How to Make Sure Your Business Doesn’t Struggle in the Next Data Security Breach

Your data is everywhere. The next wave of security breaches won’t come from hackers. It’ll come from AI-fueled data misuse, carelessness, and blind trust. 

A support engineer copies error logs into ChatGPT to troubleshoot a bug. A marketing analyst feeds customer data into a generative tool to personalize campaigns. A developer uploads code snippets with embedded credentials to fine-tune an AI model.  

It all seems harmless. But piece by piece, your business gives away sensitive data without realizing it. This isn’t a hypothetical.  

It’s already happening in thousands of organizations. What we call a data breach doesn’t always involve a hacker breaking in. Sometimes, the damage is self-inflicted. Data security is less about defending the perimeter and managing where your data lives, and who’s touching it. 

AI is amplifying the chaos behind the scenes 

Artificial intelligence has become the unofficial assistant in every department. Developers rely on it for coding help. Analysts use it for insights. Marketing uses it for content. 

However, the point is that every one of those interactions can involve sensitive data. When you paste a document into an AI tool or train a model on internal datasets, that data often ends up in places you don’t control. 

According to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024, the global average cost of a data breach has climbed to $4.9 million [source], and the number is increasing in real time. With AI’s rapid adoption, a new category of breach risk is emerging, caused by unmonitored usage of tools and platforms powered by machine learning. 

These breaches don’t start with malware. They begin with convenience when people use AI tools outside IT’s purview. As a result, sensitive data is leaving the organization in small, invisible pieces. Companies aren’t prepared for this kind of data sprawl that eventually leads to data breaches. 

How AI turns customer data into a compliance risk 

A retail analyst wants to improve customer segmentation. So, they upload purchase history into a generative AI platform to run pattern analysis. That platform stores the data to improve its model accuracy. 

Months later, a customer files a GDPR deletion request. However, the data has already been embedded into a model owned by a third party. There’s no way to extract it or prove it’s been deleted. The company is now out of compliance, and the breach didn't happen through an attack but through misuse. 

These kinds of AI-related data breaches are not loud, don’t trigger alerts, but quietly expose companies to regulatory fines, customer distrust, and reputational damage. 

What does a modern data security breach look like? 

Hackers breaking through firewalls and stealing data is only part of the picture. But this doesn’t work now that data is floating around countless AI models.  

With the advent of AI usage, many breaches begin with internal missteps: someone copying encryption keys into prompt logs, syncing sensitive datasets with external AI tools, or bypassing internal controls to speed up a task. 

These AI security incidents are often ignored until the damage is done. But they represent a real threat to data security. Most organizations lack the tools to monitor these interactions, let alone secure them. 

A modern data breach, mainly associated with AI use, is often a byproduct of good intentions paired with poor controls. Consequently, sensitive data ends up in the wrong place, protected by the wrong keys, or accessible to people who shouldn’t see it. Here, traditional data breach security fails. 

Traditional data security tools aren’t sufficient to protect AI models 

Legacy security tools were built to defend against external attacks. They weren’t designed to understand how data moves through AI tools, cloud services, or shared development environments.  

A firewall won’t stop someone from pasting private data into a chatbot. Logging tools won’t catch when encryption keys are embedded into AI prompts. 

How data is used today, especially in AI-driven environments, requires a different mindset. You need real-time visibility into how data is accessed, processed, and shared, not just where it’s stored. 

Most importantly, your data security strategy must be built for a world where users often unknowingly expose data. Without that understanding, you’re always one step behind. 

Fortanix Armet AI: Built for this exact problem 

Unlike traditional tools focusing on endpoints or networks, Armet AI is designed to secure sensitive data inside AI and cloud-native environments. 

The solution offers the following primary features: 

Keep Data and AI Secure 

• Confidential Computing: Secure enclaves isolate and process data at the hardware level. 
• Data-In-Use Encryption: Data stays encrypted even during processing, blocking unauthorized access. 
• Hardware-Level Security: Built on Intel SGX, TDX, TiberTrust, and Nvidia GPUs for encrypted execution and integrity checks. 
• Privacy-Preserving AI: Train and run AI without exposing raw data or models. 

Stop Data Leaks and Tampering 

• Data Sanitization: Auto-detects and redacts sensitive info before it hits the AI pipeline. 
• Prompt Security: Blocks prompt injection and manipulation with strict validation. 
• Hallucination Detection: Flags factual errors in model output to maintain trust. 
• Policy Enforcement: Enforces guardrails to align AI behavior with internal policies. 

With Armet AI, you get precise control and full visibility over how your data is being used, even in hard-to-monitor environments. Whether data is being fed into a generative model or shared across internal tools, Armet AI helps you identify security risks before they turn into costly breaches. 

Secure your AI Data before it slips sideways 

To protect your business from the next data security breach, you need more than patches and playbooks; you need control, especially when managing data with AI tools.  

Fortanix Armet AI gives you that control of data, starting with strict access governance, compartmentalized collaboration, and scalable role-based permissions. It helps teams work securely and makes secure AI practical and repeatable. 

Armet AI also shuts the door on data exposure across every stage: at rest, in motion, and in use. With built-in support for global regulations like GDPR and the EU AI Act, it takes the guesswork out of compliance.  

The solution offers consistent, policy-driven protection that builds trust and keeps your business off the breach list. 

Fortanix Armet AI sends a clear message to customers and regulators: your data is handled carefully, and your trust isn’t taken for granted. Connect with our team to book a demo.