AI Security Threats Loom as Enterprise Usage Jumps 91%
AI Security Threats Loom as Enterprise Usage Jumps 91%
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/ai-security-threats-loom-zscaler/
Publish Date: 2026-01-28 06:45:00
Source Domain: www.infosecurity-magazine.com
AI adoption is accelerating faster than enterprise oversight, creating a rapidly widening attack surface across all sectors, said Zscaler in its ThreatLabz 2026 AI Security Report.
The annual report, published on January 27, 2026, analyzed 989.3 billion AI and machine learning transactions across the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform between January and December 2025.
The cybersecurity firm found that despite a 91% AI usage growth across an ecosystem of more than 3400 AI applications, many organizations still lack a basic inventory of AI models and embedded AI features.
Finance and insurance remain the most AI-driven sectors by volume, together accounting for 23% of all AI/ML traffic, while the technology and education sectors recorded explosive year-over-year growth in AI transactions (202% and 184%, respectively).
Departments that used AI the most were engineering, which represented 48.9% of all AI usage, followed by IT (31.8%) and marketing (6.9%).
Year-over-year comparison of AI/ML transactions (January–December 2025). Source: Zscaler, ThreatLabz 2026 AI Security Report
Enterprise AI activity observed by Zscaler was largely concentrated in the US, which accounted for 38% of transactions, followed by India (14%) and Canada (5%).
OpenAI services was the top LLM vendor recorded every month of 2025, followed by Codelium and Perplexity.
Alongside the uptick in AI usage, Zscaler analysts found critical vulnerabilities in 100% of AI systems and applications observed, with 90% of systems compromised in under 90 minutes.
The median time to first critical failure was just 16 minutes, with some of these AI flaws in a single second.
Enterprise AI Apps Drive Data Privacy Violations
Additionally, in parallel with a surge in AI usage, Zscaler reported a staggering 18,033 TB of enterprise data transferred to AI/ ML applications, a 93% year-over-year rise.
“The massive influx has transformed tools like Grammarly (3,615 TB) and…
