Pass the Isaca AI-Centric Security Management AAISM Questions and answers with CertsForce

AAISM prescribes Preparation as the foundational phase of AI incident response. The first priority is to form and empower a cross-functional incident response (IR) team with AI/ML expertise (security, data science, product, legal/compliance). Only once the accountable team exists can you define playbooks, communications, containment/eradication steps, recovery processes, and escalation paths. Without a designated team, procedures and channels lack ownership and effectiveness.

AAISM governance practices state that before categorizing technologies by risk, the first step is to ensure that all AI systems are documented in the organizational asset inventory. A complete inventory provides the foundation for subsequent risk analysis, accountability, and governance. Grouping solutions, identifying vulnerabilities, and assessing risk levels come afterward, once inventory accuracy is established. Without confirming that the technologies are recorded in the inventory, risk categorization may miss critical assets.

AI/ML threat modeling is the most effective structured method to both identify and address model security risks. It systematically surfaces attack classes (poisoning, evasion, membership inference, model extraction, inversion), maps system-specific attack surfaces (data pipelines, feature stores, training artifacts, inference APIs), and drives prioritized mitigations (ingestion validation, robust training, rate-limiting, watermarking, differential privacy, monitoring, red teaming). Output spot-checking (A) finds errors but not security vulnerabilities; encryption (C) protects confidentiality but does not reveal threats or mitigate inference-time attacks; adding data (D) may improve accuracy but does not target adversarial risk.

AAISM guidance on crisis management and communication emphasizes that the initial priority in responding to a reputational or market manipulation attack is to provide accurate clarifying information to the public through a pre-approved statement. This ensures stakeholders and markets are given verified facts immediately, limiting the spread of misinformation. While forensic analysis, employee training, and monitoring activities are important, they occur after the immediate need for public trust and damage control is addressed. Pre-approved statements are a central control in AI-related incident response to ensure consistency, timeliness, and credibility in communications.

AAISM emphasizes that the core outcome of AI risk assessments is prioritization: mapping threat likelihood and business impact to determine which risks to treat first, at what strength, and with which controls. Implementing privacy controls (A), funding alignment (B), and updating registers (C) are important outputs, but the greatest benefit is making defensible, prioritized decisions that align with risk appetite and optimize control selection and resource allocation.

The most direct preventative control against data poisoning is robust data validation/ingestion gating: provenance checks, schema and constraint validation, anomaly/outlier screening, label consistency tests, and whitelist/blacklist source controls before data reaches training pipelines. Larger datasets (A) don’t inherently prevent poisoning; monitoring (C) is detective; updating a foundation model (D) does not address tainted inputs entering the pipeline.

AAISM highlights that AI-enabled predictive maintenance improves operational resilience by using real-time sensor monitoring to schedule repairs based on actual conditions rather than fixed schedules. This prevents unexpected breakdowns, reduces downtime, and ensures continuity of operations. Regular maintenance based on recommendations is static and may not reflect real conditions. Manual reviews are slow and inefficient. Full automation of repairs without human oversight is not realistic or safe in critical manufacturing. The approach that best demonstrates resilience is real-time condition-based repair scheduling.

AAISM emphasizes that when introducing innovative AI systems, organizations reduce security and compliance risk by following a phased adoption approach. This allows incremental deployment, controlled testing, and gradual scaling while monitoring risks in real time. Re-evaluating risk appetite and evaluating compliance are important governance steps but do not directly mitigate risks during implementation. Seeking third-party advice can add expertise but does not provide the structured control that phased integration offers. The most effective risk management approach for AI innovation is to adopt a phased rollout strategy.

AAISM guidance on privacy-preserving AI highlights anonymization as the most effective means of protecting personal data used in training. By irreversibly removing or masking identifiable attributes, anonymization ensures that training data cannot be linked back to individuals, thereby meeting key privacy obligations under laws such as GDPR. Erasing data after training may limit exposure but does not protect it during the training process. Ensuring data quality improves accuracy but does not mitigate privacy risk. Hashing protects data integrity but does not guarantee anonymity, as hashes can sometimes be reversed or correlated. Therefore, anonymization is the recommended control for protecting personal data in AI training.

AAISM positions early and continuous risk assessment as a critical success factor. The guidance states that AI risk should be “identified, analyzed, and measured starting from the design and concept phases, before significant investment and deployment.” This ensures that high-impact risks (e.g., bias, privacy violations, safety issues) can be mitigated or designed-out before they become embedded in production systems. Frameworks (A) are valuable, but their effectiveness depends on when and how they are applied. Stakeholder participation (B) is important but is one component of a broader process. Creating completely separate risk processes for AI (D) may fragment governance and is not required; integration with enterprise risk management is preferred. Thus, the timing of risk measurement—early in the life cycle—is identified as the most important factor for effective AI risk management.