attack
What It Means
An attack on an AI system is when someone deliberately tries to break, fool, or misuse your AI models or the data they rely on. This could mean feeding bad data to throw off predictions, stealing your training data, or manipulating the AI to produce wrong or harmful outputs. Unlike random system failures, these are intentional attempts to compromise your AI's reliability or security.
Why Chief AI Officers Care
AI attacks can destroy customer trust, expose sensitive data, and lead to costly business decisions based on manipulated results. They also create significant regulatory and legal risks, especially in industries like healthcare or finance where AI decisions directly impact people's lives. Unlike traditional cybersecurity threats, AI attacks can be subtle and hard to detect, potentially causing damage for months before being discovered.
Real-World Example
A financial services company's fraud detection AI starts flagging legitimate transactions as fraudulent after attackers deliberately fed it poisoned training data during a model update. Customer complaints surge, legitimate transactions are blocked, and the bank faces regulatory scrutiny while spending weeks retraining the model with clean data.
Common Confusion
People often think AI attacks only happen during the initial training phase, but attackers can target AI systems at any point - during data collection, model deployment, or even after the system is running in production. Many also assume traditional cybersecurity measures are sufficient, when AI systems need specialized protection strategies.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare AI, attacks pose critical patient safety and privacy risks, such as adversarial inputs designed to cause d...
Finance: In finance, AI attacks commonly target fraud detection systems through adversarial examples that manipulate transaction ...
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Includes:
- 6 industry-specific applications
- Relevant regulations by sector
- Real compliance scenarios
- Implementation guidance
Technical Definitions
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
"Action targeting a learning system to cause malfunction. "Source: NISTIR_8269_Draft
"Any kind of malicious activity that attempts to collect, disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy information system resources or the information itself."Source: CSRC
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