Talk Title: Exploring Traditional and Emerging Cyber Attacks Against Generative AI

Abstract

This session examines how Generative AI systems can be manipulated, misled, or degraded by both familiar cybersecurity threats and newer AI-specific attacks that undermine the trustworthiness of their outputs. It connects classic concerns such as DNS hijacking, compromised APIs, covert channels, and third-party dependency risks with emerging threats such as jailbreaking, prompt injection, retrieval poisoning, and context manipulation. Framed through the lens of confidentiality, integrity, and availability, the talk argues that the real issue is not simply whether GenAI can generate an answer, but whether that answer remains valid, secure, and trustworthy in a hostile environment. The presentation also emphasizes cyber resilience by showing how attacks on GenAI often target the broader ecosystem of inputs, memory, retrieval, and external services, making GenAI security a system-level challenge rather than just a model problem.

Speaker Bio

Brett J. L. Landry is a cybersecurity professor and practitioner with over thirty years of experience in consulting, teaching, presenting, and researching. He holds multiple industry certifications, including Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certified Ethical Hacker (C|EH), Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), and Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC).

As a cybersecurity professor at the University of Dallas, Landry has taught security professionals around the world to address the challenges their organizations face and is frequently asked to present in the U.S., Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America on various topics in cybersecurity. He has been active in the University’s Center for Academic Excellence (CAE) in Cyber Defense, which is designated by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He has published and presented numerous articles in the areas of AI, Cybersecurity, IT Ethics, IT Management, Network Architecture, and Disaster Recovery to both professional and academic audiences. He is currently a University Senior Faculty Fellow at the University of Dallas and a Visiting Professor at Tarleton State University.