Cisco Expands Cloud Security Platform with AI Defense Offering

Cisco is expanding its cloud security platform with new technology that will enable developers to detect and mitigate vulnerabilities in artificial intelligence (AI) applications and their underlying models.

New AI Defense Offering

The new Cisco AI Defense offering, introduced on January 15, is designed to prevent data leakage by employees who use services like ChatGPT, Anthropic, and Copilot. The networking giant already offers AI Defense to early-access customers and plans to release it for general availability in March.

Integration with Cisco Secure Access

AI Defense is integrated with Cisco Secure Access, the revamped secure service edge (SSE) cloud security portfolio that Cisco launched last year. The software-as-a-service offering includes zero-trust network access, VPN-as-a-service, a secure Web gateway, cloud access security broker, firewall-as-a-service, and digital experience monitoring.

Admin Dashboard and Cloud Security Offerings

Administrators can view the AI Defense dashboard in the Cisco Cloud Control interface, which hosts all of Cisco’s cloud security offerings.

Addressing AI Security Concerns

Addressing AI security will be a major concern this year, given the rise in attacks against vulnerable models, according to Crawford. "We have already seen examples of LLM exploits, and experts have considered the ways in which it can be manipulated and attacked," he says.

LLMjacking Attacks

Such incidents, often described as LLMjacking, are waged by exploiting vulnerabilities with prompt injections, supply chain attacks, and data and model poisoning. One notable LLMjacking attack was discovered last year by the Sysdig Threat Research Team, which observed stolen cloud credentials targeting 10 cloud-hosted LLMs. In that incident, the attackers accessed credentials from a system running a vulnerable version of Laravel (CVE-2021-3129).