Fortinet Contributes to the World Economic Forum’s AI and Cyber Initiative

Just as our digital adversaries work together to advance their attack methods, no single organization alone can successfully disrupt cybercrime at scale. Fortinet has a long history of collaborating with global experts across various sectors, pursuing a shared goal of making our digital world more secure. We regularly work with public and private organizations to advance our collective cyber resiliency through initiatives that encourage knowledge and threat intelligence sharing.

One such example is our ongoing engagement with the World Economic Forum. Fortinet is a founding member of the World Economic Forum's Centre for Cybersecurity, founded in 2018, and is also a charter member of the Cybercrime Atlas, a joint initiative launched by the organization's Partnership Against Cybercrime project. Through these efforts and more, Fortinet addresses critical, timely cybersecurity challenges impacting entities around the globe, ranging from the ongoing cybersecurity talent shortage to the necessary evolution of risk management strategies as new technologies come to market.

Understanding the Cybersecurity Implications of Using AI Technologies

Organizations are increasingly adopting new technologies and many are harnessing AI to enhance nearly all aspects of their operations. According to a recent McKinsey Global Survey, 65% of business leaders say their companies regularly use generative AI. Yet the adoption of any new technology inevitably brings with it benefits and risks. As organizations take greater advantage of AI-driven offerings, their attack surfaces are expanding as a result.

Last year, leaders engaged with the World Economic Forum's Centre for Cybersecurity raised the need for organizations globally to better understand the cybersecurity implications of using AI technologies and gain clear direction on how to securely adopt these offerings. As a result, the World Economic Forum launched its AI and Cyber Initiative in the spring of 2024 to develop guidance for organizations to manage the complex cyber risks associated with the adoption of these technologies.

The AI and Cyber Initiative is a collaboration between the World Economic Forum's Centre for Cybersecurity, the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre at the University of Oxford, various business partners, government and international organizations, and civil society and alliances. Together, the group will explore the practical and exploitable dangers of AI. This includes examining real-world model poisoning methods, data lineage models, data validation for input and output to AI models, and the privacy and sensitivity concerns around AI regarding linking potentially identifiable information back to individuals.

As an inaugural member of this initiative, Fortinet brings real-world experience to the group, offering insights into how threat actors harness AI technologies to create attacks and exploits. Fortinet provides unique insights from FortiGuard Labs, our elite threat research organization, assessing thousands of threat data artifacts and determining how AI is being used on the offensive side and providing insights into using AI to defend against attack techniques.

The FortiGuard Labs team keeps a pulse on threat actor activity and monitors the tools, techniques, and tactics attackers use to infiltrate organizations. This enables us to showcase how organizations can harness AI and ML models to protect against specific threats and how AI can assist with increasing the efficiency and efficacy of cyber protections.

Key Insights from the Cyber Leaders Roundtable

A virtual kickoff for the AI and Cyber Initiative occurred in April, bringing together 45 cybersecurity and AI leaders from around the world. The session introduced the effort to the community and was followed by breakout sessions in which leaders discussed the cyber risks and associated mitigation measures stemming from the implementation of AI.

Last month, I was thrilled to continue these important conversations on behalf of Fortinet and attend the Cyber Leaders Roundtable, the first in-person meeting for the AI and Cyber Initiative held in Oxford, United Kingdom. More than 30 of the initiative participants from public, private, and civil society organizations, as well as academia, came together in Oxford to share their insights, experiences, and key priorities related to the adoption of AI technologies.

This event fostered multistakeholder dialogues between cyber leaders on cyber resilience and AI. It brought together the communities from the AI and Cyber initiative and the Cyber Resilience Blueprint initiative to understand cyber resilience tradecrafts. We discussed the controls, behaviors, and messages that matter, advanced the understanding of the risk scenarios related to the implementation and use of AI, and examined the impacts of the innovative and changing era of AI in cyber resilience. Fortinet played an active role at the Cyber Leaders Roundtable on sharing how to use current technologies to protect against AI attacks. This included discussing AI firewalls, testing AI models, reviewing AI controls, integrating data loss prevention technologies, and showcasing the role of the human element and the dangers of AI models.

Cyber Resiliency Is Vital as We Adopt New Technologies

Understanding and accounting for the cyber risks associated with new technologies is a crucial part of effectively managing every organization's risks. At the recent roundtable, we discussed that businesses need to be resilient to cyber incidents to ensure minimum impact on operations, and that cyber resilience involves a toolbox of methods to harden the environment, detect and respond to attacks, and ensure business resilience in the face of malicious cyberattacks and accidental cyber failures. It also involves learning from incidents and evolving to stronger postures.

The discussions and guidance resulting from the AI and Cyber Initiative will offer public and private sector institutions valuable insight into how to balance business growth with ongoing cyber resiliency. Fortinet and FortiGuard Labs are committed to continuing our research on how threat actors exploit AI vulnerabilities. Using continuous threat intelligence collection, threat research capabilities, breach research, and incident response cases, Fortinet is keeping a pulse on how attackers are evolving and has committed to the World Economic Forum to discuss, research, and share its insights into the dangers of AI exploitation and how organizations can effectively protect against those threats.

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