-level of checks until they can get access, eliminating the risk of unauthorised persons getting in.
However, the cyber security landscape is changing rapidly. This is thanks to the explosion of AI, which brings new risk to organisations and an increasing likelihood of cyber attacks. Zero trust is now even more integral to safety.
As many businesses begin to consider their AI usage, or try to control staff using it, knowing how to protect yourself is key. By leveraging zero trust principals, you can minimise the threat through cyber security best practice.
In this guide, we explain how zero trust works in the AI-driven world, and how to protect your business.
Why do businesses need to be wary of AI?
There has been plenty of buzz around AI, good and bad. On the positive side, people praise its productivity benefits and the innovation it can deliver to businesses. On the bad side, people fear the risk it brings businesses and the ethical implications.
Both sides of the argument are true. When used correctly, AI can help businesses save significant time often lost on repetitive, mundane tasks. But, in the wrong hands, it can cause chaos.
Many cyber criminals are now employing AI to exacerbate their tactics. They can ask AI language models to help them strategise their approach, tailor their messaging to impersonate trusted individuals and drive the scale of their attacks. Using AI also makes attacks lower effort for them, meaning they’re likely to target more businesses like yours.
This means there is more risk facing your business as cyber attacks increase in frequency. Moreover, these attacks can be harder to recognise and intercept.
An additional threat that organisations need to be aware of is the risk of their data being leaked through AI. Some AI tools aren’t secured to your organisation, meaning the model can learn from your inputs and share them with other users.
If your staff share sensitive customer data or intellectual property, that means it could be shared with those outside your organisation. This leads to compliance issues, reputational damage, customer dissatisfaction and the potential loss of market share.
These dangers do not mean that you should outlaw AI completely. However, it does mean it needs to be used considerately and with adequate protections for your data. By doing so, you can ensure you continue to reap the rewards without falling victim to the risks.
Zero trust principles in the AI era
With mounting risks, zero trust can be a lifeline for businesses who want to embrace AI safely and responsibly. Fortunately, many zero trust principles apply in the AI era, provided you know how to implement them.
Principle of least privilege
In an AI-driven environment, the principle of least privilege dictates that AI systems should be granted only the minimum necessary permissions to perform their tasks. This involves:
- Granular access controls: Implementing fine-grained access controls to limit AI systems’ ability to access specific data or resources. This should involve classifying your data, so that highly sensitive information is labelled appropriately and kept out of the AI remit.
- Role-based access: Assigning specific roles to AI systems and granting them privileges based on those roles. This ensures that AI systems only have the authority they need to fulfil their assigned functions.
Continuous verification
Continuous verification is essential to ensure the security of AI-powered systems and monitor if it is only working as intended. This involves:
- Constant monitoring: Continuously monitoring the behaviour of AI systems to detect any anomalies or suspicious activity.
- Authentication of users and devices: Regularly authenticating users and devices accessing AI systems to prevent unauthorised access. Similarly, you should authenticate users across your business systems to ensure that bad actors do not seize control, especially if they’ve used AI to impersonate others.
- Behavioural analytics: Utilising behavioural analytics techniques to identify deviations from normal patterns and flag potential security risks.
- Machine learning: Employing machine learning algorithms to automatically detect and respond to threats, such as phishing attacks and malware. Tools like Copilot for Security can be particularly useful.
Micro-segmentation
Micro-segmentation involves dividing networks into smaller segments to limit the impact of potential breaches. In the context of AI, this can be achieved by separating critical data and applications from less sensitive ones can minimise the risk of compromise. From here, you can designate which segments can be accessed by AI and not.
This means your most sensitive data is kept safe, while any risk affecting one segments is isolated from others.
These segments should be consistently managed and reviewed to ensure they are up-to-date, and data kept in the right place.
Data-centric security
Data is the most precious asset a business has. Data-centric security focuses on protecting data itself, regardless of where it resides. Key strategies for this include:
- Encryption: Encrypting data both at rest and in transit to render it unreadable to unauthorised individuals.
- Data loss prevention: Implementing DLP solutions to prevent sensitive data from being accidentally or maliciously leaked.
By utilising these, you can keep your data protected against AI-related risks and beyond.
Extending zero trust further
With the risk increase stemming from AI, it’s crucial to extend zero trust across your entire network, not just AI systems.
This means implementing robust and consistent identity and access management, ensuring devices accessing the network are secure and compliant, setting strict access controls for all users and closely monitoring network traffic.
By having stronger cyber security practices in place, you can mitigate the threat of AI-powered cyber criminals.
