Artificial intelligence (AI) is hot. New SaaS AI programs appear every day, companies are embracing new AI solutions, and individual consumers use AI for everything from homework help to creating diet plans.
However, as useful as AI seems to be, it brings with it a number of security issues—for individuals, corporations, and data centers alike. You may have heard stories of unscrupulous developers training AI with stolen user data, for example, or AI algorithms scraping personal images and private conversations. It has also become a regular occurrence for employees to accidentally leak company secrets by asking AI models to proofread emails, fix broken code, or analyze documents.
People are more aware of these kinds of security breaches because they’re publicized frequently and so egregious. Many people, however, are unaware of the dangers AI poses to data centers.
Your data center is a target for operational risks if it runs AI applications for clients, uses machine-learning algorithms to analyze data, or employs AI in any strategy, planning, or management capacity. The full list of AI data center security risks is innumerable, but there are six common ones to be aware of.
1. Data Poisoning
Regardless of how robust or sophisticated an AI algorithm is or how much money and research have been poured into its development, an AI model is only as good as the data it is fed. In other words, a very complex and intuitive algorithm can be developed, but if faulty data is given to it, the algorithm will produce incorrect results.
Sometimes, these “bad” data sets are the result of accidents. If a large language model scrapes data from an inaccurate source, such as an internet forum where people fervently believe that the earth is flat, it will absorb that false knowledge repeatedly until the algorithm judges it to be fact.
However, bad data sets are often the result of deliberate data poisoning attacks. Data poisoning happens when malicious actors contaminate data with biased, misleading, or intentionally dishonest information, with the goal of training the AI model to return these incorrect “facts” to users who may be none the wiser.
To continue our simplistic example, an attacker would introduce overwhelming evidence to the AI algorithm that the earth is flat, and a user who receives results from that AI might not know any better. They’ll read the AI’s explanation for why the earth is flat, accept that information, incorporate it into their belief system, and then repeat it to others. Data poisoning, in this way, can be a very subtle and dangerous method of sabotage.
Our example is simple, but data poisoning is frequently quite sophisticated and hard to detect. Sometimes, in addition to feeding bad data into the algorithm, attackers will teach the AI model to change the way it analyzes information and makes decisions. Regardless of whether attackers use one or both methods, the result is the same: skewed, corrupted, or even entirely falsified outputs.
Data poisoning attacks can have devastating consequences. A data poisoning attack can be expensive. Corrupted data needs to be repaired and cybersecurity needs to be significantly increased. Additionally, once consumer trust is broken, it is often difficult or impossible to regain it. Just one successful poisoning attack can sully the reputation of an organization so dramatically that it never recovers. Finally, it’s usually necessary to shut down operations entirely for a time until the problem is fixed. This can mean days, weeks, or months of lost revenue and the departure of customers who leave and never return.
2. Infrastructure Vulnerabilities
AI systems are built on a stack of three types of infrastructure.
The first tier is foundational infrastructure. This includes hardware, the software that runs on that hardware, and any cloud computing services that run adjacent to or within native software.
The next tier is the model layer, which typically consists of general, specific, and hyperlocal AI models. This tier handles the “thinking” process of AI.
The third infrastructure tier is the applications layer. This layer helps humans interact with the AI model in a way that makes sense to both parties. Applications provide the interface for humans to communicate with computer algorithms, and vice versa.
An AI model can’t be built, trained, or deployed without all three layers. Each infrastructure layer has its own unique security vulnerabilities.
The foundational layer is vulnerable to the same type of attacks people might see on a home computer system but on a much larger scale. Data breaches are one such problem.
The model layer is vulnerable to attacks where hackers try to break in and steal code, sensitive data, or entire AI models. Attackers may also modify the models on this layer to change the way they compute data or corrupt their decision-making processes.
Applications on the last layer are vulnerable to attacks to exploit the system for malicious purposes. Attackers might, for example, try to manipulate the way the AI prompts users for inputs, which can introduce any number of problems.
3. Data Breaches
On the inverse side of data poisoning, where attackers try to inject bad information into a data set, are data breaches. Rather than trying to add data, data breach attackers are typically trying to access and steal sensitive information for their own use.
What the attacker does after successfully stealing data can vary. Identity fraud and financial theft are common. Personal and sensitive data might be used for corporate or high-profile individual blackmail and extortion. The most sophisticated teams may use this data to build copycat versions of successful AI models.
As with data poisoning, data breaches can ruin organizations. Customers lose trust, costly cybersecurity measures must be implemented, and operations shut down while security is fortified.
4. Manipulated Results
Malicious actors have numerous ways to manipulate AI outputs. Data poisoning is a prime example, but it’s not the only method in common use.
Sometimes, all a hacker needs to do is identify a weakness in the way a particular algorithm crunches data and exploit that vulnerability many times over. Add enough manipulated data into the algorithm, and eventually the AI will start to output inaccurate results.
However, a malicious attacker need not exist at all. With the overarching popularity of AI, current models frequently output false information as fact or make up claims that defy reality.
These errors can happen because of inconsistencies or imperfections in the development of the AI model. For example, when an AI system becomes more concerned with achieving rewards rather than providing useful information, it “learns” that it can manipulate the system to get the reward without actually having to correctly answer the question or perform the task the user prompted.
Other times, an AI model interprets subtle clues from user inputs and generates wildly different answers to questions that should have similar answers. One particularly harmful example is a user asking what makes AI systems vulnerable to attack—perhaps with the good intentions of implementing a more robust cybersecurity system—and instead receives step-by-step instructions on how to hack AI systems.
5. Resource Overload
A problem many data centers are familiar with is the intense resource drain that AI applications have. AI consumes a lot of electricity and computational power. Data centers are continually having to ensure that cooling systems are up to the considerable challenge of keeping hardware running optimally and avoiding outages and downtime.
6. Legal and Regulatory Compliance Issues
Because AI algorithms process a vast amount of data—personal, enterprise, and sometimes even classified—legal and regulatory organizations enforce strict compliance requirements on data centers that plan to use AI.
The penalty for non-compliance often includes hefty fines, reputational damage, and sometimes even the disruption of services.
What should data centers do to mitigate these risks?
The following pillars should be in place:
- Prioritize cybersecurity. Implement data encryption, access controls, network upgrades, and constant monitoring of algorithms and data sets.
- Plan for scalability. Power, cooling, and security needs will snowball with added AI applications.
- Know and understand ethical and legal guidelines. If data centers operate within compliance regulations and adhere to established ethical uses of user data, they can avoid many legal pitfalls.
While data center managers can’t plan for every possible operational risk, careful planning can address the most common ones.