Copy. Paste. Breach.

March 2025. A financial services firm discovered employees had been using ChatGPT to analyze customer data. For months.

Nobody in IT knew. Nobody in security knew. Nobody in compliance knew.

The employees weren't malicious. They were trying to be productive. Copy customer information, paste it into ChatGPT, get quick summaries for reports. It saved hours of work.

Then came the breach notification. The AI tool they'd been using wasn't the company's approved, enterprise version with data protection guarantees. It was the free public version. Every piece of customer data they'd pasted had been processed and potentially stored by OpenAI's systems.

Personal information. Financial details. Account numbers. Social Security numbers. All fed into an unauthorized AI tool that the company had zero visibility into.

This is shadow AI. And according to IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, one in five organizations has already been breached because of it.

Here's what makes shadow AI different from traditional security threats:

When employees install unauthorized software, IT can usually detect it through endpoint monitoring or network traffic analysis. When employees use cloud apps without approval, security teams can spot unusual authentication patterns or data transfers.

But shadow AI is different. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—these tools run entirely in a browser. No installation required. No unusual network patterns. Just employees copying and pasting data into what looks like a normal web application.

IBM found that breaches involving shadow AI cost an average of $670,000 more than standard breaches. Why? Because by the time organizations discover the problem, sensitive data has already been processed by AI systems they don't control, stored in locations they can't access, and potentially used to train models they'll never see.

The data exposure is also more severe. When shadow AI is involved, 65% of breaches result in exposed personally identifiable information and 40% result in compromised intellectual property. Compare that to traditional breaches where these rates are significantly lower.

The problem is nearly universal:

98% of organizations have employees using unsanctioned AI tools right now. Not 98% are at risk—98% already have shadow AI operating in their environments.

Only 37% of organizations have policies to manage or detect shadow AI. That means 63% of organizations have no governance, no monitoring, and no way to know what data their employees are feeding into unauthorized AI systems.

And here's the concerning part: when organizations experience AI-related breaches, 97% report lacking proper AI access controls. The security fundamentals that protect other systems simply aren't in place for AI.

Organizations need AI-specific security controls to solve this.

Traditional security monitoring doesn't catch shadow AI because these tools operate like normal web applications. You need governance frameworks designed for AI, data handling policies specific to AI tools, and monitoring that can detect unauthorized AI usage patterns.

That's what AAISM (Advanced in AI Security Management) addresses. Released by ISACA in August 2025, AAISM is the first certification focused specifically on AI security management. Our recent students are among the first in the world to gain these specialized skills.

AAISM covers:

• AI Governance and Program Management - establishing policies and approval processes for AI tools
• AI Risk Management - identifying and mitigating threats like shadow AI and data exposure
• AI Technologies and Controls - implementing access controls and monitoring for AI systems

Our next AAISM bootcamp starts February 9-11, 2026.

Three days on AI security fundamentals that traditional certifications don't address. Real-world scenarios. Practical defenses designed for how AI actually works.

However, if your focus is more on enterprise-wide risk management rather than AI-specific security, CRISC (Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control) might be a better fit. CRISC addresses shadow AI through broader risk identification, assessment, and governance frameworks that work across the entire organization. Our first public CRISC bootcamp runs February 23-26.
 
This is our first public CRISC bootcamp, and we're offering $300 off as a launch discount.

Shadow AI isn't going away. Organizations that get ahead of it will be the ones with proper governance and security controls in place—before the breach, not after.

Stay secure,
The DestCert Team