Tips for implementing zero trust in your organisation
Knowing how to apply zero trust principles can be difficult, particularly against a backdrop of AI technologies and related risks. We’ve put together a list of tips to help you, but some of these can require dedicated knowledge or appropriate tools to implement.
If this isn’t something you have in-house, or you need support, we always recommend seeking guidance from skilled cyber security professionals. They will be able to help you navigate the AI landscape and implement appropriate protocols to offer maximum protection.
Here are our top tips for applying zero trust, even for AI-driven organisations:
Audit your security posture
The first step to applying zero trust is knowing where potential entry points are for cyber attackers. This will typically include all endpoints and network devices.
Spend time identifying these, alongside any core assets (including data assets) that could be susceptible to attack.
This will allow you to direct your efforts in the right places and prevent any gaps being left.
Develop a comprehensive zero trust strategy
Zero trust needs to be applied rigorously to be effective. By developing a zero trust strategy tailored to your business needs, you’ll give yourself rules to follow, creating consistency
This strategy should be documented and shared with all IT professionals so they can enact it properly.
Remember, your zero trust strategy should address any potential vulnerabilities within your security posture.
Align your AI initiatives
It is fundamental that every organisation has an AI policy. Not only does this allow you to introduce AI effectively into your business, it places specific guidelines on how you expect staff to use it. This can include areas where it’s strictly prohibited and best practice to follow.
By ensuring this policy aligns with your zero trust strategy, you can minimise the risk of someone leaking data to AI or creating weak points in your network perimeter.
Find secure AI tools
The best way to protect yourself against risk is to use secure AI tools that do not leak your data beyond your organisation.
Tools like Microsoft Copilot have specific security controls to keep data private to your organisation only. That means you can feel more confident connecting it to your data sources, which will also enable you to get more accurate outputs.
Classify your data
As we’ve already mentioned, classifying your data is key to determining what AI can and cannot use, and how. This enables you to keep sensitive customer data safely locked away from the risk of breaches.
Thorough labelling can also help you protect data internally, preventing private data (such as salary information) being shared to others within the organisation.
Invest in robust security infrastructure and tools
Proper network and device protection, alongside identify and access controls, are crucial to protecting your business against risk.
However, gaining this means investing in specific security software tools alongside the resource to manage them long-term.
While it can be tempting to avoid this expense, doing so will leave you vulnerable. Our cyber security checklist can help you find the right tools for your needs.
Prioritise employee training and awareness
Your staff are your first line of defence when it comes to any cyber attack. Unfortunately, they can also unwittingly expose your business to threats.
By spending time educating staff on basic cyber security risks, including how to sensibly use AI, you can improve their awareness and reduce the danger of them falling victim to cyber crime tactics.
Continuously monitor and adapt to evolving threats
Cyber criminals operate 24/7 and their approach is constantly evolving, especially as technology changes. You need to take a proactive stance to identify incoming threats and defend against them.
Constant monitoring, using cyber security software or a security operations centre, is crucial to this, particularly as AI boosts attack volume.
Can AI help implement zero trust?
While AI can be disastrous used in the wrong hands, it can also help businesses looking to level up their cyber security. In fact, the unique capabilities of AI place it well to identify and combat instances where AI is being used maliciously.
For years, cyber security tools have used AI to autonomously detect and ward off cyber threats. The recent explosion of AI in the public domain has led to AI-powered cyber security tools, like Copilot for Security.
Copilot for Security can help your business abide to many zero trust principles and cyber security best practice, including:
- Assessing the risk of each authentication request, factoring in user behaviour, device health and network conditions, to enforce stronger authentication measures when necessary.
- Analysing vast amounts of security data, including logs, network traffic and threat intelligence feeds, to identify anomalies and potential threats that traditional security tools might miss.
- Continuously scanning systems and applications for vulnerabilities, identifying and prioritising critical issues.
It is still relatively early days for the role of AI in cyber security provision, so there is still plenty to discover. It’s likely in the near future we may see tools that can automate more zero trust processes, including identify and access management, data encryption and classification.
As these developments happen, more businesses will fight fire with fire by leveraging AI tools against the rising tide of cyber attacks.
Find out more about how to tackle AI-powered cyber crime
AI is an innovation that can drive substantial progress for businesses, especially those facing stretched resource, difficulty analysing data and high levels of manual administration.
However, as more organisations explore their AI usage, it is crucial that they understand the risk and implement sensible controls.
Watch our on-demand webinar below to hear cyber security experts from Infinity Group and Microsoft share their insights on how AI is changing the cyber security landscape and how businesses can best arm themselves.
