AI adoption is swiftly outpacing security and governance — leaving organizations in high-risk industries like healthcare, energy, industrial, financial, government, manufacturing, and transportation and logistics increasingly exposed to expensive, dangerous, and disruptive data breaches. The US government's Cyber Threat Snapshot from November 2024 shows that cyber attacks on critical infrastructure were up 30% globally last year.

While traditional cyberattacks continue to play out, a concerning new theme is fast emerging: AI as both a tool for attack and a target of those attacks.

According to IBM’s new Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, 1 in 6 data breaches involve AI-driven attacks, most often phishing or deepfake impersonation attacks. The 2025 report also shows that weak cybersecurity around organizational AI use is actively being exploited. More than 1 out of every 8 attacks are now targeting AI models and apps themselves — a number that’s rising as AI becomes a high-value target.

Five key themes in today’s AI-related data breaches

The 2025 report, conducted by Ponemon Institute and sponsored and analyzed by IBM, is based on data breaches experienced by 600 organizations globally from March 2024 through February 2025. Here are five key themes revealed in the report:

1. All sectors are at risk. Healthcare, financial, industrial, energy, and technology are all experiencing more breaches — and those breaches are getting costlier.
   
2. Attacks are targeting AI models. As more organizations adopt AI, their AI models are becoming the focus of cyber threats. Security incidents that targeted AI models and applications were varied, but one type clearly claimed the top ranking: supply chain compromise, which includes compromised third-party apps, APIs, and plug-ins. Other prevalent forms of attacks on AI systems include: model inversion, which aims to learn sensitive information about the model itself, such as its weights or training data; model evasion, which manipulates input data to deceive a model into producing a desired output or outcome; prompt injection, which manipulates a model’s behavior by inserting hidden or malicious instructions into its input; and data poisoning, which corrupts a model by tampering with the data it learns from.
   
3. Consequences are mounting. Nearly all organizations suffered operational disruption following a breach. Then there’s the financial and reputational impact. The three biggest attack vectors — phishing, supply chain compromise, and malicious insiders — each come with a cost per breach close to $5 million. Meanwhile, nearly 1 in 5 businesses experienced reputational damage and loss of goodwill due to an AI-related breach.
   
4. 97% of companies that experienced an AI-related incident lack basic AI access controls. The overwhelming majority of organizations have no regulations or policies governing how people use AI across the enterprise. This makes organizational intellectual property (IP) data an easy target, especially in environments with lax access controls, over-permissioned accounts, limited visibility into who can access what, and use of shadow AI by employees.
   
5. Most breaches targeted company IP and customer data. One-third of cyberattacks targeted company IP. More than half targeted customer PII. Moreover, roughly one-third of organizations that experienced an incident reported loss of data integrity due to an incident involving an AI model or app.
   

Why national-security grade protection is more important than ever 

While AI is both a tool hackers are using and a target of their attacks, AI is also a part of defense against those attacks.

As IBM’s recent report found, strategic AI deployment is critical for cyber protection and response — enabling faster identification, containment, and lower breach costs. Using AI and automation across operations like prevention, detection, investigation, and response saved $1.9 million in average breach costs and reduced the breach lifecycle by ~80 days. This represents a 28% decrease in mean time to identify (MTTI) + mean time to contain (MTTC).

But the best cybersecurity approaches go above and beyond AI, using zero trust architecture to prevent breach in the first place, keep AI models secure, and avoid operational disruption. “It’s not just about dollars. It’s downtime, reputation, lost trust,” said Jeff Crume, Senior Engineer, IBM. “And the fact is that many of these breaches are preventable.”

As an IBM Platinum Partner, we know that achieving a secure zero-trust posture is not optional — it’s critical for the implementation of trusted enterprise AI. With our fully pre-integrated Platform-as-a-Service, SanQtum, organizations across the public and private sector can achieve rapid, maximum protection in today’s fast-changing threat landscape. 

Image: Unsplash | Sean Pollock

Tysons Corner, VA — 30 July 2025 — Today, Available Infrastructure (“Available”) announced it has been awarded a United States patent for a cybersecurity solution to protect energy assets and other critical infrastructure from cyber threats.

The solution utilizes a firewall gateway as a secure checkpoint that monitors incoming communications trying to interact with and control energy infrastructure, locking out access if it detects unapproved or malicious attempts.

This helps prevent cyberattacks and ensures the safe, reliable operation of critical infrastructure like distributed energy resources (DERs), electric vehicle (EV) charging, virtual power plants (VPPs), energy management systems, and industrial control equipment.

“This patent represents an important step forward in protecting the technologies that power our modern world, from grid technology to industrial systems,” said Daniel Gregory, CEO of Available. “As cyber threats grow more sophisticated, this firewall gateway technology offers a purpose-built solution to help secure essential infrastructure at every turn.”

To learn more about Available or to contact the team, visit www.availableinfrastructure.com. 

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About Available Infrastructure
Based in Northern Virginia along the Washington, DC, beltway, Available Infrastructure (Available) brings together three cornerstone solutions for operational technology (OT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS): zero trust networking for national security-grade cyber protection, IBM watsonx for enterprise AI at the edge, and battery energy storage systems for clean, resilient power.

