Microsoft: 5 Generative AI Security Threats Organizations Must Address

Microsoft published analysis of critical GenAI threats facing organizations. What's concerning: 66% of orgs are developing custom GenAI apps, 88% worry about indirect prompt injection, 80% cite data leakage as top concern. Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have doubled their use of AI to mount cyberattacks and spread disinfo—translating phishing emails to fluent English, generating deepfake executive videos, and creating adaptive malware that evades detection in real time. The five threat categories: (1) poisoning attacks manipulating training data to skew outputs, (2) evasion attacks using obfuscation/jailbreak prompts to bypass filters, (3) prompt injection attacks overriding original instructions to steer models toward malicious actions, (4) unpredictable model behavior making it difficult to anticipate responses to malicious input, (5) cloud vulnerabilities where attackers exploit weaknesses in model, app, or infrastructure to move laterally. Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides end-to-end AI security—scans code repos, monitors containers, maps attack paths, detects jailbreak attacks, credential theft, and data leakage using 100T+ daily signals.