What if your staff’s AI chats are hacked? Microsoft's breach warns of a new corporate risk

The rise of generative AI has changed how we work, live, and create. For many employees, tools like ChatGPT and Copilot have become go-to assistants for everything from drafting emails and summarising reports to brainstorming creative ideas.

This widespread adoption is an undeniable productivity boon, but it also creates a new and often-overlooked cybersecurity risk – one that exists in the ‘unsupervised’ digital lives of our employees.

Organisations have spent years building firewalls, robust endpoint detection, and strong security policies to protect corporate networks. But what happens when the threat isn't on the network at all? What if it’s lurking in the digital exhaust of an employee’s personal AI chats, waiting to be exploited?

The recent breach at Microsoft, a leading provider of these very tools, serves as a powerful reminder that even the most robust digital ecosystems are not invulnerable, and a compromise at this level can expose a vast amount of seemingly benign data to malicious actors – perhaps even the treasure trove of personal AI data.

The unseen risk of digital exhaust

The core of this emerging potential threat lies in the subtle, continuous stream of data that employees share with generative AI tools for personal, non-work tasks.

They may ask an AI to help plan a family holiday, summarise a personal document, or even generate a social media post – many are even, disconcertingly, starting to use AI as therapists. 

Each of these interactions, while seemingly innocuous, adds a fragment of information to a larger digital profile. Over time, these fragments – including personal interests, communication styles, and even details about their routines – accumulate. This is the “digital exhaust” of personal AI use.

Traditional corporate security measures are blind to this. They are not designed to monitor an employee’s personal laptop or phone, nor should they be. This creates a significant blind spot for organisations that only specialised cybersecurity providers can help fix. Cybercriminals, however, see a goldmine – even though they’re probably still only in the prospecting phase.

If they got access to this treasure trove, they could leverage the aggregated personal data, maybe through a breach at a major AI provider, to craft hyper-effective and deeply personalised social engineering attacks.

From personal prompts to corporate vulnerability

The problem isn't just about an employee accidentally inputting a company secret into ChatGPT. That’s a known risk. An attacker who succeeds in scraping an employee’s personal AI chats could learn that they are planning a holiday to Cape Town next month, have a child who attends a specific school, and are frustrated with a particular internal software system, or even their state of mind.

When combined with other publicly available information from social media or professional networks, this level of advanced profiling can become even more comprehensive and convincing to unparalleled degrees.

This detailed insight can then be used in several ways:

• Hyper-personalised phishing: An attacker could send a phishing email disguised as a travel agency reaching out about the employee’s upcoming trip to Cape Town, with a malicious attachment or a fake login page.
• Targeted social engineering: The attacker could impersonate the employee in a message to a colleague or manager, referencing their recent frustration with the internal software to build rapport and trust before making a malicious, socially engineered, request.
• Weakening the human firewall: By understanding an employee’s personal life, struggles and interests, an attacker can more effectively bypass their critical thinking and exploit emotional triggers to get what they want – not to mention the blackmailing possibilities.

The Microsoft breach as a catalyst for caution

The hack at Microsoft is but the latest example of how the game is changing, because it proves the risk of compromised AI databases isn't hypothetical. It underscores that even the most well-resourced technology companies with good reputations for security can be breached. 

If a major provider of generative AI tools can be compromised, it means that the vast repository of personal and professional data that users have entrusted to these platforms could potentially also be exposed. This data can then be used or even sold on cybercriminal marketplaces, to fuel a new wave of highly sophisticated, AI-driven attacks.

The vulnerabilities exploited in the Microsoft attack are the type that need to be fortified, but by not resting on our laurels, these hatches can and have been battened down. It’s long been a race to innovate faster than malicious actors; now it’s also about staying so far ahead that you buy time for more solutions to be developed.

For organisations, this means cybersecurity can no longer be contained within office walls. A holistic security posture must now encompass the wider digital footprint of employees – one that even covers digital exhausts.

Strategic mitigation in the new era

So, what can organisations do to manage these cyber blind spots?

First, the solution is not to ban AI tools, but to provide clarity and education. Develop clear internal guidelines and policies for both professional and personal AI use. These policies should emphasise what information should never be shared, even informally.

Second, enhance employee training. Security awareness training needs to evolve beyond simply spotting malicious URLs. It must now include a focus on data privacy and the risks of personal data aggregation, teaching employees to be mindful of the digital exhaust they generate.

Finally, while traditional tools may not see this risk, advanced threat intelligence and analytics can help detect anomalies that might signal a compromise of defences, including those that could stem from AI-attacks leveraging digital exhausts. This means a focus on a "security by design" approach that considers all potential data exposure points, including external ones.

The battle for cybersecurity has shifted – again. It isn’t centered around securing a network; it is about building a culture of digital mindfulness that empowers employees to protect not only themselves, but also the organisations they serve in a world where AI is the ultimate collaborator for both good and ill.

Richard Ford, CTO at Integrity360.

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