In today’s and tomorrow’s evolving landscape, this unique combination keeps critical infrastructure and sensitive data safer, while delivering a decision-making advantage for agencies, enterprises, and institutions. Available is the owner-operator of a fast-growing nationwide fleet of quantum-ready micro edge data centers. It is also the parent company uniting two subsidiary, sister business units — Available Networks and Available Power — and is an IBM Platinum Partner.

The Available family of companies brings together deep experience in power grids, infrastructure development, zero trust networking, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

To learn more visit www.availableinfrastructure.com.

Media Contacts

Nikki Arnone
Inflection Point Agency for Available Infrastructure
nikki@inflectionpointagency.com 

For the better part of a decade, industry voices have been heralding battery energy storage system (BESS) technologies as the ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of the power grid.

Indeed, batteries have shown themselves capable of providing valuable services ranging from backup power to frequency response to demand charge management to replacing gas peakers plants to renewables integration and mitigating renewable curtailment. In their most recent ‘world first,’ last year in Australia large batteries provided grid-scale inertia services.

Yet as BESS technology has matured and as their economics have been competitive with (and increasingly, superior to) traditional power grid solutions, they are on the verge of fundamentally flipping how the grid operates altogether. Industry trade media’s preoccupation with spotlighting the latest ‘shiny’ achievement of batteries misses seeing the forest for the trees.

FROM REACTIVE LOAD-FOLLOWING GENERATORS TO A FUNGIBLE ‘ELECTRON INVENTORY’

During the prior century, so-called “traditional” grid balancing involved starting with predictable demand, then pairing that with baseload thermal power — supplemented with modest-ramping, load-following gas peakers when needed.

As we move deeper into the 21st century, times have changed. “Modern” grid balancing now involves increasingly dynamic and peaky demand, paired with growing contributions of variable supply-side renewable generation (especially wind and solar PV), resulting in reliance on strained, expensive, polluting fast-ramping fossil peakers.

Now, times are ready to change again. Batteries are staged to forever shift how we think about (and actually execute) grid operations, thanks to their unique ability to serve as an always-ready, fungible ‘electron inventory’ that can equally serve supply- and demand-side power grid needs.

THE GRID GETS A SUPPLY-SIDE ‘SLUSH FUND’

The status quo for ensuring sufficient supply-side capacity to meet forecasted demand means there are required minimum spinning reserves, waiting to get connected to the grid. These peakers are essentially sitting ‘idle’ in the wings — like soccer players warming up along the sideline in the recent FIFA World Cup — waiting to get called into the game and ramp up.

Meanwhile, solar and wind inject power when they’re generating — in part thanks to their priority position as zero-marginal-cost generators in the dispatch stack — but they also have to throw away perfectly good electrons via curtailment when there’s not enough demand to absorb that supply.

In the unfolding new era of a battery-centric electricity grid paradigm, batteries serve as an always-ready, always-connected ‘slush fund’ that continually stocks the grid’s electron inventory with a generation-agnostic power ‘bank.’ The implications are far-reaching.

For example, instead of ramping up gas peakers — a costly and dirtier way to run the grid — those power plants can run at a more-efficient, less-polluting steady state, pumping their electrons into waiting batteries that can then respond and discharge that energy when grid demand starts rising.

For another example, with massive proliferation of smart, IoT-connected distributed energy resources (DERs), we’re seeing more demand response and DERMS programs aimed at trying to absorb excess renewable generation and reduce solar and wind curtailment. Instead, batteries can absorb those green electrons like a sponge and release them back onto the grid as demand is ready for it.

READY FOR EVS AND THE RISE OF ‘ELECTRIFY EVERYTHING’

On the demand side, in the coming years the grid is going to see more demand than it ever has, in no small part due to the ‘electrify everything’ movement. Electrification will soon touch every facet of everyday life: induction cooktops, grid-interactive water heaters, electric air-source heat pumps, and of course, electric vehicles (EVs).

EVs are a great case in point: a new electrified technology that represents not just huge amounts of new aggregate load, but also big spikes in demand over very short periods of time as EVs plug and unplug from fast-charging stations. The old school power grid management approach isn’t designed for those types of near-instantaneous, massive load fluctuations; batteries are.

We’ve already seen growing instances of EVSE operators installing battery banks co-located with their charging stations, in order to buffer the grid from such impacts. Yet a grid rewired and redesigned around battery energy storage technology altogether becomes purpose-built for the new reality, rather than being retrofitted to accommodate EVs and the rest of ‘electrify everything.’

CONCLUSION

It’s time to stop talking in the future tense about the technical potential of what batteries could do for the grid. It’s also time to move beyond celebrating each new battery ‘first,’ like last year’s story out of Australia.

BESS is now at a point of technological maturity and coming down the cost curves into competitive economics, such that we should instead be thinking harder and differently about how we operate the grid in a battery-enabled brave new world. That’s what we’re doing here at Available Power. We invite you to join us.