Organizations must adopt proactive measures, including rigorous vetting of plugins similar to comprehensive vendor risk assessments (VRAs). From an operational perspective, a stronger defense involves enforcing corporate-managed browsers, blocking all plugins by default, and approving only verified plugins through a controlled whitelist. Additionally, organizations should exercise caution with open-source plugins.
PREDICTION: At the time of writing, it was announced that around 16 Chrome extensions were compromised, exposing over 600,000 users to potential risks. This is just the beginning and I expect this to get exponentially worse in 2025-2026, mainly stemming from the growth of AI plugins. Do you truly have full control of browser plugin risks in your organization? If you don’t, it’s best that you get started.
3. Agentic AI risks: Rogue robots
The growth of Agentic AI—systems capable of autonomous decision-making—presents significant risks as adoption scales in 2025. Companies and staff could be eager to deploy Agentic-AI bots to streamline workflows and execute tasks at scale, but the potential for these systems to go rogue is a looming threat. Adversarial attacks and misaligned optimization can turn these bots into liabilities. For example, attackers could manipulate reinforcement learning algorithms to issue unsafe instructions or hijack feedback loops, exploiting workflows for harmful purposes. In one scenario, an AI managing industrial machinery could be manipulated to overload systems or halt operations entirely, creating safety hazards and operational shutdowns. We are still at the very early stages of this, and companies need to have rigorous code reviews, regular pen-testing, and routine audits to ensure integrity of the system – if not, these vulnerabilities could cascade and cause significant business disruption. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have good frameworks to follow, as well as ISACA with its AI Audit toolkits; expect more content in 2025.