As AI continues to revolutionise industries, understanding and mitigating the security challenges around large language models (LLM’s) is critical. The OWASP Top 10 for LLM’s is a comprehensive guide to the most pressing risks faced by these models.
What is it?
The OWASP Top 10 for LLM’s (v1.1) highlights the most critical vulnerabilities in large language models, how these could be exploited and provides some prevention & mitigation strategies. Some of these, like supply chain vulnerabilities or insecure output handling, will already be familiar to your Security and Risk teams.
However, newer risks like prompt injection, excessive agency, and over-reliance on LLM’s introduce unique challenges that deserve attention from both a security and risk management perspective. These emerging threats can have significant business impacts, making it essential for teams to adapt their strategies to address the evolving AI landscape
What does it mean from a business perspective?
The OWASP Top 10 for LLMs is more than just a technical checklist—it’s a call to action. As companies increasingly adopt AI-powered systems, understanding these vulnerabilities is critical to maintaining trust, safeguarding data, and protecting intellectual property. A prompt injection or training data poisoning incident could result in costly incidents and a blow to your company’s reputation.
Businesses that rely on AI should prioritise not just innovation, but also security and risk management. By addressing the OWASP vulnerabilities proactively, you reduce the risk of costly incidents and ensure that your AI tools remain effective and reliable.
What do I do with it?
So, what should you do with this? Here are three key steps:
- Security and Risk Teams: Ensure your security and risk teams have this list, or at least something comparable, in their toolkit and it is being used. This will help you understand where your systems may be at risk.
- Train your teams: Educate your technical teams on the specific risks outlined in the OWASP list. This ensures that everyone from developers, data scientists, security specialists and audit teams understand how to spot and prevent potential threats.
- Build into your projects and processes: Use the OWASP checklist in the execution of your projects, in your system design and review process and in your operations when performing upgrades (in short – look at your processes to see where this guide can be made part of business as usual).
By using this OWASP Top 10 you can help protect your organisation from the evolving security challenges posed by LLMs.
Additional Reading
OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications (PDF)
#AI #LLM #OWASP #Cybersecurity #AISecurity #DataProtection #RiskManagement #AIEthics #TechInnovation #AICompliance #GenerativeAI #MachineLearning #DataPrivacy #SecurityAwareness #BusinessRisk #AIGovernance #AITrust