Want to Strengthen Your GenAI Cybersecurity? Make Sure You Include GRC
The adoption of generative AI (GenAI) in the workplace brings countless new possibilities for growth—but it also exposes your business to vulnerabilities that hackers are exploiting. Thankfully, you have an ally in your efforts to strengthen GenAI cybersecurity: your corporate governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) program.
GRC means more than making sure that your company complies with regulations. GRC also creates a strong foundation for GenAI cybersecurity. And GRC software, such as Microsoft Purview, is evolving to support GenAI more effectively.
Businesses are just beginning to sort out the relationship between GRC and GenAI cybersecurity, so let’s take a quick dive into what a few of our clients have learned so far.
The GenAI Challenge
GenAI is a powerful tool in your toolbox. It can create content, analyze data, and even generate ideas—all in fractions of a second. As it relates to business processes, GenAI can and will transform financial operations ranging from fraud detection to customer care.
But you need to protect GenAI against bad actors looking to compromise GenAI and hurt your business. One way to thwart those threats is by adopting a stronger GenAI security posture through a zero trust architecture. That is to say, a strong GRC approach sets up GenAI cybersecurity for success.
How GRC Supports GenAI Cybersecurity
GRC refers to how well your company sets up its own rules, recognizes the things that could go wrong, and helps ensure that you follow the relevant laws and regulations. Its components are:
- Governance: the overarching framework of policies, rules, and decision-making processes that guide an organization’s actions to achieve its goals. This includes establishing clear roles and responsibilities for managing security.
- Risk: the process of identifying, assessing, prioritizing, and mitigating potential threats to an organization’s assets and operations. This involves understanding what could go wrong and determining appropriate countermeasures.
- Compliance: the adherence to regulations, standards, and laws. In cybersecurity, this means complying with frameworks like HIPAA (healthcare), PCI DSS (payment card data), GDPR (data privacy), and others.
Think of GRC like a house. Governance is the blueprint, laying out the structure and how things should work. Risk is identifying potential hazards, like a leaky roof or faulty wiring. Compliance is making sure the house is up to code and doesn’t violate any building regulations. All these individual pieces coalesce into a sort of code of conduct.
A Code of Conduct for Using GenAI
GRC often serves as a code of conduct for how to use GenAI. GRC can help ensure your business is using this powerful tool responsibly, maximizing the good and minimizing the bad. With effective GRC in place, you can more easily align GenAI with your company’s goals. That alignment, in turn, helps keep you aware of the risks involved and lets you know you’re playing by the rules.
This is especially important because GenAI can be a bit of a wild card. It can generate amazing results, but it can also create content that’s biased, inaccurate, or even harmful. As mentioned earlier, GenAI can be compromised by bad actors, which makes GRC’s ability to identify and potentially prevent those compromises even more important.
Of course, GRC does more than “just” protect consumer privacy. It also mitigates risk for all your AI models by establishing a security framework, identifying and mitigating threats, and helping to ensure that your business adheres to regulations and standards as you apply cybersecurity best practices.
Governance: Establishing a Framework
Your governance framework should include comprehensive policies for the use and protection of GenAI systems, covering data handling, access controls, and AI decision-making processes. Governance should define the acceptable use of customer data as you train AI models. For instance, are you using only anonymized data to protect privacy or are you broadening your potential attack surface?
Governance improves cybersecurity because, if you use only anonymized data to train AI models, you mitigate the risk of exposing sensitive information through model inversion attacks. Model inversion attacks are attacks in which adversaries might try to extract personal data from the AI model, which can lead to costly data breaches.
Governance also establishes clear roles and responsibilities for you to manage GenAI. This includes appointing data stewards, security officers, and compliance managers to oversee the implementation and maintenance of security measures. A chief information security officer (CISO) would be responsible for ensuring that all GenAI activities align with the bank’s overall security strategy and governance policies.
Risk Management: Proactively Identifying and Mitigating Threats
Effective GRC also means designing regular risk assessments to identify specific cyberthreats that could compromise your GenAI systems. Risk management involves identifying mitigation strategies such as advanced encryption, regular system updates and patches, and how you use anomaly detection tools:
- Advanced encryption of data both in transit and at rest helps ensure that, even if it is intercepted, your data remains unreadable to unauthorized parties.
- Regular system updates and patches help ensure that known vulnerabilities are patched, reducing the risk of exploits.
- Anomaly detection tools continuously monitor the system for unusual activities that could indicate a security breach, allowing for quick identification and response to potential threats.
Risk management should also include a comprehensive incident response plan to manage and mitigate the impact of cybersecurity breaches. It’s not practical to detail the entirety of an incident response plan in one blog post. But suffice to say the plan would cover crucial elements including immediate containment (quickly isolating affected systems to prevent the spread of the breach and protect other parts of the network).
Compliance: Adhering to Regulations and Standards
We mentioned that an effective governance framework involves establishing clear internal policies and guidelines, such as anonymizing data for AI model training, to reduce risks and align with strategic goals.
