Secure AI At Machine Speed: Defending The Growing Attack Surface
CrowdStrike, Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025
As AI becomes embedded across the enterprise - from customer-facing tools to backend automation - it dramatically expands the enterprise attack surface. Models, agents, apps, and data pipelines now span public and private clouds, SaaS, and edge environments, creating a sprawling, opaque risk landscape.
Adversaries increasingly exploit this expanded attack surface by treating AI tools as primary targets. Attackers also strike the infrastructure supporting AI development - APIs, serialized models, and dependencies - and exploit trusted AI integrations as initial access points. Additionally, advanced actors manipulate AI models and data through poisoning and prompt injection, while targeting vector stores, RAG pipelines, and inference APIs to leak or alter sensitive content.