Accelerated Innovation

Identifying and Assessing GenAI-Related Threats

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Identifying and Assessing GenAI-Related Threats

Description

This capability focuses on proactively identifying, evaluating, and prioritizing the threats specific to GenAI systems. It includes building awareness of emerging threat types, applying GenAI-relevant threat modeling techniques, and embedding them into development workflows.

Why it's Important

As GenAI systems become embedded in critical workflows and customer experiences, they introduce new and evolving security risks-ranging from model manipulation and data leakage to prompt injection and emergent behaviors. Traditional threat modeling practices often fall short in identifying these AI-specific risks early enough. Without a clear approach to identifying and assessing GenAI threats, organizations face increased exposure to operational, reputational, and regulatory harm. Maturing this capability enables teams to better understand their attack surfaces, align security efforts to real risks, and ensure safer, more reliable GenAI solutions.

Why it's Challenging @ Scale

  • Lack of AI-specific frameworks: Traditional threat modeling approaches often miss the unique attack surfaces and behaviors of GenAI systems.
  • Difficulty adapting tooling: Most security tools are not designed to detect issues like hallucinations, emergent behaviors, or prompt injection.
  • Siloed responsibilities: Security and product teams often work in isolation, making it difficult to embed threat modeling into GenAI development workflows.
  • Rapidly evolving threat landscape: New GenAI-specific risks emerge frequently, requiring teams to constantly update threat libraries and methodologies.
  • Limited institutional knowledge: Many teams lack experience identifying and assessing GenAI-related risks, slowing adoption of proactive practices.

Complexity

High: Maturing this capability requires cross-functional alignment, new threat modeling expertise, and integration of GenAI-aware practices into fast-paced development environments.

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Taking Action

Though most organizations begin their GenAI journey with significant knowledge gaps, there are targeted actions that can be taken to accelerate the process. Select your group’s current maturity, based on your assessment results, and act today.

