AI Risk Area · 2 of 5

Privacy & Security

Free-tier AI tools retain and train on whatever you paste in. Shadow AI tools no one approved are running on browser tabs in your finance department. Prompt injection turns helpful assistants into data-exfiltration tools. The exposure is already there — most businesses just haven't found it yet.

Why This Matters

AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot process everything entered into them. Free-tier versions may retain that data and use it to train future models. Client PII, financial records, trade secrets, and confidential information pasted into these tools may be stored, leaked, or surfaced to other users — and once it's in a training set, it's not coming back.

AI systems also introduce new attack vectors traditional cybersecurity isn't built for. OWASP's 2025 LLM Top 10 ranks prompt injection as the #1 risk in deployed AI applications — including indirect prompt injection, where malicious instructions are hidden in documents or emails the AI processes for someone else. Shadow AI tools — adopted by individual employees without IT review — create unmanaged endpoints. AI-generated phishing has become indistinguishable from legitimate communication.

By The Numbers

Independent research consistently finds that AI usage at small and mid-size businesses runs ahead of policy by a wide margin.

67%

of enterprise AI usage happens via unmanaged personal accounts that bypass IT controls (LayerX)

68%

of employees use AI tools without disclosing it — even at companies that have banned them

8.5%

of analyzed AI prompts contained sensitive data — customer info, legal docs, or proprietary code

Prompt injection (incl. indirect) — OWASP 2025 LLM Top 10's top-ranked risk

What This Looks Like In Practice

Four patterns that show up in nearly every AI risk assessment we run.

Data Leakage

"I just pasted the client list into ChatGPT"

In April 2023, three separate Samsung semiconductor engineers leaked proprietary source code, internal meeting notes, and debug data into ChatGPT within 20 days of the company allowing it. Samsung banned generative AI company-wide. Apple, JPMorgan, Verizon, and Amazon followed within weeks. The data was never recalled — there is no recall button.

Shadow AI

AI extensions IT never approved

"AI assistants" installed as browser extensions, Outlook plugins, or Teams apps frequently request access to mailboxes, calendars, and shared drives. Employees click through. The data flows out without IT ever seeing it.

Prompt Injection

Hidden instructions in the documents you summarize

EchoLeak (CVE-2025-32711) demonstrated this in 2025: a single poisoned email could coerce GPT-4o's web-browsing into exfiltrating SSH keys with up to 80% reliability and zero user interaction. A separate financial-services firm disclosed roughly $250,000 in losses to indirect prompt injection embedded in routine customer documents.

AI Phishing

Spelling errors are gone — and so is your detection edge

"If something looks weird in the email, don't click" no longer protects anyone. AI-written phishing has perfect grammar, your CEO's writing style, and references to projects scraped from LinkedIn. The defense has to move from training to controls.

The Structural Fix

Local AI Solves Most Of This By Construction.

Data leakage, vendor terms-of-service ambiguity, training-set contamination, prompt injection from external content — these are problems that exist because the model is owned by someone else, in a building you don't control, processing data that left your network.

When the model is sitting in your server room, none of that is true. The data never leaves. There is no third-party training set. There is no terms-of-service that could change next quarter.

See How Local AI Works →

Local AI Closes

✓Data leakage to vendor training sets
✓Cross-tenant exposure in shared cloud models
✓Vendor breach notification dependencies
✓HIPAA / SOC 2 BAA negotiation overhead
✓External prompt injection from internet content

How We Help

We come in, find the exposure, and put controls between your data and other people's models.

Shadow AI Discovery

A network & endpoint sweep that catalogs every AI tool, browser extension, and OAuth grant talking to an AI vendor — sanctioned or not.

Sanctioned Tooling

A short list of approved AI tools — paid tiers with no-train clauses, BAAs in place, SSO-controlled — replacing the free-tier free-for-all.

AI Acceptable Use Policy

A written policy your team will actually read — what is and isn't OK to put into AI tools, with examples that come from your industry, not a generic template.

DLP & Egress Controls

Data-loss-prevention rules at the browser, endpoint, and email gateway that stop sensitive data from leaving for unsanctioned AI endpoints — without breaking the legitimate workflows.

AI-Powered Email Defense

Modern, AI-assisted email security that catches AI-written phishing — because the only thing that reliably catches AI is AI. Old keyword filters are not coming back.

Local AI As The Endgame

For the workflows that warrant it — anything touching PHI, IP, or regulated data — we move the inference in-house. The whole class of risk goes away. More →

Sources Cited On This Page

Find Out Where Your Data Has Already Gone.

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