Adding to that, your compliance efforts should ensure that you meet external regulatory requirements (e.g., encrypting data as mandated by GDPR and PCI DSS) to protect against legal penalties. GRC helps ensure that your GenAI systems comply with industry regulations by mandating regular audits and compliance checks.
Compliance measures include maintaining detailed logs of all data access and processing activities, which you should review regularly to ensure adherence to regulatory requirements. Conducting regular audits and compliance checks ensures that your cybersecurity practices align with regulatory requirements. This helps identify and correct any non-compliance issues that could be exploited by cybercriminals or result in costly regulatory action.
A Hypothetical Example
Let’s examine EastTown Bank, a hypothetical institution using GenAI to enhance loan underwriting. This bank’s automation streamlines processes and expands the pool of eligible borrowers, significantly boosting revenue. However, the customer data used to train the GenAI is a frequent target for cyberattacks.
Fortunately, EastTown Bank had the foresight to implement a zero trust architecture, segmenting the network to protect sensitive data. A strong GRC framework further strengthens the company’s defenses.
Governance involved establishing policies for GenAI use, data handling, and access controls, ensuring only anonymized data is used for training, mitigating the risk of exposure. Risk management involved regular assessments and mitigation strategies like encryption, updates, and anomaly detection tools. An incident response plan helps manage breaches effectively.
Compliance helped ensure adherence to regulations like GDPR and PCI DSS through regular audits and checks. This emphasized the importance of keeping data protection policies up to date.
If cybercriminals were to exploit a network vulnerability, they wouldn’t be able to steal customer data—thanks to GRC-mandated encryption. Even if data packets were intercepted, strong encryption and compliance with standards would render them unreadable, preventing identity theft and fraud.
This scenario underscores the importance of a comprehensive GRC framework in protecting sensitive financial data.
The Role of Software to Support GRC and GenAI Cybersecurity
Whether your business relies on commercially available software or in-house solutions to manage your GRC functions, it’s important to use the right software and solutions. After all, you’re not making just another decision about your tech-stack. You’re making a decision on which software to trust to protect your mission-critical, GenAI-supported processes from increasingly tech-savvy bad actors.
If you’re familiar with popular GRC-minded GenAI cybersecurity tools like Microsoft Purview, you’re already one step ahead. Such tools offer several benefits that are difficult to achieve with in-house solutions alone. For example, they can provide a comprehensive suite of tools that significantly enhance the safety of GenAI-supported processes within your business—from your data map to process automation.
Comprehensive Data Mapping
A GRC-focused cybersecurity solution ensures your generative AI processes are protected and compliant by mapping out how data flows within an organization. This helps ensure that you track, classify, and govern all data properly. Unless you use software with effective data mapping, you might overlook compliance risks. With good data mapping, you can identify and mitigate risks, maintain compliance with regulations, and ensure that GenAI models use only secure and compliant data.
Privacy Assessment
Effective GRC software constantly assesses the safety of your company’s privacy practices, which ensures that your data complies with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA. For instance, Microsoft’s Purview platform includes a privacy impact assessment, which measures the efficacy of your privacy policies across different geographies where you operate. Privacy assessment features in a software product protect your GenAI processes from using data that could result in regulatory penalties or data breaches.
Proactive Risk Management
Risk management features in GRC software assess potential risks to your data handling practices before they become problems. For GenAI, this means monitoring and classifying data risks to help ensure the data feeding into your AI models meets all regulatory standards and is fortified against breaches.
Whereas privacy assessment focuses on evaluating privacy risks, a software’s risk management feature should have a broader scope. For example, risk management typically includes monitoring for cybersecurity threats, implementing advanced encryption, updating systems, and using anomaly detection tools to protect against breaches and ensure overall regulatory compliance.
Enforcement of Data Protection Policies
GRC-focused cybersecurity solutions often support the creation and enforcement of data protection policies essential for managing data security. These policies dictate how data should be handled, specifying access controls, data types, usage duration, and actions to be taken in case of violations.
By enforcing these rules, the software ensures responsible and secure use of your data. This provides a solid legal framework that helps protect your GenAI operations from unauthorized use or exposure.
Automated Lifecycle Management
If you’re trying to manage GRC and cybersecurity without a packaged software solution, you miss out on one of the biggest advantages that software provides: automation capabilities for lifecycle management.
Automated processes manage data consistently from creation to deletion, reducing the risk of human error and helping to ensure compliance. For GenAI, this means reliable automated data governance that upholds security and regulatory standards throughout the data lifecycle.
What Should You Do? Take a 360-Degree Approach.
To better protect your GenAI systems, align cybersecurity and GRC as part of a 360-degree approach that combines AI with human oversight. This approach can streamline alignment with your organization’s GRC program. At Centific, we practice a tailored, 360-degree approach to help protect financial services organizations all around the world.