The most important part of any journey is starting… To move from “Exploring” to “Experimenting”, focus on the following key actions:
  • Explore Key Concepts & Best Practices: Complete the Securing Your GenAI Solution workshop (2 hrs.) to understand foundational key concepts and explore applied best practices.
  • Introducing GenAI Threat Models and Security Posture
  • Understanding Attack Surfaces in GenAI Workflows
  • Establishing Basic Security Principles for LLMs
  • Identifying Security Stakeholders and Roles
  • Aligning Security with Compliance Requirements
  • Define Your Action Plan: Outline concrete, prioritized steps your organization will take to implement GenAI Strategy.
  • Align on your Current State and define your Target State
  • Create an actionable enablement plan
  • Define target timeline and measures of success
  • Deliver Quick Wins: Small, high-impact GenAI projects that can demonstrate tangible value in a short time frame.
  • Threat Modeling Sprint Pilot: Conduct a lightweight threat modeling exercise for a high-visibility GenAI feature.
  • Attack Surface Mapping Workshop: Facilitate a cross-functional session to map GenAI-specific risks and dependencies.
  • Security Roles & Responsibility Matrix: Define initial ownership and accountability for GenAI threat detection and mitigation.
To move from Experimentation to “Lifting-Off”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Complete one or more of our Deep Dive Courses: Begin exploring key concepts and best practices, including:
  • A Deep Dive into GenAi Solution Threat Modeling
  • A Deep Dive into Enterprise Access Control for GenAI Solutions
  • A Deep Dive into Preventing Prompt Injection Attacks
  • A Deep Dive into Preventing Insecure Output Handling
  • A Deep Dive into Preventing Data Poisoning
  • A Deep Dive into Preventing Denial of Service
  • A Deep Dive into Preventing GenAI Supply Chain Risks
  • A Deep Dive into Preventing Sensitive Information Disclosure
  • A Deep Dive into Preventing Insecure GenAI Solution Plugins
  • A Deep Dive into Preventing Excessive LLM Agency
  • A Deep Dive into Preventing LLM Overreliance
  • A Deep Dive into Preventing GenAI Model Theft
  • Nail It Before You Scale It: Assess and optimize your solution or process before adopting it at scale
  • Assess Your Proposed Solution or Process: Review the maturity of current threat identification efforts across GenAI use cases.
  • Define in-scope Processes and Guardrails: Clarify which threats must be modeled for each solution type and how those requirements are enforced.
  • Close any Data or Measurement Gaps: Identify where threat modeling activities are untracked or lack measurable outcomes.
  • Define Your Adoption & Scaling Plan: Create a structured roadmap for how GenAI solutions will be rolled out across teams, workflows, or business units
  • Define Your Phased Implementation Plan: Stage the rollout of GenAI threat modeling based on business criticality and system complexity.
  • Build Awareness and Finalize Enablers: Equip teams with templates, toolkits, and common threat libraries to standardize adoption.
  • Operationalize Your Comms Plan: Share the rollout strategy and progress updates across technical and security stakeholders.
To move from Lifting-Off to “Accelerating”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Formalize Your Best Practices: Document and standardize what’s working to ensure consistent, scalable success across teams and use cases
  • Standardize Threat Modeling Frameworks: Create a reusable threat modeling approach tailored for GenAI systems.
  • Integrate Threat Reviews into Dev Workflows: Make threat assessments a required step in development and deployment pipelines.
  • Develop Threat Libraries and Scenarios: Publish common threat types, attack patterns, and mitigation techniques for GenAI use cases.
  • Accelerate Your Adoption: Intensify efforts to embed GenAI across your organization by expanding use cases, increasing user engagement, and removing adoption barriers
  • Scale Threat Modeling Across Use Cases: Extend threat identification practices to all GenAI solutions, including low-code and citizen-led projects.
  • Equip Teams with Reusable Toolkits: Distribute standardized templates, checklists, and validation tools to reduce ramp-up time.
  • Automate Threat Detection Signals: Use logging and anomaly detection to flag emerging risks in production environments.
  • Celebrate Your Wins: Publicly acknowledge team accomplishments to build and sustain adoption momentum
  • Spotlight Exemplary Use Cases: Highlight projects where early threat modeling prevented major issues or improved confidence.
  • Share Before-and-After Risk Profiles: Demonstrate how structured assessments improved overall system posture.
  • Recognize Security Champions: Celebrate developers and product leads who proactively contribute to secure GenAI solutions.
The “Accelerating” stage represents “Target State” for many capabilities. “Breaking Away”, on the other hand, suggests that the specific capability represents a clear competitive advantage for your business.
  • Streamline & Embed: Integrate GenAI into core workflows while eliminating friction points to make usage seamless and routine
  • Embed Threat Detection into DevOps Tooling: Integrate automated threat scans into CI/CD pipelines and development environments.
  • Enable Real-Time Risk Scoring for GenAI Features: Surface security scores and indicators directly in dashboards used by product and engineering teams.
  • Align Threat Models with Enterprise Risk Programs: Ensure GenAI threat findings feed into broader enterprise risk and compliance reporting.
  • Leverage Automation: Use GenAI-powered tools and workflows to streamline repetitive tasks, enhance operational efficiency, and reduce manual effort
  • Automate Threat Identification Across Pipelines: Use AI to flag potential issues in model behavior, configuration, and usage patterns.
  • Generate and Update Threat Models Automatically: Leverage LLMs to draft threat models based on use case inputs and system architecture.
  • Trigger Security Playbooks Based on Model Activity: Automatically invoke investigation or mitigation workflows when anomalous behaviors are detected.
  • Evolve & Further Accelerate: Continuously refine GenAI strategies based on insights and outcomes, while expanding into more complex or high-impact use cases
  • Refresh Threat Libraries Based on Real-World Incidents: Update internal guidance using lessons learned from internal incidents or external breaches.
  • Extend Threat Modeling to Emerging Modalities: Apply structured assessments to multimodal GenAI use cases including voice, image, and video.
  • Benchmark Threat Detection Maturity Across Teams: Compare practices and outcomes across business units to identify leaders and opportunities for uplift.

Key "Watchouts"

As you take action you’ll want to avoid:

  • Treating GenAI threats like traditional software risks: Standard frameworks often miss GenAI-specific vulnerabilities such as prompt injection or model poisoning.
  • Focusing only on known threats: Emerging risks evolve quickly-threat models must be updated continuously to remain relevant.
  • Underestimating required cross-functional input: Effective threat identification depends on collaboration across security, engineering, and product teams.
  • Delaying integration into development workflows: Retrofitting threat models late in the cycle leads to missed risks and rework.
  • Overcomplicating threat modeling exercises: Too much formality can discourage adoption-start simple and scale depth as teams mature.

Targeted Benefits

While Identifying and Assessing GenAI-Related Threats can be challenging, its benefits are clear and compelling, including:

  • Reduced GenAI-specific risk exposure: Early identification of attack surfaces enables more effective mitigation and design decisions.
  • Faster incident response times: Proactive threat modeling helps teams prepare for and respond to threats with speed and clarity.
  • Increased confidence in GenAI deployments: Structured assessments build trust among stakeholders, regulators, and users.
  • Improved alignment between teams: Shared threat frameworks encourage stronger collaboration between product, security, and compliance.
  • Clearer prioritization of security investments: A better understanding of GenAI-specific risks helps focus resources on what matters most.

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Eddie
Accelerated Innovation

Hi, I'm Eddie 👋

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