Pangea's Comprehensive Analysis on GenAI Weaknesses Unveils Risks in AI Security

Pangea Investigates GenAI Vulnerabilities: An In-Depth Study

In a groundbreaking report, Pangea, a prominent player in AI security solutions, has revealed its findings from the $10,000 Prompt Injection Challenge. This global initiative spanned the month of March 2025 and saw participation from over 800 individuals across 85 countries. Participants attempted to circumvent AI security measures in a series of progressively challenging virtual environments. The extensive challenge recorded nearly 330,000 injection attempts, utilizing over 300 million tokens, painting a detailed picture of the current state of AI application security.

The Urgency of AI Security

As industries increasingly adopt Generative AI technologies, the deployment of AI-driven applications has surged. Many enterprises engage these systems for critical operations that involve interactions with customers and sensitive internal processes. However, a staggering number of organizations have yet to put in place specific security protocols designed for AI applications, opting instead to rely on default settings. This oversight potentially exposes them to significant risks.

Key Insights Revealed

The findings from the challenge present vital insights into the vulnerabilities in AI systems:

1. Non-Deterministic Security Issues: Unlike conventional cybersecurity threats, prompt injection attacks present unpredictable outcomes due to the non-deterministic features of Large Language Models (LLMs). For instance, a prompt may fail multiple times but succeed unpredictably on a subsequent attempt, even if its content remains unchanged.

2. Data Leakage and Reconnaissance Risks: The study highlighted the risk of unauthorized data access through AI applications, which can also be manipulated to disclose sensitive operational details, like server specifics and open access ports.

3. The Necessity for Defense in Depth: Organizations that rely solely on basic LLM security measures are notably vulnerable. The report indicated that approximately 10% of prompt injection attempts were successful against rudimentary system prompts. Incorporating multi-layered defense strategies significantly reduced the number of successful attacks.

4. Risk Amplified by Agentic AI: As firms lean toward agentic AI designs—where these systems have direct access to databases and tools—the repercussions of compromised AI systems escalate dramatically, heightening the threat landscape for organizations.